A Yarny Twelve Days of Christmas

As promised, here is the tutorial for how to make the Twelve Days of Christmas Mini Yarn Calendar.

First things first

Wind and weigh out your sock yarn, ten grammes is plenty and fits perfectly in the mini bags. You can wind your yarn into a mini skein if you prefer, but the recipient will then have to wind it into a ball, before they can use it (seems a little daft to me).

Supplies

You will need :

Small traditional wage envelopes, scissors, sticky tape, a hole punch, or bradawl, a couple of sheets of card (any colour) and something to tie your bags up, either twine or ribbon. If you’re particular and prefer everything to be just right, then a pencil and a ruler would be good too.

These items aren’t necessary, but if you’d like to decorate the bags or make a label for them, they’d be useful. If you don’t own a label shaped paper punch you can purchase pre-punched labels from a stationery store, or make them easily from a small rectangle that you cut the top two corners off of at an angle.

To Make the Bags

It seemed so much easier to record a short video on how to make the bags. The sound is a little low, sorry and I should apologise for the gold paint that’s all over my fingers.

Bag made we need to get to decorating

I punched out a tag to tie to the front of each bag and decorated the front using a snowflake rubberstamp and some gold ink.

On the back of each label, I wrote the brand of yarn, fibre content and the shade if I knew it. I’m not big on keeping the ball bands, once I’ve used the yarn, but tend to remember the brand at least and Ravelry can help with the fibre content. I chose to use all wool/nylon blends for my calendar as I’m not sure what they will become.

This may seem obvious to everyone else, but I’m putting it here to remind myself. Fold the envelope flap down and punch a hole towards the top in the centre of the bag – Lora, be sure to go through the flap, the back and the front.

Note – If you pop the yarn ball in the bag, before making the hole, it will allow for any distortion and make it easier to tie.

Bag made, tag finished, mini enclosed, time to tie everything up. Cut twelve lengths of ribbon/string – mine were about 40cm, but my hands aren’t as dexterous as most people’s.

Fold you ribbon in half and holding the label over the holes in the bag, thread the loop from the back to the front. You only need to pull a little of the ribbon through.

Bring the other end of the ribbon over he top of the bag and thread it through the loop.

Pull it gently into place.

Tie your ends into a bow. As you can see from the photographs, I tried using twine

and ribbon.

Then opted to use the cheep foil ribbon you use to wrap presents, florists use it too. The ends curl easily, when you run scissors back over them.

Repeat twelve times.

If you like you can hang them along a piece of string using pegs or mini bulldog clips.

Alternatively, you could pop them into a small brown carrier bag, or decorated shoe box and if the recipient isn’t a yarnie, replace the mini’s with sweets, or something else appropriate to them.

Happy Making