The story of how this year I decided to take a stab at making my own ornaments and gifts for Christmas.
In an effort to be more crafty this year, and because I’ve always wanted a beach themed tree but ornaments are actually pretty expensive, I decided that I was going to take on the task of making my own coastal Christmas tree ornaments.
I started the process by buying clear plastic ball ornaments, starfish, and seashells. To have multiple textures and colors, I left a few starfish their natural color and then painted everything else various shades of blue, sea foam green, lilac, and silver. (On some of the plastic balls I used Martha Stewart’s sea glass paint and sponged it on to give them that rustic sea glass feel.) Most of the balls were embellished with smaller shells and some sea glass I had leftover from another project, some of which I put inside the balls and I attached to the outside with twine and hot glue. To the hang the ornaments I tied twine to the balls and hot glued twine to the back of the seashells and starfish. I also used the remaining twine to make just enough netting to wrap around a couple ornaments. To top it all off I picked up a few strands of pearl branches to add dimension to my tree, wrapped it with blue light strands, and made a skirt out of burlap for that beachy vibe.
I ended up being very happy with the way my ornaments came out, they really spruced up my $20 plastic tree from Lidl!
Once I felt the success from my ornaments I figured why not give people more meaningful gifts this year and make something special for everyone? Since I love to cook my first thought was homemade salsa. This I kind of winged it to be honest. 15 tomatoes on the vine later I whipped up a batch of fresh salsa, filled up 6 Ball jars, and canned then in a water bath on the stove. (If you haven’t tried canning anything before you should give it a try, its actually a lot easier than you might think.) It’s been a while since I canned and I didn’t use a recipe, but who doesn’t love salsa, even if it’s bad salsa?!
After the canned salsa I thought it would be fun to make some all-natural beauty products. I perused the internet for a while and found a
super cute recipe for a peppermint candy cane sugar scrub at https://www.theidearoom.net/peppermint-candy-cane-sugar-scrub . This recipe looked so cute! I used some of my leftover Ball jars instead of buying additional containers and the recipe called for red dye or raspberry juice but I decided to use beet juice since it’s such a strong color and you can get a can of them for about $1. Everyone seemed to really love the gesture of the all-natural product.
My final attempt at the handmade Christmas gifts was a small painting for each of my immediate family members. They took me quite a bit of time to make since I’m still learning how to paint, but I really ended up loving all of them and everyone was so impressed with the effort!
All in all I really enjoyed being crafty this Christmas. Maybe this will inspire inspire you to give the next major holiday a crafty spin! Watch out Valentine’s Day!
