Favourite Find: Sticky Dots

It's no secret that the words Christmas and Baubles were made for each other.  Two years ago, when Mimi was 2, we put up the Christmas tree, decorated it, and explained to Mimi, "don't touch; the baubles are fragile and you don't want Santa to be sad."  Or something to that effect.  Later that same day, she came to me with a mouth covered in sparkles and shaking her head, "don't lick Santa-balls," she said, and I remember it still!
This year's tree is covered in baubles which are pink, blue and purple, but I wanted to try making some of my own using my favorite material; paper.  Using 4 medium-sized foam balls, I decorated each one differently as follows;

• Mini pudding - I used strips from a brown paper bag to decoupage this ball, then pinned a small doily and a gingham ribbon and red star on to the top.
• Little apple - red Chinese joss paper with a gold pattern was used for this one, to which I then then added two fake leaves and another star on top.
• Christmas ivy - this was done with green tissue paper, again from an Asian supermarket.  It's black Chinoiserie pattern helped to give the paper extra interest, and then I popped on some red sticky dots and the star.
• Snowball - this was done with several pieces of lacy doily and stick on gems, and a full doily and star on top.

Here's the top 5 things I learnt;

1. sticky dots are great; they're not cheap, but once you have made the balls, by placing one under the star, and then pinning through it, the pin stays in place, even when you hang the balls up.
2. red joss paper stains everything, and I mean everything, including the kitchen counter when the silly bauble rolled off the protective newspaper.
3. doilies tend to disintegrate in the mixture of glue and water, and the delicate pattern is quickly lost when the fragile paper ribs rip apart.  
4. save the red joss paper bauble til last, as even the tiniest bit of red ink will stain the glue-water mix, and whilst this added interest to the pudding, it turned the snowball pink.
5. foam-ball decorations are not as Faberge-fabulous as I thought they would be.

On the upside, it was a fun half hour (twice as long as I like my craft projects to be!) and I found out how useful sticky dots are... but the red apple is still in quarantine on a top shelf and not to be trusted! Now go on; vote for your favorite Christmas tree material!