Thursday, December 4, 2008

Homemade Christmas

So I am working with the kids to try and make their presents to family, friends, teachers, etc. So far we have made:

1) String Bowls. These are cool. You take colored yarn and drench it in white glue. It takes a LOT of glue. Then you blow up some balloons and attach them to a paper cup or bowl to stabilize them. Then you drape the strands of yarn all around the top half of the balloon. After it dried, we also painted more glue on so it was crunchy (I have also heard you can use fabric stiffener). When all that is dry you pop the balloon (which does this cool crunchy deflating thing), and detach it from the bowl. Waaalaa. Very cool. We are going to make more of these.

2) Felt Animal Pens. I saw these here. Basically they are just ballpoint pens dressed up to look like animals. We made a dozen or so over Thanksgiving.

We also plan to make:

1) homemade melted crayons - I have been collecting old crayons to make a bunch of these babies.

2) Rollo Turtles - These are soooo awesome. Seriously. Oh my GOSH they are so good.

Any other cheap and easy ideas?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My sister just made some of those pretzel chocolate things - but she used Hershey kisses & then topped it with a red or green M&M.

We also made Ritz cookies, dipped in melted chocolate and topped with a few pieces of crushed peppermint pieces. (I'll blog about it in a few days and leave you another note)

I wanted to let you know that I'm your Secret Ornament Swap Santa. I was out of town and didn't realize that the deadline to mail was the 1st. So I sent out a portion of your gift that I had with me on my vacation. The rest was at my home. I forgot to include a card or a note or anything! I also never described what you were getting - it is a Pear.

So expect a little something else in the mail from your Secret Ornament Exchange Santa.

Have a Fabulous Day!

dml91hokie said...

I think of food at this time of year.

Candy trains - with 5 pack gum packs, life saver rolls, kisses, and rectangular candy like caramel. Can also use small boxes of raisins. Glue them in the form of a train with ribbon connecting the pieces or just make a lot of engines.

Peppermint bark - white chocolate and crushed peppermint candy cane pieces. You can add a milk chocolate base if you want but I like the plain white chocolate and candy cane pieces. Just crush the candy canes, melt the white chocolate in either a double broiler or the microwave, combine the two items, and spread it over wax paper. Let harden then break into pieces.