There now...ready? Ok...so in my Halloween blogs I compared the crafts I did to their Pinterest inspirations. I'll only do that for a couple of the crafts this time because I'm not sure it makes sense to have an 'inspiration' paper snowflake. (Of course you can always visit my pinterest board if you want the directions for some of these).
Many of my crafts this year are paper based. These were nice because I could do a quick craft with stuff I had on hand whenever I had a few minutes.
Kids and I made lots of snow flakes and put them on all the windows. We used regular printer paper, wrapping paper (my favorite), disassembled gift bags and pages from old books. Based on advice from a craft site we used glue stick to put them on the windows because apparently it will clean up better than tape (I'll get back to you on that later!). Peter really got into making the snow flakes and came up with lots of interesting designs. Of course there were tiny shreds of paper all over the house!
I also made some star crafts. My 'big' deal craft was the 3-d 5 pointed stars. They weren't terribly hard, but it took a while to cut out the parts and glue them together in stages and fitting the final point on them was so frustrating that I sometimes said some words that were not appropriate to the season. I sent some down to my Mom to help make things more festive given that my stepdad was in the hospital. I kept three and moved them around the house about a thousand times trying to find a place that I liked them AND where they would stay...apparently that particular combo was too much to ask so they ended up on the mantle in the bathroom (although see how I used one for our gingerbread village!). My original vision was to put them on the living room wall surrounded by smaller stars, kind of all pointing to the Morovian star we have on your tree. Unfortunately, I couldn't get them to stay on the wall for more than a couple hours at a time. I left the 'background stars' on the wall and was moderately happy with that, but without the bigger stars it felt a little empty, but I didn't have any more glitter paper to make more.
In the second picture you can also see the magazine Christmas Tree I made. Basically you just sit for about an hour folding pages of a magazine until it makes a tree shape. I tried to glam it up by doing a light green wash over the edges to make it more 'tree-y', I also put glitter paint on it in a subtle 'garland' pattern, but probably too subtle. I sent this tree's twin to Mom as well.
Star/Snowflake/Pinecone - this is one of my favorite crafts this year because it is so different and because I brazenly decided that I liked my version better than the inspiration. The inspiration was supposed to be a multipointed star. You take 10 circles of paper, cut eight slits in each circle and then sit for HOURS rolling each of the 80 sections into points. The inspiration version involved gluing each point individually, but I liked the fluffy look better and decided not to. I put it in the garland over the door and loved the pop of white. You can see it 'in action' in the picture above. The picture below is a blurry close up!
Silhouettes - reincarnation of the Halloween silhouettes with a Christmas theme.
Gifts and Gift bags: Learned to make these cute little gift backs from a friend. These are made with double sided scrapbook paper and embellishments. I made one for my Mom's gift and one for a gift for Abby. I would have made more but I'd already bought gifts for the ladies in my life and none of them would fit. Boo! Next year everyone is getting something small ;)
I also made these cute little post-it note stands for teacher gifts (tucked gift cards in with them).
Miscellaneous crafts: Last item for this point isn't particularly attractive, but it sure was useful. The Haney's came in for the week and, as is often the case for holidays, we started talking about all the things we wanted to do or wanted to visit and then proceeded to get distracted by mundane things and soon the kids were vegged out in front of the TV in a stupor. Based on an inspiration from my sister Tracy I put together this quick calendar for the rest of the week and cut some strips of post-it note and put on them all the things we talked about doing and put them on the calendar on a day that seemed reasonable to me. Things that were just 'it would be fun' ideas I put at the bottom of calendar. As we went through the day, if it looked like we wouldn't have time to do something that day, we moved it to another day. It was a nice way to keep track of things, especially things that the kids want to do with us that often get lost in the shuffle. I put the meals we'd planned on strips too so that we could make sure to make the things that we'd bought ingredients for! i moved strips to the side as we did them, which was a nice visual reminder of all the fun we were having (although things like 'Ortho appointment' aren't really fun!) Will do this again in the future, but will make it more attractive, and possibly color code the post its somehow.
Next up: Decorating!
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