A Gingerbread Cityscape

Weeks ago, I found a cute Christmas idea in Better Homes & Gardens. It was a tutorial to make a gingerbread cityscape in a jar. I tore out the page to use later, and I asked Andrew for a glass jar for my birthday. When Aminta and I got together to bake Christmas cookies (as we do every year), we got to work on our cities.

We didn't end up following the tutorial. I used the gingerbread recipe from allrecipes.com that served me so well for our gingerbread house. Then, Aminta and I cut out the buildings freehand. We cut out houses, churches, skyscrapers, capitol buildings... even a Taj Mahal! We used a wooden skewer to carve in the details. After the cookies were baked and cooled slightly, we rubbed powdered sugar in the carvings. Once they were completely cool, I poured sugar into my jar and stuck the cookies in to create a cityscape. Ta da!

Easy, Personalized Ornmanet

I wanted to find a nice ornament for the kids' great-grandma, but nothing I found seemed right. There were a couple of cute ornaments I found, but they were outrageously expensive! I finally decided to try to recreate one on my own. That way, I could personalize it, too. As it turns out, Sharpies are expensive. A large pack of multi-colored Sharpies was $13! I'm sure I'll get lots of use out of them, though, and I can make more ornaments in future years.

I looked up images of holiday clip art online, and then I drew the images on an ornament.

On the other side, I wrote all of her great-grandkids' names. I tied a bow and a gift tag to finish it off. It came out really cute, I thought!

Our Gingerbread House

Oliver and I made a gingerbread house together! Well, I did most of the house. He decorated Christmas trees for it all by himself, though!

A few years ago, I tried to make a gingerbread house, but it didn't go very well. I wasn't expecting much this time, but I was pleasantly surprised. I used the children's gingerbread house recipe from allrecipes.com. I needed to add more flour than the recipe called for, but it otherwise worked out perfectly. All of the pieces I cut out kept their shape and didn't need to be trimmed. The frosting from that recipe held like glue! The house ended up being really easy. I used a template from Martha Stewart's website, which is also where I got the idea of using cinnamon sticks as a bundle of logs.

I wanted to add "stained glass" windows to our gingerbread house. Apparently, there are two ways to do it, one is before you bake your cookie pieces, and one method can be done after baking. To make stained glass windows before baking, you first put your cookie pieces on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Break some Lifesaver candies, and put the broken pieces where the windows are cut out. As the cookies bake, the candy melts. When you pull them out of the oven, the hot candy should cool and solidify to form the "glass." I would have done that method if I'd read about it before I baked my cookie pieces. So, I did the window method for after baking. I used a Pyrex liquid measuring cup (since it can take high heat), and I melted some yellow and orange Lifesavers together in the microwave. It actually didn't take that long to melt them. I think I zapped them in 15-second intervals, and it took just 2 or 3 cycles to melt the candy. Be careful if you do this method because melted candy is very hot and sticky. Once mine was melted, I poured it into the window holes of my pieces, on top of parchment paper. Once it cooled, it looked like stained glass. I piped frosting for shingles on the roof as well as for trim on the windows and doors.

I gave Oliver some ice cream cones to decorate like Christmas trees. He squeezed and spread green frosting on the "trees," and then he shook some sprinkles on top. He had a ton of fun with the first one! He was bored with the project by the second tree. Oh, well!

I pieced the gingerbread house together as Oliver decorated the trees. The frosting held like glue! I did the four walls first and let them dry completely before putting the roof on. I placed some flickering LED candles inside the house before putting the roof on, too, so it is lit up from inside!

Simple Holiday Craft: Ornament Magnets

This post is a little late for Christmas and most of the holiday season, but perhaps some of you will be inspired to get crafty as you take your decorations down.

Months ago, I found this easy-to-do project on Pinterest. On her Young House Love blog, she recommends using liquid nails to securely attach magnets to basic ornaments to festively decorate your fridge. I'm a big fan of using what I have around the house, I so used my hot glue gun. I had some round magnets leftover from my picture frame project. I think I got them from a hardware store, but I can't recall exactly. Please remember to keep small magnets away from little kids! If they swallow them, the magnets can cause serious internal damage.

I used my magnets to hold up all of our Christmas cards and greeting cards. I think I need to make more! I had to use every magnet in the house.

