I decided to ring in the 2020 holiday season by making what seems like the most fitting ornament to embody this mess of a year…
Presenting The SK Commemorative 2020 Covid Ornament!
Sufficiently grumpy and full of all the 2020 feels, if I don’t say so myself…
I was planning on just posting a quick pic of it completed, but as some folks have requested a bit more information on how I made it, I’ll tell you basically how I did, so you can create your own!
I found a 2″ diameter styrofoam ball in my collection of craft things; I had gotten it in a bag of secondhand styrofoam balls at a thrift store last year. Overall, I’m not a big fan of buying styrofoam as it’s not a sustainable/environmentally-friendly material, but since I bought it secondhand, I got to avoid unintentionally signaling to styrofoam manufacturers to make more by buying new (recycling and reusing lowers that production potential!). If I hadn’t had it on hand, I would have likely used clay of some kind.
I also had a bunch of 1″ flat-head pins already in my supplies. I used 24 for them for my grumpy coronavirus. Also, I seem to possess an obscene amount of beads that mainly go unused, so I was very happy to put some to good use.
Here’s the set of beads and sequins I used:
The two round beads (one hot pink, the other a garnet color) are each 1/8″ tall and the orange bugle bead is 1/4″ long. I threw in a couple of sequins (one clear flat iridescent one, one faceted silver one) for variety and to create an interesting capped shape for each tendril.
I started by painting the styrofoam ball with a custom mix of neon pink, orange and white acrylic paint. Before you choose those colors, it might be fun and worth noting that although illustrations of the coronavirus are often depicted in reds and sometimes greens, it turns out the pesky thing is actually clear and has no color at all.
So that means, you can make it any color you like! Or a whole bonanza of multi-colored ones!
To make the face, I painted on two dabs of white paint, waited for them to dry, and then went back with a fine point black Sharpie to add the remaining facial details.
For the backside, I used that same Sharpie and wrote the glorious “2020″ tramp stamp above Le Crack de Bum* with a red Sharpie. (This was an undeniably scrappy make, you can tell by the first “2″ having a couple of different pen treatments….but it’s 2020, so who cares.)
Once I sorted where the face and backside were going to be, I loaded up each pin with beads/sequins and stuck them in one by one all around the ball.
The good news is that if you think you haven’t spread them out well enough, you can easily go back and rearrange them all, even while grumpy face watches you.
My final step was to put a pin in at the top of the coronavirus to hang it by. That took a few tries as I was very particular about how it hung, but if it’s wonky, that’s even funnier in my estimation.
I initially used a metal looped pin from my jewelry supply stuff (I threaded beads onto it and then pinned it in), but found that it wasn’t secure enough and wouldn’t hold the weight of everything. You could easily add a drop of glue to to that hole/pin to fix that, but I decided to just replace it with another of the 1″ flat-head pins I had.
I got some white embroidery thread, folded it in half and tied the looped end around the pin before pressing it down all the way into the ball. After it was pushed in, I tied a knot at the opposite raw ends of the thread to create a hanging loop.
And that was it!
Happy 2020 Holidays! xo-sk
*Not real French but it should be.