What craft-y Christmas Presents are you MAKING with your children?

[morningpaper]

Last year we made lots of clay christmas tree decorations with cookie cutters, painted them with metallic paints and holographic glitter and attached posh ribbon - was v. effective.

Need ideas for this year. What are you making with your children?

Pretty easy - mix the basic chemicals (mag sulfate and citric acid) with food colouring and fragrance. The add a little water to help it set and keep it in a mould for a couple of weeks.

You can just make bath salts (no waiting) by missing out the water and mould bit, and putting the powders into a little bit of silk or gauze.

lol @ small business ad, so funny

I will take some pics of the christmas decorations - we used clay from the early learning centre. I did some with salt dough but you went to a lot of hassle and they didn't always bake very well, which was a pain. So we ended up using clay which was fine.

Lol at SST post, I read it thinking about boiled sweets. I thought "Blimy you're dedicated I'd just buy some sweets from the corner shop!"

SST that sounds very complicated, I think the chemicals probably make it sound scarier than it is to make bath bombes!

The supermarkets all sell bags of fruit-flavoured boiled sweets in the sweetie aisle - v cheap. Or Fox's Glacier fruits work.
We often make bookmarks - cut a rectangular piece of card, personalise it using gold and silver pens, Christmas stickers etc and then laminate.
Boxes are good - try the Baker Ross catalogue as they often have star-shaped ones. Mix some PVA glue with water, brush onto the boxes and stick torn up pieces of tissue paper on, then another coat of watered down glue and add glitter or sequins.
Or paint with metallic paint and add stick on jewels.
DD1 and her friends made a fortune for their class Christmas bazaar last year with homemade bath salts - coarse sea salt, bicarb of soda, food colouring and fragrance, packed into old jam jars (serious Bonne Maman habit in this house so they looked great). They did batches of different colours and layered them up for a stripey effect.
We have about 20 Bonne Maman jars again this year so are trying to think of something else to do with them.

some piccies of christmas deccies on my profile

the best ones were where we used pricey holographic glitter

oh yes who we gave it to:

anyone over 50 really who stood still long enough, as Franny says

we have lots of elderly relatives

Awww at your DD MP making clay decorations. Looks like you had a whole cottage industry going on there!

They look fab.

They look great MP. What kind of clay did you use?

Oh sorry, see you said ELC further down.

OOOH OOOH MP

that orange box on the counter, was it full of wooden beads shaped like butterflies???

dd1 got one for her birthday if so

Yes Olive it WAS

And now it is a Very Useful Box

oh we love beads in this house

dd1 OBSESSED

I find them everywhere

SO ANYWAY what we did was, we made sets of the christmas decorations, like 3 of each, then I bought some silver flat boxes from ebay, put the deccies in sets of 3 on the foam cushion in the boxes, decorated the boxes with a pic of DD making the decorations and a festive message, tied the boxes with ribbon, and presented them to all Old Ladies That We Knew.

not overly crafty because I made them, but we made bookmarks last year - 3 pics of the kids printed on a bookmark size piece of paper, then laminated. But you could also get the kids involved with decorating them

Thanks MorningPaper. Great thread this. Might try getting hold of some of that clay when I'm in the UK.

Among other things, I'm going to be making bird feeders and dog biscuits (jazzed up with celophane package and red gingham ribbon) to sell on the stall (Blue Peter recipes both!).

Also some angels made from paper plates and glitter (this is a nursery school Christmas stall we are talking about here!), green felt frogs filled with dried beans with red ribbons around neck, felt pincushion hedgehogs (green and red), laminated snow flake tree decorations and some gingerbread men if I can get hold of a good recipe.

Considering Christmas lights made from old jam jars decorated with glass paint swirls and then tied with wire thread. A bit of sand goes in the bottom and then a tea light and then you make a loop with gold wire tied around neck of jar and looped over. Bit worried this wire might get hot once candle lit so going to have to experiment as don't want any burnt hands ... .Anyone done this?

Also considering something I saw on a craft website. Kilner jars full of cookie ingredients but just the dry ingredients all weighed out in correct proportions and sifted carefully in jar in layers like sand art. Then a label goes on the front stating name of cooker, what wet ingredients to add (usually an egg and/or some milk) how many it makes and how long to cook them and at what temperature.

Just got to actually START making all of this stuff now ....

Meant to say MorningPaper - your decorations look amazing - v. professional - your dd looks totally absorbed too!

I saw a thread months ago about making glass baubles filled with "christmas spells" e.g. a feather, glitter, some words written by the DCs e.g. good luck, peace, joy, and a small photo of the DCs

I thought that sounded rather lovely

Great idea Califrau - that would look lovely in the jars. We might do them for our own presents this year rather than the school fair.

how does the whole cup measurement thing work cali? how do you know what size cup to use? [dense]

I love the idea of the cookie jar filled with dry ingredients. I am already sorted out this year for presents, but I will file that one away for future.

I always end up using uk.geocities.com/veggiemania_org/american.htm