Merry Christmas

 Merry Christmas everyone!

DIY Ornaments

Once December 1^st hits, then it’s time to put up the Christmas tree. Mine went up this weekend. Usually it’s a work in progress as the first step is putting up the tree and then the next few days and weeks, we add ornaments to it.

We thought that it might be a fun idea to make some ornaments this week. In the past we have painted ceramic and wooden shapes, but this year we thought we’d use the plastic ornaments that you can find at the craft store which open up. We’re going to open them up and fill them to decorate as well as paint them.

Again, this one is a really inexpensive craft to make with items that you can easily get at the dollar store or probably even find at home.

Painting the ornaments takes more time so you’ll want to do this further in advance if you want to give them away or hang them up. We’ve picked a variety of colours for paint to use; some are Christmasy and some are not. We also have a bunch of different sizes of brushes and some sponges as well. You can pre-sketch out some designs or you can free style it and come up with your design as you go. Do whatever you like. Here’s what we came up with...

This is a drip paint ornament. What we've done is pick a couple of matching colours and dripped them into the ornaments and moved the paint around by turning the ornaments. We did this process a few times to get all of the area covered. Then we let them hang upside down overnight to drain out the excess paint and this is what we got...

Another option to is to fill the ornaments with curled ribbons, shredded snow, larger glitter bits, small punched shapes, or coloured paper or paper from old books so that you can see the words.

For both, you can put ribbons/bows on the outside to adorn the finished ornaments.  

Now you can hang them up in your tree or around your house or you can make a bunch and hand them out as gift this year.  

DIY Advent Calendar

It’s November and it’s the start of our holiday blogs leading up to Christmas. We’re doing crafts, gifts, and foods that are inspired by one of our Christmas cards.

The first card is our four little Christmas trees card.

We’re going to share with you how to make an advent calendar. Big advent calendars with little treats/themes are so interesting to me. I’ve seen ones with nail polish, socks, jams etc. that you can buy and I’ve seen people make up personalized ones for people in their lives. My mom made one for me leading up to my Birthday (since my birthday is on the 26^th it worked perfect) but doing the same for a friend or loved one is something that I find so neat.

The advent calendar that we are choosing to show you how to make is really simple and can be made with simple items that you can find in your home.

You will need 25 toilet paper rolls, green, brown, and yellow paint and tissue paper, a glue stick, a metallic felt pen, and little gifts.

Once you have enough toilet paper rolls, paint one of them yellow, three of them brown, and the remaining of them green.

While they are drying, cut your tissue paper. You want to make sure that the tissue is slightly longer than the roll and has enough to go around the roll with a little flap to overlap. Cut two pieces per roll and then also cut two pieces to cover the tops, a big enough rectangle to go around the ends.

Once the rolls have dried start the long process of gluing the tissue paper over the rolls and the tops. Leave an opening at one of the ends so that you can put your gift inside. We covered one of the ends first and then rolled rest afterwards to cover up the scraggly ends. If you want to reuse this calendar then don’t glue the end piece. Glue the body of the roll and then use the green tissue to cover the end by attaching it with an elastic band or green thin ribbon.

When choosing gifts be creative and try to personalize it a bit for the person who is going to open it. You can pick candy, chocolate, jewellery, money, stationary, nail polish, lip balm, key chains, or anything that would fit or that you can make fit into the rolls. If you want to make a bigger calendar than use things like Pringles cans or mailing tubes and do the same process.

Now it’s assembling time. Glue your rolls together to form a tree with a stump and star on top.

Place all of your gifts inside the rolls. For the backing, we’ve picked a piece of white poster paper because that’s what we had but if you’re going to reuse this then you can get a heavier duty cardstock or cardboard in green to match the tree. Glue the backing on.

Once you have the backing on, then all you have left to do is to write the numbers on the tree. We are using a metallic pen to write a mix of numbers and words in random order. You can do your numbering however you like though.

Here is your finished advent Christmas tree calendar.