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Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Pasta Angel Ornaments...

In case you missed my guest-post over at Under the Table and Dreaming, here it is! I'm showing you how to turn this...



...into these!



Pretty little Pasta Angels are cheap, easy, and you can eat the left-overs! This craft reminds me of Christmases when I was little- my mother would make these ornaments for our trees and as gifts for her friends. So fun! You will need a 20mm wooden bead for the head, Rigatone (the big tubes) for the dress, a wagon wheel for the collar on the dress, elbow macaroni for the arms, stars (Stelline) for decorating the dress, a bow-tie for the wings, and Ditaline for the hair.

First, hot-glue the wagon wheel to the tube. (Craft glue works too, but I'm impatient enough that I will put up with having to remove all the pesky hot-glue strings.)
Next, glue the head bead to the center of the wagon wheel.
Then attach the bow-tie to the back of your angel, just underneath the collar. 
Glue the elbow macaroni either to the sides of the dress or to the underside of the collar, whichever works best for your particular macaroni. Because mine were so twisty, I tried both ways and they both looked great.
For the hair, glue a row of Ditaline on the head-bead. In this picture, you can see that I have the holes in the Pasta facing sideways. I also made some with the holes of the curls facing frontwards. Both were cute!
Fill in the back of the head with curls.
Decorate the dress with stars! Here I put one star in the center of the collar and also used them as a trim.
Now the fun part! Seeing them turn white! To spray-paint them evenly, I jabbed some pencils and take-out chopsticks into the frozen ground and stuck the angels on top of them. They got shot with three coats of glossy white spray paint.
After they dry, use a fine-tipped permanent pen (I used a scrapbooking one) to draw their faces.
And there's lots of room for making them your own! If you like a demure all-white angel, you could run a ribbon through one of her curls and stop there. You would have something like this!
Or for a little extra sparkle, you could paint the stars gold (I did mine with a paint pen) and attach some gold seed beads strung on a wire to look like a halo.

And that's it! A fun and easy project that won't break the bank. And I have a budget for craft supplies, but when they come from the grocery store, you don't even have to count them, right?!