Easy Pom Pom Christmas Ornaments

We made these very easy Christmas ornaments, that I saw on Pinterest, recently.

 

 

 

On the instructions it said to take dressmaking pins and push them through the little pom poms and then push them into the white Styrofoam balls. As we didn't have any little pins without those big plastic heads and I hadn't bothered actually reading the instructions ... cause I fly like that ... we ended up simply hot gluing the pom poms on. They worked out quite well, although if you have little fingers making them, the pins are probably safer than a hot glue gun or an adults help will be needed.

 

We did push a pin through the ribbon to hang the balls, but also hot glued the pins and ribbon onto the ball. I have used pins before to hang Styrofoam ornaments and they have come out after a while so I wanted to make sure these stayed together.

 

 

 

 

Some tips:

• Don't get big Styrofoam balls as firstly they will take a LOAD of pom poms and secondly they will end up huge once put together. These balls in the above pic are a bit bigger than a golf ball and about the size of a tennis ball when complete.
• Get a "lot" of pom poms ... those four ornaments above took 1 pack of small pom poms and 1 pack of large pom poms.
• Purchase the larger pom poms, those mini ones are simply too small and it will take too long. The larger ones look better too, they seem to cover the gaps better.

 

 

Male Logic

The Mama: Hun I think I need to go for another eye test. I am not seeing as well as I used to. I can't even see the TV screen in our bedroom properly at night, even with my glasses on. It's just a total blur.

The Papa after a few minutes: Maybe we should simply get a bigger TV for the bedroom.

Granted it is a small wall TV but that my peeps is male logic!

Crayon Art

We are in the process of FINALLY arranging to have Agent Smelly's bedroom painted. She is having her walls painted yellow, with white trim and we have had drapes made up that are white with blue and yellow flowers. I am also looking for art and other accessories to add to her room too. It is not very easy to find girly things unless you are into pink or purple really so I have been making some things for her. I have seen a few art canvasses on Pinterest where you melt a crayon across a canvas, not difficult but there are a few variations and they look really cool.

So for our last art session Agent Smelly and I used a hair dryer to melt some crayons over 4 small canvasses which will go on her bedroom wall once it is complete. The photo does not actually do it justice and you can't see the different texture like you can in person.


Some tips if you are going to try it.
- We used some metal tongs to hold the crayon so the hair dryer didn't burn our fingers.
- It was not as easy as it looked as sometimes the melted crayon went flying across the bench, canvass or yourself. There's not a lot of control really.
- We also had some of those really thick large crayons left over from when the girls were young, don't use them if you have them, they are really hard to melt.
- We also tried grating some crayon and gently blowing on it but even gently blowing the crayon goes flying everywhere.

Finishing UFOs

During art this week, The Fashionista went to work on completing her very first hand sewn teddy bear. There's a bit of work still to go but she has finished attaching, stuffing and sewing up the legs. The arms are also attached and there is now only the head to go. I have been helping with the pins used to secure the limbs as they are a little hard to twist. When I first started hand sewing bears I used to get the Papa to twist the pins for me.

Agent Smelly chose to sew a bow onto one of her teddy's ears (that's teddy in the pic and you can just see a glimpse of the bow on her right ear which matches her dress) and then she sewed some Guiding patches that she recently earned onto her sash.

Both the girls said they are really enjoying our Fridays and I had to suggest they take a break a couple of times as they got so into what they were doing.

I confess I sat at the end of the table updating the blog rather than completing any of my own UFOs ... Naughty Mama.

Harry Potter Learning Activities

This week for Harry Potter, we read another chapter of the book, filled in the questionnaire that related to the chapter we'd read and also did some .

In one of the earlier chapters one of the things on Harry's school book / uniform list was that they may bring either an owl, cat or toad with them to Hogwarts, so I had the girls write a paragraph for me on which they'd choose and why? The Fashionista thought an owl would be good to poop on any enemies (this is what you get when you homeschool I suspect, trying to make their mama laugh!), Agent Smelly included the following poem in her answer.

The Moonlight Owl

My postie was my owl,

it delivered late at night,

that's why I called it the Moonlight owl

but it had a bad habit to bite.

Their Family of Owls

Both girls chose owls (I suspect because of Harry's own beautiful owl) so when we did art later in the week I had them make clay owls. Our clay wasn't very good as it kept breaking up but they still came out kind of cute. TF made one big one and AS made a wee family.

For living maths I wrote up some random maths questions based on the wizarding currency, galleons, sickles and knuts (IE one galleon = 17 sickles) and on some of the things mentioned in the book. Did you know unicorn horns are 21 galleons each ... seems rather pricey to me but these ones are apparently silver so maybe that's not a bad price.  The "chocolate" gold coin was an incentive for them ... nothing like a little bribery to have them finish quickly so they could eat their galleon.