Marbling is a great technique for creating colourful paper for use as decorative wrapping paper or cardmaking, and following this step by step it’s simple and fun too!

What you’ll need:

• Sheets of A4 white paper
• Shaving Foam
• Food Colouring
• A Cat-Litter tray (unused) or Baking Tray (at least 20mm deep)
• Small piece of poster board card
• Fork or paintbrush

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This beaded star makes a beautiful embellishment to stick onto Christmas cards or gift tags. It could also be sewn onto bags or purses, hung on the christmas tree, or just scattered on the dining table for a beautiful sparkly decoration.

If you’ve not worked with small beads much, it can be a little fiddly to begin with, but soon you’ll be rattling them off and coming up with different star designs of your own.

What you’ll need:

• Assortment of glass seed beads -minimum of 2 different colours (the shinier and sparklier the better!)
• Bugle Beads
• Needle and Thread

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Christmas Pomander’s are a really simple way to make you home look and smell that little bit more seasonal. decoration, not only that but they smell fantastic too!

Making a Christmas Pomander is very easy but can be quite time-consuming! Saying that it’s quite a relaxing way to while away a few hours by the fire on a cold winters night.

You will need:

• Oranges (or Satsuma’s for mini pomanders)
• Cloves
• Ribbon
• Cocktail Stick or Pin
• Greaseproof Paper

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Safety Pin Bracelet’s are eyecatching, unusual pieces of jewellery that make great gifts or to wear yourself!

 What you’ll need:

• Around 50 - 80 Safety Pins
• Colourful Seed Beeds
• Length of Elastic (around 3/4″ wide)
• Pliers
• Needle and thread

1:  Take a safety pin, open it and pick up around 5-6 beads onto it, then close it.  Crimp the end with the pliers so it won’t pop open again.  Repeat this until all the safety pins have beads on.

2:  Cut a length of elastic around the size of your wrist, and thread all the beaded safety pins onto it.

3:  Using a needle and thread, sew the ends of the elastic together.

You’re bracelet is complete!  There are so many designs and styles you can create with these, creating patterns with the bead colours, only beading every second safety pin and varying the size of safety pin used.

A Crisp Keyring makes an unusual gift for the friend who has everything!

What you’ll need:

• An empty crisp packet
• Scissors or hole punch
• Baking Tray
• Oven
• Keyring loop

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Hello and welcome to Crafty Inspiration, a great new blog full of ideas, step-by-step guides, useful resources and suggestions for all those who love arts and crafts.

We plan to develop the site into a vast free resource of inspiration for crafters all over the UK and abroad. With projects ranging from beaded jewellery, card making, scrapbooking and clay modelling.

Many of our projects will provide you with inspiration to create wonderful hand-crafted gifts for your friends and family, and plenty of seasonal ideas for all the family to muck in and get creative!