Creative Christmas for the Craft-Challenged

Those of you who know me in real life know that I am not at all crafty. I appreciate beauty and creativity, but often have difficulty putting them together in a visual medium myself. But, I am a smart woman and I can follow directions. So, wanting to be one of those moms who does those things with her kids and wanting to create something meaningful for James’s grandparents and great-grandparents, I pinned a couple of simple looking crafts and got to work.

I am grateful for Pinterest. I am a better cook for it and now I’m a better crafty mama. It all started with pin about salt dough Christmas ornaments from Creative Playhouse. It looked great (i.e. easy but still pretty), but I was very glad to find this link on making salt dough in order to get started.

So, here’s our wonderful, messy process, annotated for those who are craft-challenged like me. I combined 1 cup salt (the Morton’s in the cupboard), 2 cups flour (the all-purpose in the freezer), and around 1 cup cold water. I worked with it in a bowl until it felt like dough. I will say, though, that this made a ton of dough. We only used probably half to make 12 ornaments, so I think you could safely half the recipe and still have plenty. I stuck the other half of my dough in the fridge, hoping to use it for something else another time.

Then I stuck the dough in front of James, hoping for some of that sensory learning to happen that all the moms seem to be going on about. He seemed interested, but confused about why we were sitting at the table playing with something that looked like food but obviously wasn’t food.



So we got down to business, rolling out the dough. 


This was more fun, but I was constantly flouring the table and the rolling pin to try to keep it from sticking and I have one of those supposedly nonstick pins. Ah well. If I had it to do over again, I may have skipped to the painting part for a 2-year-old, but he seemed to humor me.










Then we used some thematic cookie cutters to cut out some shaped. We did butterflies, trees, and stars.

This is where I lost him for the day. It took too long for me to pull the dough away from the shapes, get them to the cookie sheet, and reroll the dough. He did a few, then I finished up. To make a nice hole for hanging, I used a plastic straw to punch a hole in the soft dough. That worked surprisingly well!

The instructions say to bake them for a couple of hours at 100°. Since my instructor is in the UK, I figured this was Celsius, so it would be 212° Fahrenheit. My oven, thinking it knows better, wouldn’t do anything less than 300°. Since this is a craft and not food, I figured I couldn’t overbake them, since the whole point was to dry them out. I left them on one side for a couple of hours, then took them out to let them cool so we could paint. Unfortunately, my husband ruled that the pan side of the ornaments still seemed doughy, so they went back in for a couple of hours on the other side. The ornaments are done when they feel hard and a little brittle.

The next day we started painting:

 

I also bought glitter, which we applied directly to the still-wet paint to help it hold on. Here are our almost finished products:
 

I really liked the way the butterflies turned out. I was less controlling about what James did, letting him mix colors of paint and glitter. I’m constantly relearning that life turns out more textured, beautiful, and amazing when we relax our grip on our façade of control, and just let things be what they are.
 

A few days later, I was telling some coworkers about our craft project and how it just didn’t seem finished. After all, we had basically made a kind of food. Sure, it had paint and glitter on it, but if it was going to last from year to year, it seemed like there must be another step. The experienced mamas advised me to buy a spray sealant. (One of them asked me if we had used acrylic paint to which I didn’t have an answer. I used the paints that James got at some point. They had good colors.) I went to Michael’s, told the helpful clerk what I needed, and left with a Krylon crystal clear acrylic coating.

I put the ornaments on paper plates (for easy transport), took them out front, sprayed them down, then let them dry for a day. The coating did modify the colors, but I think they still looked nice.

The next day, I flipped them over, wrote my son’s name and the year with a Sharpie, then sprayed them with sealant. I’m not sure if it was the Sharpie spreading on the dough or the wet coating being applied too soon, but some of it smeared. Those I kept for myself. But some of them turned out just fine.
 

Finally, when all was dry, I tied red ribbon hangers on each one and parsed them for giving. If I were to do this again, I might make more effort with coordinating ribbon or whatnot, but I was up against a deadline.

Here’s one of the keepers on our tree:

 

I hope your Christmas was merry and bright! What traditions did/do you have as a family?

Christmas Lists & Dreams Deferred

I’ve been thinking about transition, dreams, and contentment a bit lately. It’s that time of year when my family asks me for a Christmas list because, for many of us, our love language is giving gifts. Or, at least, it’s one of our love languages, a way of saying, I value you, I treasure you, I want you to be happy.

So, my cousin contacted us to let us know that our lists were insufficient. Probably because my grandpa starts Christmas shopping in July. So last night, just before we turned in, my husband remarked, “I don’t know what else to ask for that’s not really expensive.” I thought for a moment, then named 5-6 things I could imagine he could want or need. We laughed at how well I knew him and how good I am at thinking of gifts. Then I asked him to try to do the same for me, since I don’t have any idea of what to add to my list either. He was stumped. I think his exact words were, “If I knew what you wanted, I would know what to get you every year.”

As I lay down, I pondered his words. Why is it that I don’t want things? Why is it that I can’t come up with a good list of things that can be ordered and wrapped and given? Honestly, I think it’s because I’m content with my life for the most part. I have everything I need and then some. Sure, we have recurring needs – diapers, wipes, food, gas, etc. – but not the kinds of things that most folks think make good gifts.

But I refuse this year to ask for wasteful things. In the past, I’ve filled up lists with books that look good that I’ve never read, movies I like but never sit down to watch, or music that sits dormant on an ancient iPod. There’s something within me that has known this was not right, but this year, is adamant in saying, “No!”

Perhaps it’s because I’m in a different place this year. I’ve now been a mom for over a year and my perspective has been radically, irrevocably changed. Honestly, I feel like I’ve been in transition for that year and am just now finding my footing again. The transition of my body that occurred during the birth of my son – that agonizing, amazing time – was only the beginning of this transition of my life.

Recently on Facebook, I’ve been reminded of the fragility of our lives and how many things can cause these transitions. A friend posted the other day that it was 2 months ago that his daughter was born, who has since died. Then today, a friend who had announced that they were expecting shared the hard news that they had miscarried. It all made me think of this poem:

“Harlem” by Langston Hughes

  What happens to a dream deferred?
      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore –
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over –
      like a syrupy sweet?

     Maybe it just sags
     like a heavy load.

     Or does it explode?

Sometimes transition comes on the heels of a dream deferred. And lately, in my experience, that has looked like the lives of children being tragically short. I look at my son, who laughs and plays and tries to run, feeling the precarious nature of things. Last week in youth, we talked about joy and I taught that joy is an abiding gift of God that is deeper than happiness. I wonder in those moments of watching my child, if I could still feel joy if something happened. I trust, by faith, that joy would still be waiting, like a deep pool of peaceful waters, beneath the tumult of trouble or despair.

But when you’re in transition – when all you can do is breathe and cry and curse and try to run from the inescapable pain that will not be denied because it is a part of you – it can be hard to know anything else. I pray for all of us that we will not dry up or fester or rot or become sickeningly sweet or sag or explode. I don’t believe that is the will of God. I believe the tragic times of transition in our lives are a byproduct of the broken, sinful world we live in. But I also believe that God is with us in the transition, no matter how painful, waiting expectantly to bring new life into being.