Christmas decorations

As you may know my father and his girlfriend N got married recently, so they had a wedding photographer.  This meant that wedding photographs, and hence an album for them, had to be chosen.  I muscled in on a meeting with the smudger to decide on the format of said album, because it was in Kettner's and I had nothing better to do than drink white wine and talk about pretty books.  During the course of the evening some samples of bookbinding leather were produced, all dark reds, and someone said  "Here Girlie, you might have a use for these".  I love being crafty at these moments - it's amazing what people will give you for free knowing that some use can be made of it, that you'd never have found elsewhere except for money.

Back home Dad and N had got a very small and stylish wooden christmas tree decoration, which was too little to hold even the littlest of our baubles really.  Inspired, I fetched some thread, my riveting tool/holepunch (from John Lewis of course) sewing scissors and the leathers.  It was a simple matter to draw rough designs on the leather in hard pencil, cut them out and punch holes in them with my marvellous tool.

A little thread or fine wire and they were ready to hang up.  For the angel on the top I devised a different method - as he was flat, I gave him a square base with a square hole in it which folds back.  This allows him to slot down onto the tree and then rest against it.  He does look more like Mephistopheles than Gabriel, but I blame this on the inherent evil of commercialising the birth of Christ and celebrating it with bits of peeled cow.