How to Make an Angel Tree on a Budget

Today, we are going to make an Angel Tree. 

If you don't know what an Angel Tree is...Basically, it's a tree at your church or place of business with ornaments that have a child's name and Christmas wish list on them. The point of it is to have people take an ornament, shop the items, and return them wrapped to be delivered to the children. It gives people the chance to bless others and become "angels" of God's blessing at the holidays.

Anyways, I had to make one for my church.

At first, I wanted to buy some angel decorations and then attach the list to each one. However, no one makes angel decorations anymore!!! Or else they are really expensive.

So, I perused the Dollar Tree and came up with an idea.

We had 12 children's lists, so I bought two boxes of these red and silver bells for $1 each.

A bag of this decorative shred is $1 as well.

Okay, I couldn't find ANY angel tree toppers, so I made this one out of red and white cardstock and taped it to a Dollar Tree star tree topper. You can look at the next two pictures here and figure out how to make your own.

Okay, here is how I made the angel lists themselves. First of all, get your kids' names (or initials), their ages, and their wish lists. Make one angel per child. (I did this in Publisher.) You can use my template at the end if you need it for the angels. Or just Google "angel clip art" to come up with your own template.

Then, print your angels on cardstock. I printed the boys on red and the girls on white.

Cut them out.

Okay: Really important step. Cut the heads out like this:

This is another view of the weirdly cut head.

Then, fold one side tab in. . .

. . .and then the other one in. . .

Then, slide the folded tabs into the bottom of one of the bells.

Once the tabs are neatly inside the bell, they will sort of unfold a little and that will lock the "head" in place.

Now to make the halo. Get your bag of decorative shred.

Get a little piece of tape like this.

Take a small piece of shred and make it into a loop. Put the tape where both of the ends of shred meet.

Then, just fold the tape around the shred.

Then, slip it onto the head of each angel like this.

Then, you can use the rest of the shred and extra bells to help decorate the tree. 

The whole project only cost a couple of dollars! (Minus the tree...which I didn't buy, so I have no idea.)

Template:

The End!

Refashioning: Kate Spade Inspired - Red Bow Neck Coat

I haven't done one of these in awhile and I had some time, so here comes today's refashion:

"Kate Spade-ing" a red coat!

Let me start by saying that it totally sucks that Kate is no longer with us.

She left us way too early. . . :(

But I just love her style, and so this post is sort of a late homage.

In particular, I love this red coat with the bow on the neck.

I remember first seeing it worn by Zooey DeChanel on "New Girl" a few years ago.

More recently, I saw a girl wearing one when my husband and I went to Raleigh, earlier this year.

It's just so cute. The one I saw in Raleigh had a bow on the back like this:

This is another Kate Spade coat with a slightly different bow on the neck. I've looked for this coat on eBay for awhile, but they always cost upwards of $300 for one in good condition.

So...fast forward to now. This is a "KashMiracle" coat from the 80s (probably) that I found at Goodwill for a dollar. I thought, "I bet I can Kate Spade that thing"!

But then I got an idea for creating a whole different bow on the neck. . .

Before I get into the bow-ing, this coat needed some work (which was why it was a dollar). If you see the picture here, you can see that the bottom hem was out.

Here's another picture of the messed up hem.

So I pinned the hem (which is on the left in the picture below). . . 

And took it to the sewing machine.

I also did a quick alteration on the inside around the underarm area to take it in a bit around the upper arm and bust area. You can see the difference between the original coat and the tailored one in these two pictures:

The fixed hemline.

Okay, so this part is going to be really hard to talk you through b/c the coat is so red it's a little hard to see, and also...there is a lot of architecture that is hard to describe. . .but you can at least see some of it.

So I folded the coat in half and matched up the neckline and button plackets.

See how they match up?

Okay, I didn't have any extra red fleece fabric, so I used shiny satin instead. What I did in this picture was to lay my folded coat on top of a piece of red satin (shiny side down).

Then, I folded the satin around the coat so it was flush with the back neckline. You can kind of see the outline of the coat under the satin here.

Then, I just started pinning the satin to the coat like this.

This is a picture of the pinned coat opened up so you can see what's going on inside.

Okay, then I just started cutting the fabric how I wanted it to go.

I wanted the bow to sort of organically appear out of a smooth neckline. So I cut the button side as smooth and even to the coat. . .

But you can see on the right, the fabric is a lot wider. This is on purpose, so that I could gather up the right side into a bow of sorts. (Don't understand? Stay with me and you'll see.) This method is more like "draping" than going by a pattern b/c I just whittled away as I went, versus cutting out pieces at the start.

Okay, so then all I had to do was to fold the top edge of the satin under to meet the top seam of the coat and pin it all down.

This is what that whole top seam looked like. (And that bulge of fabric on the right is on purpose.)

Okay, so then, I folded the bottom of the bow embellishment under and pinned that too. 

This is the button side. . .

. . .And this is the "bow" side. (Again, a lot more fabric.)

So then, I started gathering the excess fabric into pleats to see how it would look gathered.

But, I didn't like how the pleats were facing up to the neck. I'd rather had them pointing down, so I took all the pins out and repleated (see below). 

Okay, then I created a small tube of fabric and pinned that where I wanted the middle of the bow to be.

This gives you some idea of how I was picturing this bow.

So I simply sewed on top edge of the satin, catching the bow tie into the seam as I went.

Then, I wanted the pleats to stay in place, but I didn't want to tack them down completely, so I sewed perpendicularly to them under the bow tie to keep them in place without the "tacking" being seen.

Then, I sewed down the other side of the satin, leaving a gap that I could tuck the other side of the bow tie into.

Then, I pinned the bow tie down over the bow like this.

Then, I handstitched the bow tie in place so it would be more invisible and look a little more professional.

So, this is not how Kate's bow went, but. . .this is how I wanted mine to go!

So. . .looking around the neck. . .It starts smoothly from underneath on the button side. . .

Then, around to the back, it is still smooth, but you start to see some gathering on the right. . .

Then, gradually more gathering. . .

Ending in a pleated bow tie sort of look! A lot harder to do than the original bow, but. . .I just wanted to see if it would work like this. This was more experimental than direct copying.

Part Two: The back

This part was way easier. I wanted to make a bow for the back. I made two tubes: one large and one small.

To make the large piece, I sewed along the sides to create a tube, but left a hole in the middle (between the pins).

Then, I flattened out the tube and sewed down the sides.

Then, using the hole in the middle, I turned the whole thing inside out and set it aside.

Next, I made a smaller tube.

I ironed them both flat.

Here are the two pieces.

And here is how I made the bow out of them!

Holding the tie in place, I stitched it down right where my thumb is in this picture.

Then, I pinned it onto the back of the coat and sewed it in place.

Voila!

The End!