I've just started getting the house decorated for the winter season with the help of Helmar and May Arts, who have teamed up for a two day inspiration parade! I'm the sixth stop on the second day of the Blog Hop, however, you can find all the details on the May Arts Blog or Helmar's Blog!

May Arts provides wonderful textures to work with using their ribbon and the combination of surfaces and textures make the use of Helmar adhesives essential to the success of this craft project.

I started with some frosted plastic circles that I purchased in the upcycle area at the Boston Children's Museum.

I wanted to make my snowman have a vintage look, so I used Helmar's V2 Vellum Adhesive to adhere old book pages to the back side of the frosted plastic circles.

V2 Vellum Adhesive is perfect for the delicate, light book pages and dries to an invisible matte finish so that I cannot see the adhesive through the frosted plastic circles.  They are attached as if by magic!

I trimmed the pages down to size once they were completely dry, in just a matter of a few minutes.

And now we are starting too look more like the beginnings of a vintage snowman decoration…

Next I wanted to create a top hat for the snowman.  I chose a velvet corduroy ribbon from May Arts, and cut it into different lengths and glued the ends together using Helmar 450 Quick Dry Adhesive.

I then stacked the pieces one inside the other and applied glue to the edges.  I used binder clips to hold it firmly together as it dried.

And while that was drying I started to decorate the snowman with a combination of buttons and empty typewriter keys which I applied again with Helmar 450 Quick Dry adhesive.  I chose this adhesive because of the non-porous properties of the frosted plastic.

I then used Helmar's Gemstone Adhesive to place small crystals into the typewriter keys.  I chose this adhesive because it dries clear and doesn't cloud the look of the gemstones or mess with their backing material like a solvent-adhesive would.

Then I attached the entire project to a supporting cream mesh ribbon from May Arts, that will also provide a place to hang the project from, and wound a scarf around its neck with this lovely golden crushed satin texture ribbon, tied in a knot.

Lastly, I needed some arms – but couldn't find any traditional 'twig' shapes in my chipboard stash.  So I took the stem of two dressform chipboard shapes and used them instead.  Frankly, I'm usually dressing up the dressform shapes and obscuring the stand — so this works for me.  At the same time, I opted to change out the nose for a more triangular, carrot shape.  These were applied to the plastic circles with Helmar 450 Quick Dry Adhesive.

I attached a silver circle clipiola (fancy paperclip) through the mesh ribbon at the top as a hanger.

Now that the snowman is finished, he is probably going to get a bunch of brothers and sisters too.  I hope you will be inspired by this project and take a look around to see what you can use to give your house a festive, winter feel to combat the cold days ahead.

Please be sure to comment on any stop along the way as there are amazing prizes of ribbon and adhesive to be won! More details are on the May Arts Blog, and you can find the rest of the blogs from yesterday and today there as well! Your next stop is Monica Edwards' blog: http://scraps2treasure.blogspot.com/.

Have a great day!