fun ornament

In a season of busy-ness....its always fun to try to squeeze in some crafts. The Kane girls were in town this weekend and I took this craft over to the kid's grandma's house to fill some time. Its really easy!!

I saw it on a blog....a little bit funky...and she got it somewhere....giving props where props are due.

I will say it was easiest with the bigger kids, although Mallory the 2 year old did fine. I do think an even larger ornament would have worked better with Braden.

Paint liberally their hands....

Place bottom of ornament in their palm and have them slooooowwwwly
Wrap their fingers around the ornament....the slowly un wrap.

Then comes the tedious part.....once dry, I hot glued felt as hats and scarves and used a sharpie for the face....be sure to write their name and year on the underside where the palm was...if you click on the below picture you can see the finished product better!

annual gingerbread houses

We continued the tradition...actually we thought we could bypass it this year, buuuuuttttttt, Miss Finley reminded us we hadn't done it yet. Now, please know the kids start out strong ... about get one half of the roof done.... and decide there is other things to do which leaves us adults to finish the creation. Finley reminding us probably means that she wanted them around to eat the candy off of them. Last year she would pick a piece off each time she walked by....

Maddie and Emily working on Finleys
Finley at least hung around when she was "finished"...decided stacking Starbursts was more interesting...
The finished products. Marshmallow (our trusty elf) decided to land there this a.m. Finley's is in the foreground and Braden's is in the background.....wonder if we will do this again next year??

christmas craft

I had lofty goals to do a craft a day this week. Started off well on Monday.....fell off the wagon on Tuesday.....and forgot that Wednesday and Thursday are super busy days for us. So for now, we will have just one craft this week. Brady and Sean were troopers, I lost Fin about 3 minutes into it....Spongebob was on in the other room and apparently it was a pretty funny episode.

I got this idea off the crafty crow.

Start by cutting white felt into 1/2 inch strips. We used 6 strips for the head and 9 for the body. Then various items for the eyes, nose and buttons.

Glue a line down a strip and start rolling. Repeat for the rest of the 5 strips and for the body.

Once both head and body are glued, glue them together....use fancy soup cans to hold together. While this was gluing, we glued on the eyes (colored brads), nose (orange brad upside down) and buttons (small pom poms). We let the body dry overnight. This a.m. I threaded some string through the head for the ornament holder.
Proudly place on the tree!!