A Cobweb Christmas

We love our Catholic Mosaic book written by Cay Gibson. Amazon tells us, "A set of study guides for parents and teachers who wish to share Christmas-themed picture books with their children. 30 children's books are featured with discussion questions, vocabulary, and enrichment activities. Includes an extensive list of over 200 Christmas picture book titles, crafts, poems, and recipes."

We have been enjoying the books recommended in this book for many years.

And I always seem to have a new group of littles to enjoy the books and activities with.

The books we enjoyed over the last few days were: The Cobweb Curtain

The Christmas Cobwebs and

Cobweb Christmas:The Tradition of Tinsel.

All the stories incorporated the ideas of the goodness of spiders and how they helped the baby Jesus or helped those who helped celebrade Jesus' childhood.

 I  found a great printout for a spider snowflake.

We very carefully cut out our spiders and when we unfolded them we were so happy to find beautiful paper spiderwebs, 

It take a lot of finger muscles to cut out the paper which was folder many times.



Success!!

We glued our finished spiders onto black constructions paper. We then used out finger to spread on glitter glue.  

We found a great print  of our spider that we made into Christmas snowflake.

Some to the spiders and a couple of the wonderful  books

Now, I am one to catch the spider and put it outside to "be with it's family" 

I was so happy to find the simple craft to make a spider suitable to every Christmas tree.The simple dirctions for making a jingle bell spider craft can be found here..they are very cute. 

Trimming the Tree

We tend to have a party for anything...but Sunday wasn't anything. It was a very important thing.

Putting up the Christmas Tree.

Everyone was home for this traditional event.

We had tacos for dinner, (in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe) and then Mexican treats for after the tree was done. It was a real fiesta.

Hubby even managed a siesta on the feast day.

Luke and Mark taking a break from the fun.

Have I ever mentioned the house is small.....I couldn't fit all 10 kids in the photo at the same time, but believe me, they were there.

(They ate 5 pounds of taco meat and about 40 taco shells.)

Amy and Becky

Mark

A new little snowman peeking out from among the branches.

I think this is just a funny picture.

Hubby and first daughter, Becky, putting up the star.

The reason for the season.

And here they are....the famous 10 kids from Ten Kids and a Dog----you will notice, the dog did not fit in the photo, in fact, the ten kids barely fit in the photo.

The easy way to craft in Christmas

I haven't seemed to be able to accomplish much this Christmas season. We are reading aloud and counting down, but basically I have been overwhelmed and quite unproductive.

Which brings me to this post.

The minimalist Christmas crafting--caused by a tired momma!

We had another fun morning at Lowes, enjoying the Build and Grow program.

Today Daddy had to work, so I took Mark and Grace to Lowes and we made some very cute Christmas decorations. (I think I get bonus points for managing on to help build 4 things with NO mess-ups)
Above is the Lowes Christmas tree decoration.

I just love these little picture frame decorations.

Remember to check with a Lowes close to you----this weekly program is totally FREE!!

The other crafts we are doing are from Oriental Trading Company.

They are the perfect crafts for a variety of ages and, most importantly, everything needed is in a little plastic bag--ready to go!

These little bead and button icicles are super easy and very cute.

I also see that they are sold out.

I am glad I order these a few months ago!

Kimberly thinks these would make great earrings.

They looks very lovely on the tree.

Open a package, follow the directions, hang up the ornament, and through away the scraps.

This seems to be the only crafting I am capable of creating this year, but it makes the kids happy, mommy sane, and the final products are great!

The Cobweb Curtain-and craft

Last year we read the story of The Cobweb Christmas and then made a simple craft with the kids.

This year we got The Cobweb Curtain from the library. It is the story of the Holy Family's flight into Egypt and the spider that consealed them from soldiers as they hid in a cave. It is a great story that we all enjoyed.

After reading, we looked back at the spider webs we made last year and Mark remembered reading about how to make a spider web from the book 100 Things You Should Know About Insects and Spiders.
We tried to follow the directions...

