Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Of Crafts and Cookies


Yesterday, the smells in my house took me back to second grade when, with very sore fingers, I made an orange pomander for my parents' Christmas gifts.
We each took a medium orange and whole cloves from the Amish bulk store (much cheaper than from the grocery store). I had read a tip on the internet to use a toothpick to make starter holes in the orange to put the cloves into. This worked like a charm, and my sore fingers from the past remained history.
We put our ribbon around the oranges first and then began to fill the orange with cloves.
The smell is simply heavenly!
As the orange dries out we will take our pomanders down and re-adjust the ribbon.
When we arrived home today from running errands, the house was just filled with this wonderful smell.
Becky and I made a large batch of "buck-eyes" last night and today. These have been safely hidden away in the freezer for the Christmas cookie gift tins!
Grace and I also made the yearly footprint-handprint reindeer decoration. We needed a lot of glue to hold on the tremendous reindeer nose, but hopefully it will hold.

2 comments:

His Servant: Ann Kraeger said...

Save some buckeyes for me.

Anonymous said...

Oh, these are the most adorable things I've seen.

I'm happy to report that nearly every night is arts and crafts night in my household. I can't tell you how much fun life has been since we implemented this appraoch. The house is almost always a mess but it's worth it to see the excitement in my children's eyes.

Lately our boys have been enamoured with something called Kabillion’s Little Director. It’s a kid-friendly online sketchbook you can find at http://www.kabillion.com/littledirector. All the tools are there for my boys to draw whatever’s in their imagination. The pictures can even be taken a step further and turned into complete animations, with music, voiceovers and everything needed to tell a story!

You can even buy your child’s masterpiece on DVD. My boys’ latest cartoon will make a great Christmas gift for their grandparents. They’ll love it! I only know about this because I work with Kabillion, but I’m so happy to share this with my family!