christmas may be over, but you're still gonna hear about it

For the past several years, I have tried to incorporate as many handmade items into gifts as possible. This year, I found a fun craft at the last minute. I found some cute bird ornaments to hang on the outside of the  family gift baskets.

Determined to make this part of the gift giving experience, I drug the girls to the craft store ~ yet again. They seriously roll their eyes and groan when they find out where we are going! But this time they were going to doing the craft themselves, so they were pretty interested in going shopping.

We needed glitter. We splurged on Martha Stewart brand (it's glorious - by the way). We needed sheet music. We were lucky enough to find a hymnal at a thrift store. We used all the Christmas song pages for this craft. The pages of the hymnal were a little too *new* looking, so I dunked them in cinnamon water to stain them a little.  After I made the cinnamon stick votive candle holder, we let the leftover cinnamon simmer on the stove for many a day. The water was a nice dark brown.

When Heather saw me ripping the pages out of the hymnal she was shocked and mortified. She wondered what on earth had gotten into me that I would deface the hymnal in such a manner. She was sure Jesus would not be happy with me in the least. That is until I assured her that, yes, these are church songs. But no, this is not the Bible and it would be ok. She was glad to realize she would not have to save her mother from the firey depths just because I tore some pages out of a hymnal.

This craft ended up taking much longer than I expected. Since there was glue and glitter and mod podge involved, there was a lot of drying and waiting time.

We had such a nice time with this project. And the kids did a fabulous job with their ornaments. Heather may or may not have glued one of the songs on the bird upside down. One of Stephanie's bird's wings may or may not be upside down as well. I think they turned out pretty gorgeous.

They were thrilled that their ornaments would go to members of the family. They will get a kick out of seeing their ornaments on various trees next year. So if you were at Grandma & Papa's on Christmas Day, your ornament was made by these two lovely ladies.

Every year we buy the girls an ornament. We try to buy something that represents who they are or what they are interested in at the time. I still had not found the perfect ornament for them. When we did this project, I made sure there were two extra. I decided that two of the ones I made would be for their yearly ornament. Hopefully when they are older and show their ornaments to their children, they will remember what a fun time we had making these.

For instructions on making these you can visit Living the Swell Life.