A bit of frill adds instant holiday flair. To make a sparkling underskirt, find a slip slightly longer than your dress. Use fabric glue, such as Magna-Tac, to attach overlapping rows of 30-mm gold paillettes to the hem.
For the look: Madison dress, in Aqua Marine, 57grand.com.
Lace Taper Candle How-To
1. Trim a strip of rub-on transfer to the length of a taper candle. Hold strip in place on candle with low-tack tape.
2. Working from bottom to top, burnish transfer onto candle with a craft stick or bone folder.
3. Remove tape and transfer backing.
For many of us, knitting is relaxing. But when the yarn inevitably becomes tangled, it can feel more like an exercise in frustration. Here's one way to keep things from getting knotty. Gather empty cookie tins left over from the holidays, or purchase new ones. Apply a coat of oil-based enamel paint in any hue to outside of tin and lid; let dry overnight. Using a grommet kit (available at hardware stores), attach a grommet to the lid's center. Place ball of yarn inside, and thread an end through the grommet before securing lid.
Evoke a Victorian Christmas with place cards that resemble elegant paper scrolls. To make them, cut a 1-by-8-inch strip from heavyweight paper, and trim the ends at a 45-degree angle. Write a guest's name on top, centering it on the strip. To curl the ends, as shown, wrap them around a smooth-sided pen or pencil. At every place setting, lay a scroll atop a sprig of holly.
Salt and seashells are a match made in the ocean. To make this pretty dish, press the shell edges into a gold stamp pad, and then fill the shell with sea salt. Here, we used black-lip oyster shells; you should clean them, of course, before using. Polished black-lip oyster, Conch King.
The whole red-hearts-and-doilies thing may not speak to the guy in your life, but he will surely appreciate a gift wrapped with classic menswear details. These look like fabric but are fashioned from paper and notions.
To make a "cuff," cut card stock to fit, and adorn it with buttons affixed with glue. Give plain white office paper the tuxedo treatment with a series of symmetrical accordion folds from the center out. Wrap colored waxed linen thread around dark paper to create pinstripes, or thread it through a row of buttons on a narrow band of paper for a natty shirtfront look.
