Celebrating 20 Years with Jenn Shurkus!

Hi friends! My friend Jenn Shurkus, the uber talented, mermaid loving, kitty momma extraordinaire has been blogging for twenty years!! What an incredible milestone! She is having an “Inspiration Party” in which guests can select a project of hers as their inspiration starting point, and I was super excited to be asked to take part. You can check out Jenn Shurkus’s blog to see tons of vibrant inspiration in a huge variety of styles!

For my project, I decided to recreate my own version of Jenn’s bottle brush tree card (click HERE to see the original blog post):

I loved the red and pink bottle brush trees with the vibrant turquoise snowflakes, but I wanted to create a home decor piece using felt, beads, and sequins, so I decided to pull out some dies from several different companies and create my own soft version of Jenn’s card!

I began by die cutting the sold background of the bottle brush trees from Simon Says Stamp from two different shades of pink felt, then die cut the detailed bottle brush part using metallic red felt. I also die cut a couple of glittering snowflakes from some aqua glitter felt. I adhered the metallic red bottle brush die cuts to the solid sections with felt glue.

To create the tufted background for my home decor piece, I used the Scallop Banner die set from Benzie Design, cutting two large banners from ivory wool felt. On one banner, I used a needle and embroidery thread to add some red pom pom trim from my stash around the outer edge of the banner, allowing the trim to peek out around the edges of the wall hanging. Once I had completed the trim, I added the bottle brush trees and sparkling snowflakes, one of which I cut in half to allow me to complete the “rule of three” with my snowflakes. I adhered the felt pieces with felt glue, then added a simple die cut “joy,” cut using metallic red felt and the Bold Alphabet dies from The Greetery. I adhered the letters to a teal die cut banner, created with the Letterbox Banner set from Benzie Designs.

After I had added the main felt components, it was time to make things fancy! I added sparkling snowflake sequins and some magical gusts of winter wind with seed beads sewn on in a whimsical pattern. Once all of the embellishments had been added, I used needle and thread to adhere the two banner die cuts together using a blanket stitch, adding in some polyfill stuffing before sealing up the top. I added a dowel rod through the top to allow my banner to keep its shape, then added a loop of ribbon so that the decoration could securely hang from a door knob, hook, or as an ornament.

Well, that’s all for my project today! You can check out the Creative Chick Blog HERE to see all of the different ways Jenn is celebrating this fabulous milestone in her crafty career. (Psst-there are prizes and inspiration galore!) Hearty congratulations to Jenn on this achievement!

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!