It was a last minute scramble but I did manage to make a few.
These were made from glue-together foam kits, very simple. I added the Christmas tree lights to the 3D reindeer and a few other touches to spruce them up a bit, but the hardest part of these kits is holding everything together while the glue dries. Foam doesn’t really glue that well, although the end result seems strong. The only way I could get the 3D reindeer to stick together was to use pins.

This is one of those balls made by sticking pins through beads into styrofoam. They’re aren’t hard to do (except on the fingers) and the result is very fancy.

Here are two ornaments Noah made for me this year. Santa is made from beads that you place on a peg baord and then iron to set. It takes a lot of patience. The snowman is a painted suncatcher. I guess Noah takes after his Aunt Dawn.

These are made from a kit with Styrofoam forms, sequins, and a furry pipe cleaner that goes around the edge. The kit came with the blue sequins and beads but after making several of those I rummaged around and picked out some red sequins and green beads for the last one to mix it up. These were pretty ornaments but the star forms were hard to work with as the edges tended to crumble.

Tara, Jamie, and I painted some Christmas ornaments. Unfortunately the details are a little hard to see on some of the more sparkly ones, especially the beautiful heart ornament Jamie made for me, but they all came out beautifully. These are some of the ones Jamie and Tara made:

And here are some I made:

Every year at the beginning of the year I swear that I’m going to get started early on Christmas ornaments for the next year. This year I actually did it. Too bad I didn’t continue past January, but I did make enough of these to almost go around so the usual December rush is not so frantic this year.

These came from a kit and included a couple of different patterns, which is just a matter of mixing up which crstyals are blue and which are clear. I like the brightness of the one on the right.

Every year I get beautiful Christmas cards that it seems a shame to throw out, but this year I got an especially treasured one. My friend K hand drew a special climber’s card. I didn’t want to toss it but I’m not normally one to hang onto cards either, so I was really happy when I saw this idea online to make place mats out of your Christmas cards by cutting them into shapes and arranging them on clear contact paper. Some people make more organized place mats with all the shapes the same but I like this free form one I made. Too bad I only got enough Christmas cards for one place mat. Guess I’ll have to do it every year.

A pretty kit that worked up more nicely than the photo on the front and that was fun to do. Since I made so few Christmas ornaments last year (and only at the last minute) I figured I get a jump this year.

Ha ha! Thought I was dead, didn’t you? I haven’t made anything in ages, but Christmas woke me up enough to do these (from a kit, except I left some of the excess trim off) and a beaded thing from a kit that I didn’t take photos of.

I got the striped clay working this time, but there was a lot of contamination (red clay gets all over every surface and tool and white clay picks it up so easily) so I only got one sort-of-OK candy cane out of it before giving up. That’s the flat one in the upper, left-hand corner. What worked better was twisting strands of different colors together as you can see in the other canes.

We saw these at a museum gift shop and I said, oh just pipe cleaners and styrofoam balls and glue. I can make those. Of course, it was harder than it looked. The difficulties are: 1. keeping the lines straight and 2. not getting glue all over everything. If you needed a license to operate a glue gun, I wouldn’t own one.