First Christmas Ornament Exchange

Because I am a glutton for punishment, this year I organised a Christmas card or ornament exchange for New Zealand home educated children.

 

For those aged 5-7 they could make and exchange their own cards and for those 8 and above they could participate in an ornament or craft exchange. We had about 70 children enrolled and they were sorted into groups of four, by their ages.

 

My girls made the following ornaments for their exchange partners.

 

 

 

Agent Smelly, simply used a large cookie cutter to trace Christmas trees onto white felt and then sewed mistmatched buttons onto them and stuffed them and sewed them up with blanket stitch. Sorry my photo doesn't do them justice, they are really cute!

 

 

 

The Fashionista made these ornaments out of felt (she used a red button for the holly) and also stuffed and blanket stitched them. She traced around a large sticky tape roll to get the size of the plum puddings and then free hand drew and cut out the holly leaves. They came out awesome!

 

 

 

They also included a pack of the Reindeer Noses, pictured above, for each of the children in the exchange. There are loads of reindeer labels on Pinterest but we printed these Reindeer Noses labels from Over the Big Moon who has kindly supplied a free printable (four labels to an A4 page). We packed a zip lock bag with a Jaffa (Rudloph's nose) and eight Maltesers for the other reindeers.

 

I was a great help ... I finished off the pack of Maltesers ... mmmmm Maltesers.

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.