Fail Scarf and Felt Picture Frame Ornament

Wait, isn't Christmas over? I bet you thought I was done with holiday posts!

Almost, but there's one post I've been saving for after Christmas, because it's one part describing a gift I was attempting to DIY (that was a complete fail), and the replacement gift I DIY'd instead. I had to wait until after my mom opened the gift to show you all!

OK, first the failure. This was something I'd pinned on Pinterest, from Martha Stewart. A no-knit scarf! Which I thought would make perfect DIY Christmas gifts. I was gonna make one for everyone!

Source

We already know this didn't end well. But here are a few of the progress shots.

Once I'd gotten to the end of my strands of 140 inch yarn, as Martha's tutorial had told me to measure out, I was confused. My scarf was only about half of the length it should be! Definitely not long enough to wrap around my neck twice, as is pictured, not even long enough to wrap it around once!

So...fail.

I wasn't ready to give up though. I decided to try again with much, much longer strands. But I knew this project was going to take forever now, and so I thought I'd only make one for my mom, and not for a bunch of people. And I decided to try to make it wider this time too, since it was a little sparse feeling the first go around.

The only problem was, I couldn't find quite as bulky of weight yarn this time, but I decided to make do with medium weight fuzzy yarn instead. 

It was at this point, about 5 hours in, and only maybe a quarter or a third of the length complete, that I decided to do an assessment. It was looking just alright. Not super cute and awesome, as I'd hoped. And then I grabbed the end, to try to put it around my neck to check the length, when I realized what it was actually going to look like while wearing it.

Like a bunch of stupid knotted yarn. Not a pretty lattice pattern.

Double fail. 

So I bagged up the yarn (who knows, I might have a reason to finish it in the future, but I sure as hell wasn't spending another 15 hours completing it when it wasn't something I was willing to give as a gift), and went back to the drawing board for my mother's Christmas present. This project definitely didn't fit into my "quick, cheap and easy" mantra for holiday crafting!

I ended up getting her a bunch of fun North Carolina foods (like pinot noir jam, honey, etc), since she already has so many "things" and nowhere to really store them. But I felt like she needed one more gift, and so I revisited the DIY idea.

At Thanksgiving I'd noticed my aunt had this photo of our whole family at our wedding framed in her living room.

Shoot Me Now Photography

So I decided to turn it into a photo frame Christmas ornament for my mom. I just cut out a 4.5" x 3.5" piece of card board and some felt with pinking shears, and followed a similar process of layering on the felt with hot glue, like the felt wreath I'd made.

Adding some ric rac ribbon to frame the photo, another mini poinsettia, and some ric rac to hang it on the tree, and I had a DIY picture frame ornament.

Thank goodness this turned out cute enough to gift! Although my sister and I were joking that I could always just glue some macaroni or uncooked beans to it, like the ornaments and DIY things we used to make my mom in elementary school!

Alright. Now I'm finally done sharing my holiday crafts. For this year anyway!

Did you have any crafting failures this holiday season? Has anyone out there tried Martha's no-knit scarf with better results than I had?