A Creative Christmas

Just wanted to share a few little projects from the past couple weeks.

1. Gingerbread house from scratch.  Not quite the Martha Stewart moment I imagined, although I do like this picture.  I thoroughly read several blog posts and online articles about making a gingerbread house and thought that would just be the epitome of domesticity.  Several hours into making and refrigerating the dough, which didn’t even taste good as a dough, printing, creating, and cutting out templates, rolling out and cutting shapes out of the hard-as-a-rock dough, baking the pieces, decorating the pieces with hard-as-a-rock icing, here I am with my mother and sister-in-law, trying to assemble said pieces.  It was going fairly well until we realized the pieces became too contorted in the baking process to fit together very well and we didn’t have enough time to really wade through the process.  Also, I burnt my finger on the burnt sugar mixture intended for gingerbread house mortar.  The day after assignment night Caleb and I broke all the pieces into little tiny pieces and threw them away.  I guess that was kind of therapeutic.  I just hope I remember what a time-consuming process this was before I go and attempt it again next year. 

This little wonder is actually the creation of my mother, who got the idea from a children’s magazine.  Simple, adorable, and a great way to preserve beautiful Christmas cards.  All you need are some pieces of stiff felt, some cute ribbon, some fabric paint, little squares of old Christmas cards, some sort of craft glue, and little bits of velcro, and some magnetic tape for the back if you want to put it on your fridge.  Assemble.  Admire.  Use again next year.

This one was actually completely my brain child.  Since we are going to be out of town for three weeks surrounding Christmas, we agreed it would be a waste of money to buy a real tree, but I couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing the pretty lights and our special ornaments this year.  With a single strand of Christmas lights and some clear thumbtacks, you too could have a completely needle-free, low-cost fake Christmas tree!