This year I went a bit homemade craft mad.  I love Christmas but having two small children kept me pretty busy.  Now as I’m coming up for air as my kidlets are getting bigger, I can do more with them.  Like turn them into elves to help me with making some Christmas decorations.

We started with the classic salt dough Christmas tree ornaments.  I say classic, I have never made salt dough in my life.  But its super easy.  One cup of flour, half a cup of salt and half a cup of water.  Mix together and kneed for about 10mins and roll it out ready to cut your shapes.  I didn’t have any cutters so I had to freestyle it, if you couldn’t tell.  I used a straw to punch the hole for the ribbon.

Next up, Santas using the kids hand prints.  These were pretty cool, I used salt dough again, got the kids lined up to press their hands (lightly; not so hard that their tiny fingers went through to the work surface) into the salt dough.  This was done a couple of times before success.  After they were dry, and kids were not around, I spray painted the Santas with two coats of white acrylic paint.  Then I painted on the red Santa hat, followed by the face.  Then I used gold glitter and acrylic gloss mixed together to outline the Santa.  Once all was dry, I painted over the hole thing with acrylic gloss.  I stupidly showed the grandparents.. now they’re expecting some for Christmas.

Then onto the pallet Christmas tree!  So I got my husband to deal with the cutting, he cut a pallet into the shape of a Christmas tree and fixed extra wood from the pallet onto the bottom so that it would stand up.  I painted a couple of coats of white on it with the kids, let it dry and wrapped some lights around it. Theres so much more you could do with these but I kept it simple and ran out of time, and creativity.  Pretty basic as you can see but thats exactly what I wanted.

And finally, I made a table centrepiece.  I collected some off cuts from my Christmas tree, gathered up some jars and old candle holders, some standard table salt, some string and some pine cones.  This sits nicely on some baskets in my kitchen out of the way of prying kidlet hands…

How to make your tray of Christmas goodness:

1. Go to a forest and collect pine cones.  Or take you kids, give them a bag each and make them do it.  The one who has the most pine cones wins.  Not sure if they actually won anything, but they just win.  At life.
2. Soak the pine cones in some warm water, I also used dettol.  Let them dry out and they will open up.
3. Soak the jars in warm water, then peel or use wire wool to scrub the labels off. Also scrape any candle wax out of any old candle glasses.
4. Once the pine cones are dry, put some newspaper down and spray them with some white acrylic spray paint.  Once dry, turn them over and spray the other side.  Let them dry.
5. Cut a length of string and wrap it around the top of the jar maybe six to seven times, tie it off with a bow or a knot, your choice.
6. Fill the jars with about an inch or so of salt (this is great as you won’t run out of salt for the next year).
7. Stick some of your Christmas tree off cuts in the salt in half of the jars.
8. Pop candles of your choice in the other half of the jars.
9. Place all jars on a tray how you like, scatter the pine cones around the jars to fill the gaps.
10. Light the candles and enjoy your table masterpiece!

Must dash, got a lasagna just finishing up in the oven and a glass of red with my name on it.

Happy Christmas everyone! xx