We taped down the straight strings to begin the web. This went fine,

then things got way too messy and a little too difficult for a mother and 4 children under the age of 9 to do. You are supposed to dip the string into the glitter glue and then place it in a circular pattern around the web. This sounded easy--it stuck to everything, our fingers, the table, hair, and small children.

I stopped this technique and used a toothpick to spread the glue where I wanted it. (I should have just squirted the glue out of the bottle, but it was in a bowl because we put the string into it at first.) This way it was easy to place the string onto the cardboard using the plastic end of a paintbrush. After the string was down, I used clear "school glue" to cover the strings some more so that when it dried it would be very secure.

The next day, I was able to take the tape off the cardboard circle and trim the stiffened string. I then let the littlest among us paint over the whole web to give it more sparkle. We used my new favorite glittery glue paint.

It is so nice and shimmery. It would be much prettier if we had painted the cardboard black. (Maybe next time.) You can't really tell from the picture how is shines. We trimmed it and added a paper clip for hanging. I wasn't really going to put it on the Christmas tree, but Mark insisted, remember, it was his craft idea. In fact, it goes quite nicely on our almost totally homemade tree. In this picture you can see part of a borax snowflake, a popcorn string, a paper chain, pipe cleaners with pony beads and part of a handsewn ornament--very child friendly!

Borax crystal snowflakes

I have seen these beautiful crystalized snowflakes on other people's blogs in the past, and finally this year, we got around to making our own.

I found directions here, and they were very simple. We already had everything on the supply list:

Borax-(we had this from making Elmer's glue Gak)

pipe cleaners

string

boiling water

large mouth jars

pencils

Cut a pipe cleaner into three pieces and twist it into a snowflake shape. Tie one end of the string to one point of the star and the other end of the string to a pencil. (This suspends the snowflake in the blorax suspension.)
Mark and Grace formed beautiful snowflake shapes, Luke's is more artistically free of boundaries. He refused the one that I made into a flake for him.
Boil water, and into this add borax powder. Kept stirring and dissolving the borax into the water until you see some borax no longer being dissolved and falling to the bottom of the jar. The solution is now super saturated.
Add a few drops of blue food coloring if desired.
Place the snowflake into the water.
Put the jars in a place where they will not be disturbed for overnight. This was the biggest challenge that we had with this project. But with proper signage-we succeeded with this step.

TA-DA!!!

The next morning we had gorgeous borax crystal snowflakes. I was very pleasantly surprised with the results. They sparkle, don't seem to break easily and were so easy.

They are much stronger and harder than they look. I wasn't sure if we would be able to use them on the tree, but we have had no problem with them breaking, even with the kids taking them on and off the tree to show whomever comes into the house.

This will definitely be something that we do every year to add beauty (and science) to the Christmas tree.

Religious Images-into-Christmas Ornaments

I have had this idea for combining Advent feast day images and Christmas decorations for quite a while and I am very excited at how they turned out. Of course, they are still very child friendly in their preparation-as it should be-when you live with so many children

I made a simple frame out of fun foam. I cut out two of these, and also printed two copies of the pictures I wanted to use. Today we made Juan Diego and the image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

I also wanted to make sure to include a review for this new product I discovered at the store yesterday. Elmer's Shimmer and Shine art glaze. It has little confetti mixed into it and brushes on smoothly. We give it 2 thumbs up.

I didn't take pictures of the production of these, but they are pretty straight forward. I made these two so that they have the same picture on each side, but I won't do this again, it is not needed, I will just cover the back with a solid piece of foam. I also haven't added something to hang them with yet. I am going to use pretty ribbon, and using a needle will add this to the top for hanging.

The embellishments are just the glitter glue and stickers. You can't get any easier that that. Of course, there are many things you could add, like lace, small silk flowers and ribbon, but I wanted the kids to be able to do the decorating themselves, so stickers are what we used.

I have the pictures printed out for Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Lucy. We will make these on their feast days. I also plan to do one of a picture of the Nativity, and maybe other Advent figures like John the Baptist and the Angel Gabriel--OK, this might continue to grow and grow.....