How to Make Angel Pencil toppers

There's nothing like a few good pencil toppers to make the homework go faster.....or to help you with that Christmas list. I enjoy making pencil toppers with little people on them. ( sorry for the picture quality but we have been cloudy so no good natural light...I'm hoping for a mini picture studio for Christmas ) Here are some Christmas elf ones that I'm working on. The basic design comes from the Gnome Craft Book. One of my favs, in fact I find all the little Floris craft books great. Here is the how to on the angel, one I came up with on my own.

Materials Required: felt tacky glue or if you want to sew them needle and thread wood beads 14mm or 1/2" beads for hands 3-5mm pipe cleaners pencils wool roving or stuffing store bought wings or artificial flowers to make wings from. template Take your wood bead and either draw on or paint on your face. I like to paint mine but my kids do better using micron markers and drawing on their face. Slide on to pipe cleaner until it is in the middle. Bend the top half of the pipe cleaner down around back of the head and twist about three times underneath to the other half of the pipe cleaner. Try to get it as tight as you can. Now we will make the halo. Take some gold or silver pipe cleaners, you could also use wire, form a loop and push end down thru hole in head. Take some wool roving or stuffing ( poly stuffing will work as well), put some tacky glue around the head and glue wool on for hair. You can always style it a bit after the glue has dried but don't fuss with it now you'll just end up with wool stuck to your fingers.

Your head should look like this. I like having the halo above the head as it kinda looks like a kid in a Christmas concert or something. You could just make a loop and glue directly on the head on top of the hair. Using the template cut out the dress and collar from some felt. Make sure to cut the dress on the fold. The collar can be cut with pinking shears if you're really careful or you can make the jagged edge with some sharp scissors. You could also just leave it round if you don't want to fuss. For the silver angel I cut my collar from some ribbon. Make a little hole in the center of both the dress and collar for the head. Thread the collar on first, then the dress. Take your two smaller hand beads and thread on to the pipe cleaner ends. Push up into place.

Now this step is a bit harder to explain. Holding the bead, bend the pipe cleaner end back on itself and twist a few times to form an arm. You want the hand to be in place at the end of the sleeve of the dress. Wrap what is left of the pipe cleaner around the halo wire a few times. If you don't have a halo wire just wrap the two arm ends around each other. Take your pencil and wrap those pipe cleaner ends around the top. We will be gluing everything into place so don't worry about it being too tight.

Apply some tacky glue in the middle of the angel and glue the two dress sides together sandwiching in the pencil. If you want you can sew it into place instead.

Use some clothespins to hold it together while drying. You might find you need more glue depending on your felt. I find some types of felt just suck up the glue and don't stick on the first try. Glue on your wings. There are lots of angel wings in the stores right now for Christmas crafting. You can also use 2 petals from an artificial flower for wings or make your own from felt.

And there you have it an Angel to watch over you while making all those lists and checking them twice.

You could easily turn this pencil topper into a pin by leaving out the pencil and sticking a pin back on.

see you next time

gail