Nativity Scene

I kind of claim Sunday afternoons as craft time around here and today we decided to make a nativity scene. I have been wanting to buy one for the girls to play with but seriously, have yall seen how much nativity scenes cost?? I didn't want to pay much for one which pretty much left me with only one option... making one myself. Here is what we came up with.

 

 

We started by having my husband chop a dowel rod into different size pieces for our people & animals. I made all the people basically the same size, give or take a 1/2 inch or so for variety. Then I sanded down the edges to get them nice and smooth. Holding a crazy girl on your lap while doing this is optional. :)

 

 

I wanted to paint the heads a pretty neutral color so I just used white with a little bit of gold mixed in with it. You could also use brown or maybe even a little black if you didn't have gold.

 

 

I let the girls paint the tops of the pieces, which will end up being the neck/shoulder part of the person. It doesn't matter if the paint gets down further because you will be covering the rest up with felt later.

 

 

After the paint was dry, we added a dab of hot glue...

 

 

And attached a head. I got these balls at Wal-Mart in the craft section. It was a pack of 12 for around 1.50. This was the only thing I didn't have on hand so it was a pretty cheap project.

 

 

Then I let the girls paint the heads...

 

 

We cut out squares of felt big enough to wrap around each body. This one was for an angel so we used white but we used all kinds of colors for the other people.

 

 

I cut out a half circle and cut slits on the front half for the hair. I didn't worry about covering the whole head with hair since they had scarves put on top.

 

 

Here is a piece I cut out for a scarf...

 

 

I didn't take a picture of the wings but then you just hot glue all the pieces on and you have angel!! The other people we made very similar but just changed a few minor details... belts instead of wings, crowns instead of scarves, ect.

 

 

And that's a look at our "less then 5.00" nativity scene!!

 

Cardinal Banner

Ok, this may just be the quickest craft ever... I got this idea out of Family Fun magazine & I am pretty sure that if you would go to their website they would have a printable template you could use to make a banner. I just cut the pieces out myself, made a pile of birds, a pile of wings, buttons, beaks, ect. and the girls assembled them while I hot glued them together and then on to a piece of ribbon. I don't have many Christmas decorations so this was a quick, easy way to add to my collection.

 

Here is the bird bodies, wings & eyes. I made a variety of wings for the girls but it would be fine to make them all the same.

 

Here are the beaks. They wanted some with opened beaks & some with closed.

 

 

And here is the finished product, glued on to  a piece of ribbon.

 

 Also, you can see that we added a little cottage for our woodland animals. I got an old book, covered the cover with felt & then just cut out door, windows, ect. The girls had fun picking out what colors to make things. The trickiest part was getting the smoke to stand up but you can see on the picture below that I used a couple toothpicks to help me out.

 

 



~Short

Winter Woodland Animals...

Today I was looking through a Family Fun magazine while rocking the little man to sleep and came across a cute picture of some little forest animals. All I had to say to the girls was `lets craft` and they were on a mission to round up scissors, glue, felt, ect. Here is a peek at what we did...

 

First, I dug out my stash of toilet paper rolls that I have been stuffing with dryer lint to use for fire starters next time we go camping. The girls were eager to clean them out... they will pick woodland creatures over fire starters any day. :)

I cut a square of felt out and wrapped it around a tp roll.

 

They had fun running the tube of glue... if I would be doing them myself I would use hot glue since it dries so much faster but this worked well with the girls.

 

Then, I tucked the back side in to cover the hole up and also to give me a point to work with and make ears out of it. Then I just pulled and cut until I got the look I wanted. I also cut out little pieces for the face, tail, feet, ect. I didn't take pictures of those steps because they are very easy to just look off of the finished project and cut them out.

 

Putting some glue on the back for a tail.

.Once we finished the fox, we did a raccoon. Everything was pretty much the same except for different color felt. Here we glued stripes on to the tail.

 

Cut the excess off...

 

And here we have it, a fox and a coon. 

Her face says it all... Hopefully more to come in the next few days. :)

~Short

Thanksgiving Turkey Banner

 

So yesterday, 3 days before Thanksgiving, the girls and I decided to make some Thanksgiving decorations. And of course, we drug Lil Man into the project, too. :)

 

We started out with tracing their hands & cutting them out using

colors that looked like fall.

 

 

 

 

Then, we took one of each of the kids hands and stacked them on top of each other.

Biggest to smallest...

 

   

Then we cut a body from a thin piece of card board.

Brown paper would have worked better, I just didn't have any.

 

                                             
                                                                     Draw a face....

                

      Then we glued them all onto a string and put some

 paper on top to make it stronger.

                                                             

                                              
                               We cut out some little feet and just taped them on the back.

                          

 Then we hung them up on our piano. The girls were quite excited about them. :)

 

~Short