Christmas House

I needed a hostess gift last night and thought I'd whip up a cute little Christmas ornament to tie onto a bottle of sparkling cider. I popped over to my Christmas ornament Pinterest board and thought these by Retro Mama might be cute.  (and funnily enough she's posting about her Christmas houses on her site today!  Check out her blog, I LOVE her stuff)

I added a little Christmas-ish holly on top and dabbled a bit on the free-motion cursive (to which now I'm totally addicted)  Might have to make a few for my own sad little tree.  I'm pretty sure my kids can't break ornaments like these, or at least if they do I won't find them sitting in a ring of crushed glass Christmas balls like I did last Friday.  (grrrrrrrr.....)

but that's a different blog post altogether....

Today I'm linking up with:

  

Homemade Gifting

I posted previously about this idea for homemade mugs and it just seemed like a great gift idea.

I went to Goodwill and picked up two white mugs and for family night we set to work.  Luckily my husband has a collecting bug so we had basically every color of permanent marker available on the market.  In the original post I got it from they just used black markers but I thought color would be more fun for the boys.

I also took some creative liberties with the directions and instead of using carbon paper to trace the pattern on the mug I used masking tape and a scrapbooking cutter dealie (not really sure of the official name of the thing, a razor blade I guess) and cut out the letters to create a negative space cutout of the letters we were doing.

(does that make sense?) I figured that would make it easier for my little guys (3 1/2 yrs old and 18 months) to keep things looking like letters.  It worked like a charm and they just colored to their hearts' content and then we peeled off the tape and there were the letters.

It was a fun project and I think my little C had a great time doing it.  Highly recommend this activity.

Ideas for a homemade Christmas: Design Mom via SouleMama

Image from SouleMama.com

I saw this really cute idea over on SouleMama yesterday and I thought it would make a great Christmas craft for my kids.  Here's the original link up over at Design Mom.

I think when we try it I might try to use contact paper or maybe even a wide masking tape since my guys are so little.  I don't know that the carbon paper would work for us.