2012 advent : day 5

Today was day 5 on our advent calendar. It was a pretty easy day since we usually spend the first half of Wednesdays away from home.

When Olive opened her day 5 cubby this morning she found another little sheep and a piece of paper that said we were going to make snowflakes! Yay!



Olive was prepared with all of our supplies. Winkled paper that she stole from my printer and scribbles on a little bit each day and a pair of scissors for both of us.



These scissors used to be mine. This was Olive's first lesson in cutting. She eventually caught on really well but would revert back to this strategy after a few normal snips.



She got to open them all.



"Open! Yay!"







Yes, her pants are on backwards.



She stuck one to the wall. "Hooray!"





I told her to stand by her snowflakes and smile. She said "yay!" and clapped. The solid piece of paper to the left is her solo snowflake. It has slits cut in it but she couldn't get the angle right to cut pieces off of the paper.

I peeked... and I'm excited for tomorrow. :)

Olive's Advent Calendar
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4

2012 advent : day 4

Today's advent activity was to make a wreath.

We went to the Dollar Tree to pick up some supplies and walk out with enough to make wreaths as gifts, some squishy toys for Olive, some stocking stuffers for Olive, and a couple of books as a gift for someone.

The Dollar Tree was full of parents with little kids today. Olive kept saying "hi kid" to all of them fairly closer to their faces. None of them said hi back.







For the wreath that goes on the outside of the door we bought a simple Christmas wreath with nothing on it. I grabbed a few ornaments, light bulbs that don't work, and my hot glue gun and Olive told me precisely where to put everything and helped me glue them on.







For the wreath on the inside of the door I took a circular plant foam thing and used a knife to cut it in half. It seemed kind of thick and would take more yarn to cover it if it weren't cut. We can also make two this way. :)



I wrapped it in yarn in small sections so I wouldn't have to run the big yarn ball around each time. We used hot glue to secure the ends in the back and Olive helped me cut the yarn.



For this wreath we also used some fake flowers - it's really easy to pull the flowers right off the tops of the stems.













I also bought a few grapevine wreaths and a lot more flowers. We pulled the flowers off the stems and glued them onto the grapevines. We're going to save one for our door and give the rest as gifts.



We have a lot of flowers left so we'll likely go get a few more grapevine wreaths and make more! :)

Olive's Advent Calendar
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

handmade christmas, installment #1.

I didn't get to work on the idea of handmade Christmas quickly enough this year but I've had a few successful projects. Some of these projects I should not share with you until after Christmas though.

But I can tell you about the wonders of toilet paper rolls and also of brown paper.







Cut the toilet paper and paper towel rolls and use the rings for all kinds of projects! I cut slits and poked holes to string them on yard and make garland!

If you know me in real life or on twitter you may know that I chose not to decorate this Christmas due to a lead dust issue in our house. A complicated story but just no that there were no Christmas decorations in our house until this toilet paper roll thing happened. Free, thrifty, fun! :)

I also used toilet paper rolls to aid in decorating Christmas gifts along with brown paper filler that was included in some boxes from Amazon.



A bit THANK YOU to Amazon and to toilet paper for making this Christmas possible... affordable... fun... and a little handmade. :)