{Handmade Christmas} Clay ornaments

We did these last week. As in the kids and I did them. Me! Craft! With my kids! They loved it and took it very seriously. After all, these are going to be Christmas gifts for their Kindergarten teachers, some of their friends and family. And I love how they turned out.

I got the idea from here and it was just what I was looking for, something simple, cute, inexpensive, somewhat useful and easy enough for the kids to make (who am I kidding, after the almost Memory mishap, low skill level applies to me more than my kids....). Then Belinda posted something similar but I decided to go with the original one I had seen because I liked the look. Oh, and I later saw that Yvonne also made something like it using them as tags for her Advent calendar. I've bookmarked that idea!

In the end, we did a combination of several things. We did rectangular shapes that the kids pressed stamps into. Big brother cut his rectangles himself (and he's as good at this as mommy is... thank goodness he's only 5 yet!), for little brother I did the cutting and then gave them to him to finish. They added the hole using a toothpick and then stamped snowflakes and stars on them.

We also did quite a few mini Christmas trees that I later ended up tying to the larger ones.

For packaging, I used scraps cut from simple cardboard boxes (I live in the middle of nowhere and I hate dragging my kids to the nearest city for shopping. So a lot of things get bought on the Internet and shipped here, resulting a never-ending supply of boxes), punched a hole and tied the ornament to the cardboard.

But my favorite part is my new stamp that says "handmade". I got it as part of a set of stamps on sale when buying supplies for all my planned Christmas crafts. Love it.

Then I wrapped the whole thing in cellophane and added a twine bow and a tag. Now I only have to do that for the other millions of them.

We also made snowflakes, but only three of them. I already bought more clay to do some more snowflakes. They would be a nice addition to our Christmas tree.

So this is what I ended up with. Not bad for one package of clay and maybe a good half our of nice, peaceful crafting with the kids, if you ask me.

Oh, and I'm going to mention again that making as many gifts myself or having the kids make them is part of my Christmas strategies. I'll just keep mentioning this until someone finally clicks over to that post and reads it. And leave a comment, maybe. But don't feel pressured to do so. Really. Totally up to you.

Have a good weekend,
Swenja