Merry Craftsmas

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? It took about two weeks but I finally started feeling like an actual person again. Dorito has made a full recovery as well. Huzzah! We’re off to a good start for 2013. Unfortunately, since I was sick during Christmas, I got behind on pretty much everything in my life. Before being hit by the plague I had all these fun Christmas crafts to talk about making. Instead, I’ll just do a short little recap.

Basically, I’m not a big fan of Christmas. Working in retail for several years has kind of soured me on the season as a whole. However, E$ loves it. Since this was our first Christmas living together, I didn’t want to put a damper on his holiday decorating spirit. And I do love a good Pinterest project. I made these:

They were all relatively easy and didn’t require much assembly or money. All good things.

One thing we were lacking though – decent ornaments for the tree. Let me show you what we attempted to make last year with glitter glue.

Womp womp...

As you can see, the glue didn’t stick to the ornaments and just dripped down the side. It also took FOREVER to dry. These are quite possibly the saddest, meltiest looking ornaments ever.

I found THIS on Pinterest and was drawn to this particular DIY because 1.) Glitter and 2.) There’s a video that’s pretty helpful and I found something about it absolutely hilarious. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it was the lady’s nails (those are not the nails of a serious crafter), or the fact that she appears to have forced her 7 year old to be her Vanna White for the project. Regardless, check out her blog for the step-by-step instructions. I will share with you a couple of tips I learned while making these.

It probably should have occurred to me to look for clear ornaments in a craft store. However, for some reason….it did not. Luckily, after a week or so of searching, I found a pack of nine for $6 at Target.

I found another blog that also makes the same ornaments and they both insist you use Pledge Floor wax with “Futures.” I still have no idea what that means but I do know it took me awhile to find this stuff too. I was looking for the exact bottle they show in their blogs but either they quit making that type or they changed the design. I finally found some at Wal-Mart that looks like this.

It worked perfectly though so I’m assuming it’s the same thing. It was about $7.  I was hoping to pay less but after searching the greater Columbus area for floor wax I was pretty ready to leave.

Another little tip -- Both blogs also tell you to use Martha Stewart extra-fine glitter. But certain colors can be $6 for one bottle and I wanted a couple. I saw online you can get a six pack for $10 but one of my goals for this project was to keep it as low-cost as possible. While I was at Wal-Mart I found these:

I was on the fence because they didn’t have some of the prettier blues and pinks and whatnot that the Martha glitter comes in. Then I saw it was $2.99 for a pack so I figured we only needed them in the traditional Christmas colors anyway.

We already had plastic wrap and some ribbons so then I was good to go!

Another tip -- I probably wouldn’t mix two colors of glitter together which was my initially genius idea. Here’s what green and gold look like together.

Looks kinda like puke. 

But otherwise they turned out pretty well. Here are some with the ribbon added. 

Total I spent about $19 because I got two packs of glitter. Less than $20 for nine ornaments sounds pretty good to me. However, I also had to spend several evenings inside various area Wal-Marts. I'm pretty sure the experience took a couple years off of my life... Still, it's nice to have some decent looking ornaments this year.

Merry Craftsmas to all and to all a good night.