Ojos with Mom

Craft Day with Mom yesterday! Woo!

This time, we worked on Ojos De Dios, or God’s Eyes. Many of you know them as a kind of Girl Scouts / Summer Camp craft. But they’re actually pretty interesting.

Here’s a bit of their history, from Historical Folk Toys.com:

“The Ojo de Dios is a symbol of the power of seeing and understanding unseen things. The four points of the crossed sticks represent earth, air, water, and fire.”

Mom and I wanted to make some of these to give as Christmas gifts this year, made in a small, tree-ornament size. (Did I really just type that? I’m working on Christmas gifts in April?)

So, here’s a basic tutorial — but be sure to read beyond that for the cool tricks we figured out!

I used inexpensive bamboo barbeque skewers from the grocery store for my sticks. Mom used small dowels. Both kinds of sticks trimmed up nice and cleanly with Mom’s new pruners.

To start an Ojo, you just hold your two sticks like so, crosswise to each other. Then. drape your first color of yarn over that, so there’s about a 4” tail on one side.

Hold the sticks in one hand, and with the other hand, wrap that tail of yarn twice around the place where the sticks cross. Wrap diagonally, and tightly. Then, wrap the same tail of yarn twice around in the opposite direction.

As you’re working, do your best to keep the sticks at a 90 degree angle to each other, and keep they yarn tigntly wound. It’ll be kind of fiddly.

Once you’ve wrapped twice, set your sticks on your work-surface, and take the two ends of the yarn. Tie them into a tight double knot. Your sticks should be pretty secure for wrapping now. Take a moment to adjust them so you have the yarn wrap in the center of all four sticks.

Now, you just wrap your yarn around and around. You’re wrapping over and around the stick, and then diagonally to the next stick. Over and around that stick, and diagonally to the next. And so on and so on. Tension is everything with this craft. You want to keep your yarn wrapped as tightly as possible, which means never letting go of your ojo while you’re working.

When you’re done with that first color, cut the yarn with about a 4″ tail.

I like to tie my yarns off when I complete a color. I do that by anchoring the loose end with my thumb, and then tying a simple surgeon’s knot around the stick. (Again, a bit fiddly, since you have to keep the tension tight.)

Now you can tie the next color to the same stick where you ended, and continue weaving.

I like to try to capture these loose ends in the weaving to secure them. I just lay them along the stick, and then wrap the new yarn around them on each row.

You can add as many or as few colors as you like. We’re using a variery of yarns for this project — some thrifted Red Heart, and some thrifted tapestry wool.

When you tie off your last piece of yarn, you can anchor the loose end by threading it onto an embroidery needle and passing it under a few strands on the back.

Now, here’s something interesting we learned from Ojos De Dios artist Jay Mohler’s website: if you wrap your yarn twice around each stick rather than once, you’ll end up with a much flatter, more precise Ojo. See the difference that made? The twice-wrapped one is on the left.

Jay also does some embroidery on his Ojos. I got all excited about the possibilities of that. You can stitch right on the surface of your work, using a blunt tapestry needle. (You can glue your loose end to the back of your work, or just tie a great big double knot in the end, like I did.) It’s a little different in terms of tension — your embroidery should be a tiny bit loose, so it doesn’t pull your Ojo out of shape.

. . . Or, you can make your embroidery purposefully tight, and create interesting patterns! Ooooooooh!

One traditional way to finish off an Ojo is to add tassels to each of the stick-ends. In the first photo, you can see one that Mom finished off that way. I’m also toying with making some kind of little poly-clay finials to finish the ends of my sticks – they could be baked hard before I weave the yarn. The other thing you can do is apply some glue to the back of your work, to anchor the yarn to the sticks really well, and then trim the ends of the sticks very close to your weaving.

Just for fun, here’s a tiny one, made of toothpicks and thread. Took a loooooong time.

Oh — and be sure and look at Jay Mohler’s amazing tutorial for an eight-sided Ojo.