Christmas Craftiness...

So, I can't tell you about ALL of the Christmas crafts we did this season because some of those crafty things will be going out as gifts very shortly, but we WILL tell you about most of them...and I have to do this BEFORE Christmas, of course, because in a few days no one will want to hear about them!

We made ornaments this year...specifically snowflakes (from pipe cleaners and beads) and reindeer (from clothespins, a dowel, paint, googly eyes and pompoms). I'm gonna try to upload some photos, but with blogger lately, you never know. The snowflakes came from FamilyFun, and they look fabulous and sparkly, and are time-consuming and tedious, but quite easy. (For teeny hands, though, threading beads on pipe cleaners can be a little rough.) The reindeer idea came from some clothespin reindeer we had in our home growing up, and 50 clothespins I found at a thrift store for under $2. Jason cut a dowel into 1 1/2" lengths for me, and the kids had a blast hand-coating the dowel bits and the clothespins in brown acrylic paint. When they were dry, the kids watched Mommy glue on eyeballs, noses, tails and hooves, and had fun laying them out on the table just right to dry.

We made Christmas turtlenecks with Bella one day, when the kids used red, green, and gold fabric puff paint to decorate them, and they, too, came out ADORABLE. Though Miss Bella has hers at home and I couldn't photograph it for this blog entry, each one is uniquely that child: Goo's is covered in a crazy smathering of color, Tyler has his name and a couple handprints on his (with the R on one sleeve because he ran out of room), and Bella girl has lumps of color along with two matching candycanes. They're so cute it's surreal.
We did a paper countdown chain with construction paper, of course, and Tyler and I made snowflakes for the windows, and we made yarn cardholders, decorated a wreath, and I've been knitting scarves like crazy...oh, and just took the kids to the fabric store so I could MAKE some of the same, super-pricey ones that are available from GAP and the like. All you need is some heavy, washed-and-softened felt or some neat lightweight t-shirt fabric. AWESOME.

Oh, and there are the cookies and things, of course...most especially sugar cookies bedecked with sprinkles of all sorts and Jason's famous dark-chocolate topped peanut butter cookies...which happen to be Santa's favorites, so we'd better get on making another batch!

And speaking of baking, Nona and Papa are at the door to make a gingerbread house with the kids, so I'm off! Merry Christmas!!!