Sonya Nimri

Another session of my D.I.Y. class at UCLA Family Commons has just wrapped and I wanted to share the adorable projects my students made with everyone! Colorful, cute, and one of a kind  Sculpey necklace.   "Sparkles on a Half Shell" project from my second book  Beadalicious ! And Soapsicles!  Soap in popsicle molds.  They had a great time mixing the colors.

Happy Holidays! I made this winter wonderland for the UCLA Family Commons  window, and it was the most fun I've had doing display in a long time!  Scrap ribbon, felt, buttons, shrunken old sweaters, sequins, and odds and ends...oh my! What a great excuse to go digging through all the little bits I've squirreled away all these years.  I'm so glad I'm such a pack rat.  I found awesome trim that I didn't even know I had (made of wood bits and beads... see bottom right blue house).  The houses are made of cardboard templates that I found online .  I cut the roofs out of wood (with a hack saw) and stained them with a rag, then cut a paper template of the front of the house that just wrapped a little around the back (since the back is unseen), and used that as a guide to cut the sweaters the correct size.  (I didn't want to waste my precious shrunken sweaters on the back that wouldn't show...I mean, duh!).  All the trim is hot glued in place.  The buttons I sewed

A skeleton butler with glow sticks greeted guests.  Purchased at www.orientaltrading.com Spider webs lined a dark hallway, gummy spiders dangled from the web in strategic places and plastic cockroaches were strewn across the floor.  I found this Hillary Clinton mask at the 99 cents store, stuck it  on a pole, added some cardboard tubes for shape, and draped fabric around it to form a body. Death by reading is what happened to this poor old soul!  It's hard to see his bulging glow in the dark eyes.  Again, I used a rubber mask and a head form on top of bags of fabric. Three styrofoam balls attached by toothpicks where draped with fabric to make ghosts.  I hung them by fishing line by wrapping the line around the center of the round ball, taping it in place, then running the fishing line through the top of the fabric "head" of the ghost. See the spooky ghosts on the left!  I left the ladder up and made it  a feature.  The best thing about the haunted house was the table sca