Homemade Holiday

We've been busy with the semi-successful holiday crafts here.

These are the cinnamon-scented ornaments seen here at Sycamore Stirrings. I bought large cinnamon and applesauce jars at Smart & Final. The finished product ended up being a little crumbly even after 3 days of drying. I think it might work better if we turned them over during the drying, and maybe if we used the glue. Also, they need to be kind of thick. The thin ones didn't hold up. But they do smell good.


Here we have wooden ornaments the boys painted. They're cute and worked great - probably because they were our neighbor's craft, and done at the neighbor's house, overseen by said neighbor, not at our house or involving me in any way.

Have to do Christmas cookies. I make it easy and use the refrigerated Pillsbury dough. The problem is, the dough was sticky. I guess I didn't use enough flour on the rolling pin or the table, but I thought I did and it was annoying to try to roll it out and then to peel the cookies off the table onto the cookie sheet. I think we made them too thin again, because they spread in the oven so much the original shape was lost. The boys didn't mind, though. Ben made his little gingerbread-men cutouts anatomically correct (but, my husband would like me to note, not to scale).

But here's my favorite. One of my favorite crafts ever is Scrumdilly-do's Tin Foil Festive collages. We made note cards a while back with the boys' foil collages. And then I saw the fabulous idea at Bethany Actually to make simple trees out of the collages. I set the boys down with foil, watery glue, paintbrushes and strips of christmas-themed scrapbooking paper.

Neighbor boy did his very orderly-like.

Ben used lots of pom-poms.

I cut them into triangles and rectangles, and the boys glued them to cards.


They make great cards for teachers, etc. Except for the ones that kind of stuck to each other and all the ones that Ben did backwards (with the tree on the back), this craft actually worked pretty well.