So here's the first of my 25 makes of Christmas.
Ideally I've been looking for things I can do to make the world's brownest house as little more colourful and that I can do in front of the telly whilst I'm watching one of the many Christmas movies on ABC Family with the kids (sorry UK, we have wall-to-wall cheesy Christmas movies and some classics throughout December here).
So first up I thought I'd try doing something to make this area a bit more Christmassy:
This is an alcove in the main living room and as you can see, most of the year, Melchett stores her 'rock collection' in it:
On the left hand side you have the bigger rocks and the right you have the smorler (smaller) ones. The rocks include the Statue of Liberty Rock, the nose rock and the boney rock...hey, what can I say, I've told you before about the wibbly wobbly world of Melchett.
So first of all, we put out our Christmas village. We try to add to this every year or so. I was very pleased to add a school house to it this year from the Dollar Shop. Yep, a new building for a whole dollar (plus tax), that's 64p.
And the snow - shredded plastic shopping bags. Pretty cool.
But that lower ceiling within the alcove was crying out for something hanging down from it. So we made some snowflakes...
....whilst eating one of my carefully rationed "I-have-to-travel-miles-across-Phoenix-to-the-speciality-food-store-to-get-these-mince-pies-so-I'd-better-make-the-packet-last" mince pies or as the packet says here to make the Americans understand them "Mincemeat Tarts".
To be honest, they're pretty ropey so one of my other 25 makes later this month is going to be baking my own mince pies as they've not made it over here as a Christmas tradition like they are in the UK. But that's another blog post...
For now, here are the snowflakes we made:
I used ideas from the following website links where they show you how to fold your paper into 6 (or more or less depending on what you want to achieve) and patterns for cutting the bits out:
Basic paper snowflake patterns
I've become a little addicted to making them and might make more as I love opening the paper up at the end and seeing what it looks like for the first time.
Then I saw a tweet rewteeted by my brother from a teacher who'd just finished 'decorations day' at her school and had been making 3-D snowflakes. I loved the thing she'd taken a photo of so had to search the internet to see if I could find instructions to make one. And I found this great webpage and photo instructions:
Now admittedly, we think that the end result looks more like a Christmas star than a snowflake but it still looks fab (and looks complicated and clever even though it's really easy to make):
What do you reckon - large 3-D snowflake or large 3-D Christmas Star?
I asked Goth Child and she said "it's a flower, der". She has to be different.
Anyway, that's one little spot of the world's brownest house that looks a little bit more fun, a little bit more colourful and a little less brown :)
And the 3-D one was so much fun I think I'm going to make some coloured ones out of construction paper for other parts of the house. So watch this space.
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