Holiday Happenings

This last year was by far the best year of my life and that includes the recent Christmas and New Year’s holiday. Being able to celebrate the holidays with a little one, who is old enough to actually participate in opening the presents and playing with the toys, was the best thing ever. We packed the month of December full of various projects and fun. I actually added a few too many things to my to do list (still working on the balancing act called life with a baby) and didn’t get them all done, but looking forward to adding them to the mix next year.

Here’s a look at some of the projects we tackled.

 

Love my snowmen ornaments. The one on the left was for an ornament exchange that I whipped up just before heading out the door. I just took white yarn and started wrapping it around itself to form the balls. I then used felt to create the hat, eyes, nose, and buttons, and ribbon to create the scarf and hanger.

The fishing bobber snowman was a project little miss and I whipped up for my husband. I had some left over fishing bobbers from his Father’s Day gift and he LOVES fishing so we thought it was only fitting that he get a special fishing ornament. I used felt to make the hat, nose, and scarf and drew on the eyes, mouth, and buttons using sharpie. I used an ornament hook to hang. I just cut a slit in the top of the hat and pushed it down through and attached it to the hook on the bobber.

These are our matching Christmas PJs that I sewed. My husband was needing some new pajama pants and we can never find any that he likes or that aren’t extremely expensive. I hit up the Black Friday sales at Joann Fabrics and got a TON of fabric and felt for super cheap. I used preexisting pants as my patterns to create a pattern that I can reuse and then just used basic sewing techniques to finish the rest. In order to create the R on the baby’s onesie, I printed out an R from the computer, cut it out and then measured the size of fabric I would need. I cut that square out, ironed on some iron on material to it. Then I backwards traced the R onto the paper side of the iron on material. I cut it out, using an exacto knife to cut out the inside of the R and then peeled off the back and ironed it to the onesie. I finished it off by sewing a zigzag stitch all the way around the R using my sewing machine. So happy with how they turned out and have made several more pairs of pants for the hubby since :)

I also got crafty and created multiple Christmas onesies and outfits for my baby girl. I love how fun it is to sew and cannot wait to create more outfits for her as she grows. I am so sad that Christmas is over and these precious outfits are going into the box :( Time to make some for Valentine’s day I guess :)

This project is by far my most favorite. I wanted to create a special baby’s first Christmas ornament for my little girl and loved all the cute mistletoes plaques i saw floating around on Pinterest and thought the concept would be awesome to use to create an ornament. I am OBSESSED with hand and foot print art (footprint art being easier to do with a baby than handprint…not that I know this or not haha).

In order to create this, I made a batch of salt dough: 1 cup flour, 1 cup salt, and about a half cup of water (give or take a little bit). I rolled out the dough until it was about 1/4 inch thick. I enlisted the help of my husband to hold the baby and I gently pressed her foot into the dough to create two footprints. I did the same with her fingerprints to create the berries. I think took a knife and very carefully cut out around the footprints so it had a tiny edge and looked like a foot (same with the finger prints). I pre-poked holes in them before drying out, but ended up having to have my husband drill the holes out more to fit the string I was going to use. After I had the prints cut out, I dried them out in the oven. This process does NOT require baking so you need to set your oven temperature low. I set mine to 200* and then “baked” the prints for 3 hours, turning half way through. Be sure to bake them on parchment paper so they come off easily. If they still seem damp after three hours, turn off the oven and let them sit in there for a bit longer until they are hard, or leave them sit out overnight on the counter. Once they were dry, I took green and red acrylic paint and painted over them, both front and back. I ended up doing 3 coats just to make sure they were well covered. I then strung them together with bakers twine and applied a little bit of hot glue to keep the feet in place so that they look like mistletoes. I wrote the year and baby girls name on the back and Baby’s First Christmas using Sharpie and then hung it up and cannot wait to get it out year after year.

I wanted to make special wrapping paper for all of our family and friends after seeing a picture posted by a page I follow on Facebook. I never logged the name of the person I saw the original post from so I cannot give proper credit for this idea. This is NOT my original idea and have since seen multiple people replicate this along with other DIY wrapping paper ideas so if you search Pinterest you are sure to find multiple posts :)

The day we made the mistletoes ornament we also created some hand and footprint plaques for Christmas gifts. These were created the same way using the same recipe as above. I had to create a fancy one for myself. I used a toothpick to make the holes and the year and baby girl’s name before baking. If you want impressions in the dough you HAVE to do it before baking. If not you risk cracking it when trying to drill it.   

It was an exciting Christmas full of lots of new traditions that I cannot wait to continue. We started off the morning by celebrating Jesus’ birthday with some Blueberry Buckle and a story all about that First Christmas Night as well as telling Baby Girl all about Jesus and why HE and his birth are so SPECIAL. Then we got to work on opening those presents, which she had a BLAST opening. It was a great day of family and fun.

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and have a very BLESSED new year. I cannot wait to see what this one holds for my family :)

I am linking this post up with Megan at Mrs. Wheeler’s FIrst Grade for her How I Spent My Winter Break Linky.