Polar Bear Ornament

As a blogger, it's always so fun to participate in a blog series with other bloggers as you get so many new ideas! That's how I've felt checking out all of the posts in the 10 Days of Kid-Made Ornament series hosted by Mama Miss. Every day it's been running I've found another idea that I love. And even better, all the ornaments are based on books so I've also found several books I'm looking forward to reading too!

For our post in the series we were excited to create an ornament inspired by the book "Santa Claus and the Three Bears."

 Of course a polar ornament, or more specifically making sure we had at least three polar bears, seemed like a great ornament fit.

Host A Kid-Made Ornament Party

One of my favorite things about this time of year is all of the traditions we celebrate as a family. Some of the traditions my husband and I had as children and now share with the boys. Other traditions we've made as a young family together and they are something we can all look forward to.

But as we honor our old traditions, it's always fun to try something new too. And often that is what leads to a discovering something that will become a new tradition. This past weekend we hosted our first "Kid-Made Ornament Party" and it was so much fun - it might just become a new annual tradition.

On a chilly Sunday we invited a handful of young friends (ages 3 to 8) over along with their parents and we encouraged the kids to get crafty and creative with a table full of ornament making materials. For this post we were lucky enough to work with The Oriental Trading Company who sent most of the supplies for review.  However, the opinions and ideas in the post are all our own. We're excited to share some of the things the kids came up with when given a range of awesome project materials! 

Cork Painted Ornaments

We've really enjoyed making ornaments this year! 

We've been experimenting with several new types of ornaments, like these snow white mitten ornaments. But if you've been hanging around this fall, you also know we've been liking using cork as a crafting material.

So of course, why wouldn't we combine the two ideas into these easy Cork Painted Ornaments?

Mitten Ornaments Inspired by Jan Brett's "The Mitten"

Mitten Ornaments

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We're really excited to be participating in the 10 Days of Kid-Made Ornaments as hosted by Mama Miss. There are so many amazing homemade ornament ideas being shared by some of the most creative kid bloggers out there. And all of the ornaments are both kid-made and inspired by a different children's books! Of course you can see why we're excited.

For our ornament project we decided to read Jan Brett's "The Mitten" and create our own snowy white mitten ornaments.

Indian Corn Mosaics and More

This week we've been sharing different activity ideas we had for exploring "indian corn." Our final activity put to use the kernels we'd taken off the cobs the other day by combining them with salt dough to make mosaic decorations.

Indian Corn Mosaics (with 15+ Indian Corn Activities and Crafts)
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We've used basic salt dough before, we find it an easy material for even the littlest of hands to create with. For these creations we tried something we had not tried before, pressing and baking something into the salt dough. 

Stamped Salt Dough Ornaments

It's amazing to me, but there are only 8 days left until Christmas and we still have lots of projects on our list to complete. But, it really is possible to create quick, handmade projects and treats even with just over a week to go. Our hope is to share some of our ideas with you in the next few days. (And I say hope, because on top of the busy season we seem to be in spell where unexpected events keep taking us away from our projects and posting. But we'll give it our best attempt.)

Last week we worked on these stamped salt dough ornaments. There are lots of different salt dough ornament ideas floating around on Pinterest these days, which inspired us to create up our own idea.

To begin with we used a basic salt dough recipe: 

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1/2 cup cold water

First I mixed the flour and salt together in a bowl, then added the water and stirred with a wooden spoon. Once it had formed into a ball I placed it onto the counter and kneaded it until is was fully blended and not lumpy. (It still feels kind of grainy to the touch.)

We used two kinds of stamps and presses. The first I made using small wooden snowflake cutouts which I hot glued to corks. I thought this would give some height off the dough so we only got the image and not marks from the sides. 

The second set were more traditional stamps. For the most part we were doing snowflakes, but we couldn't resist trying the poinsettia too.

In order to make our ornaments, I rolled the dough flat until it was about 1/4 inch thick. Big Brother then used one of our round biscuit cutters to cut out circles. 

Next he pressed or stamped images into each circle. He liked experimenting with mixing different sizes on each ornament. 

When he was done cutting and pressing, we baked the ornaments on a cookie sheet in a 250 degree (Fahrenheit) oven for about 2 hours. When they were done we had these creamy white snowflake ornaments. 

The next day we decided to paint some of the baked ornaments. We used acrylic craft paints, including glitter acrylic paints which come from a Martha Stewart line sold at JoAnn Fabric Stores. 

In the end we liked the glitter paints best as they were not too dense in color because they had more of a clear base. We also decided not to paint all of them, as we liked many of the ornaments plain. 

We like giving each grandparent a handmade ornament every year, and we're considering using these this year. They also make nice add-ons to wrapped gifts. But, we still have some more fun, handmade projects to try out this week. 

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