Christmas Crochet: The Beginning

I spent a lot of time this weekend working on my swap quilt and it is now almost finished (yay!).  In the evenings though I made a few small Christmas crochets.  I'm pretty picky about not getting out my Christmas decorations too early, but I'm all about doing Christmas crafting and Christmas shopping way ahead.

I borrowed this little leaflet from my mom's stash a couple years back, it was published in 1983 (when she presumably bought it) and although it is falling apart I still have all the pages. It has a bunch of  angel and snowflake crochet patterns which I really love;  I think they are cute and lacy but easy to crochet.  They're meant to be done with skinny white thread, and I've actually made several things out of this leaflet in past years, including the large angel tree topper using the skinny thread.  When I get out my Christmas decorations later in the year I'll show them here.

In the meantime though, what I had was washcloth yarn in some sort of Christmassy colors so I made the small angel ornament.  It obviously came out much bigger than if I'd used the smaller yarn (way too big for a tree ornament), but I think she's cute all the same.  I have her standing on a paper cone in the picture, but I'm not sure how I'll prop her up permanently.  In the leaflet, they suggest sugar starch but I'm not sure that will work on such a large heavyweight yarn.

Then I made "snowflake #3" out of the same yarn combo.  It was sort of balled up at the end, so I blocked it flat overnight.  It looks cute, but is also pretty big.  Sadly, I think it looks more like a trivet than a snowflake, so I think in future I'll stick to the skinny white yarn for the snowflake patterns.

How about you guys,  anyone start Christmas crafts yet?