Crocheted snowflake and star ornaments

I love my job! I get the privilege of working with child care providers and directors in the eastern part of North Dakota. I love that we share a similar passion – to provide the best quality care we can for our future generation. Through the past year and a half, I have been working with a handful of directors who are working hard on a director’s credential called Aim4Excellence. It is intense. It is time consuming. It is in-depth. Each module takes about 6 weeks and there are 9 modules. That’s a lot of hours. Recently, a few of the directors I’ve been working with have finished this daunting task. The last time I met with them, I wanted to give them a little something to thank them for all the hard work they have put in. I’m pretty sure you can guess that it was homemade. After all, I do like being crafty. ;) Since Christmas is around the corner (yippeeee!), I decided to find some cute crocheted Christmas decoration patterns and try my hand at making them.

The first one I found was for snowflakes. The free crochet pattern can be found here. I used a G sized crochet hook and a couple of different colors of worsted weight yarn. Loops & Threads Impeccable yarn in Teal, I Love this Yarn in graphite and I Love this Yarn in white sparkle. The white sparkle yarn is absolutely perfect for this pattern! Just enough sparkle to look like a snowflake. :)

The beginning of the pattern starts with a magic ring.

Then, I dug out my sparkly Modge Podge (seriously, this is so cool!) and dabbed a bit on the front of the snowflakes. Not only does it add a nice fun sparkle, it stiffens the yarn so that the snowflake doesn’t curl in on itself. Multi-purpose AND pretty – can’t get better than that! Don't forget to continually tighten your magic circle so that the hole in the middle stays small. It will want to stretch as you go.

          

When you are putting the Modge Podge on, it will look really white. Be patient, once it dries, it will be clear and only show the sparkles. Don't put it on too thick because the sparkles kinda clump together. After drying, I tied the snowflakes together to make a long garland.

I spaced the snowflakes about 3 inches apart using my husband's old-school Transformers ruler. :)

The next project I took on was crocheted stars. I found this free pattern on Pinterest. I used a G sized crochet hook and used three different festive colors. I Love this Yarn in sparkle white, I Love this Yarn in Jelly Bean, and Yarn Bee Dreamy Chenille in black cherry.  

I started the yarn with a magic circle for all of the colors EXCEPT for the red. That yarn tends to break when I try to tighten the magic circle. I stuck with a simple chain 4 and slip stitched into the first chain to form a circle. Then, I put the puff stitches in that. 

The beginning of this pattern using a magic circle

Starting Round 2 of the pattern

Once again, I used the sparkly Modge Podge to stiffen the yarn and add that nice little sparkle. These turned out so cute! I decided to turn these into tree decorating ornaments so I put a little bit of red yarn at the top and created a loop so it could hang. 

Starting Round 3 of the pattern

Finished pile of stars! Now comes the sparkly part!

                                                                                                                                                               
My husband graciously offered to burn the ends of the yarn so it wouldn’t unravel. Any time my husband can play with fire, he’s a happy man. Is that a Y chromosome thing? 

I found a cute cardboard container in the dollar section at Target and managed to find some matching tissue paper in my tissue paper storage container. Win win! Relatively cheap gift and I was able to use up some scraps of yarn that had been in my stash for quite a while.

If you are looking for an easy Christmas crochet pattern to use up yarn and to make a cute creative gift for someone in your life, look no further!