Here are my magnet ornaments up close:

Toddler Glitter Pinecone Ornaments

I'm feeling nostalgic. I remember hanging all of the ornaments we made at school every year onto our family Christmas tree. There were paper plate wreaths with our photos in the middle and, of course, glitter pinecones.

My cousin did this craft with her daughter last year and wrote about it on her blog here:
http://playadventures.blogspot.com/2011/12/glitter-pinecones.html
I loved the idea of shaking the pinecones in a bag of glitter (less mess!), so I decided to give it a try with Oliver.

I'm adjusting the supplies you need, based on my own experience:

Pinecones (I collected them outside with Oliver)
Plastic bags with seal closures, or tupperware with lids that snap securely
Children's glue or Mod Podge
Paint Brushes
Glitter

We purchased a pack of glitter at the dollar store. It came with five small containers like these:

As it turns out, one container would coat just a single pinecone! So, with the pack of five, we were able to make five pinecones.

Here's what you do to set up:

1. Pour your glitter into a plastic bag or tupperware.

2. Pour your glue or into bowls. At first, I mixed them with paint, like my cousin suggested. I wasn't very pleased with the results. The red glue looked pink when coated in silver glitter, and the white barely showed through. It just wasn't worth getting paint and mixing it in (in my opinion). So, save yourself that step and just pour your glue into a bowl.

3. Place some newspaper, wax paper, or paper towels on your table to protect the area from spilled glue and glitter. Then, put your kid to work!

Here's Oliver painting his pinecones:

Oliver was able to do most of the painting himself! When he was done, I used the brush to push any large globs of glue around.

We worked one at a time so the glue wouldn't dry. When he was finished with a pinecone, I placed it in our plastic baggy and sealed it. Oliver shook the dickens out of it!

I even took a video because, yeah, I take photos of videos of everything.

Here are the glitter pinecones! OK, so working clockwise, the pinecone on the far left was painted with white glue and shaken in a bag of green glitter. The next pinecone was painted in white glue and shaken in red glitter. The next pinecone was painted in red glue and shaken in silver glitter. The next pinecone was painted in plain glue (no paint) and shaken in silver glitter. The final pinecone was painted in white glue and shaken in a mixture of red glitter and cinnamon (to make it smell Christmas-y).

I used my hot glue gun to attach yarn to hang our pinecones as ornaments. That step is optional. You can display your pinecones scattered on the mantel or in a glass bowl on your dinner table.

I plan on getting some holiday gift tags to attach to the yarn so I can write Oliver's name and the year on them. We'll give one to each set of grandparents as a gift.

Here are our finished ornaments hanging from the tree:

Oliver loves them! He goes up to the tree and points out these and the cinnamon ornaments we made last week. He says, "Oh! There are the cookies! They smell good. There are the pinecones!" So, it's safe to say this project was a hit!

Cinnamon Ornaments

Apparently, cinnamon ornaments are a thing. Did you know this? I never heard of them until this year! I guess you bake some cinnamon ornaments, and they leave a warm, cinnamon scent in your home all season long. No kidding! A friend mentioned them to me, so I went online and perused cinnamon ornament recipes.

Most of the recipes call for glue. I settled on the simplest recipe I found by McCormick: just applesauce and cinnamon. You can find that recipe right here. I worried it wouldn't hold as well without glue, but ours worked perfectly.

I combined the 3/4 cup of applesauce with the entire 4 ounce container of cinnamon. I mixed it with a spoon first to get the cinnamon moist, and then Oliver used the Kitchenaid mixer (he loves that thing) to get it mixed well. We rolled it out between two pieces of wax paper. 

Oliver helped me use a cookie cutter to cut out shapes. I made a hole for the ribbon before removing the cookie cutter so the hole wouldn't warp the shape of the ornament. Because I worried the dough was fragile, I transferred each ornament to the baking sheet before removing the cookie cutter.

We got 9 ornaments out of a batch. I baked them at 200 degrees for two and a half hours. After the first hour and a half, I flipped them to make sure they dried evenly. The house smelled incredible as they baked! I threaded them with some ribbon and hung some over the back door and some on the tree.

Oliver loves any excuse to use the mixer. These were fun! I think they'll be an annual tradition in our household. We left them as is this year, but, next year, if Oliver is more crafty, we'll decorate the ornaments with glitter glue. Martha Stewart's website has some beautiful cinnamon ornaments decorated as birds. You can find them at this link. Hers are definitely too intricate for my family this year, but maybe we'll give that a try in another decade or so!