Is There a Christmas Connection?

The prompt for Our Beautiful World this week is the word CONNECTION.  How timely that I had just finished working on this project for our school office.  It's something I saw on either Facebook or Pinterest and with the right tools, pretty easy to do.  Here is the link to the creator's website Stubbornly Crafty.

All you really need is cardstock and jute twine.  I used silver cardstock for the light sockets on mine, but you could use black or dark green, or really any color that you would like your sockets to be.  They are cut into strips measuring 1 1/4 x 4" and then scored every 1/2 inch.  The third and 6th segment are punched. 

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And then use a good adhesive (I use redline tape) to attach both ends together so it looks like a paper bolt kind of.

Then cut various shades of cardstock into strips measuring 1 x 8.5".  Gently fold each piece in half - don't make a hard crease if you want the bottom to look like a real light.  Hold the tops together and punch a hole in both at the same time so they line up.  Then just hold at the punched end and a gently press the creased end into the palm of your hand to give the paper a "bulb" shape.

Then you need to CONNECT them with the jute or I suppose you could use ribbon if you wanted.  It wasn't necessary for me to make any knots to keep them in place because of the size of the punch that I used, but if your punch is bigger or you use ribbon instead of jute you might need to secure them in place. 

This is the view from my desk with my IKEA felt tree and you don't see all my holiday-related solar dancers on the counter.

And one more project that I'm working on (because who doesn't need just one more project to work on before Christmas?) are these "chair socks".  I'm crocheting them and I've found that I can even do that when I putting in my time on my stationary bike in the morning.  (That is providing I get to do the bike in the morning as the mornings this week have been pretty full of other things to get done before work.)  I only need to do, well, I'll do what I can do before Christmas Eve.  But, I have to say that they are not hard to do and they do make such a difference with the chairs on the wood floor.  We had those stick-on felt pads on the bottoms of each leg, but they are constantly slipping off and guests would even find them stuck to the bottom of their shoes when they got home!  I picked out yarn in various shades of brown, but I've seen them made in a multitude of colors - user's preference.  And I've been using my Michael's 40 or 50% off coupons to buy the yarn.