Deck the Halls, Witchlet Style!

Tags

garland, kids crafts, salt dough, tree decorating, winter solstice, yule

In our home, Yule preparations traditionally start the day after Thanksgiving (though this year, we started late since Daddy Man was out of town working) and continue until the week before Yule.  Its partially a hold over from my childhood family Christmases, but also because we “make” about 90% of our decorations.

Except the tree…we rent that.

Okay, we really don’t rent it.  But since we live in an apartment (and I can’t do live trees in the house because of the allergens it brings in), without much storage space, the past few years, we’ve gotten tree from the thrift store and then we’ve re-donated it afterwards.  The money goes to a good cause (YAY, Children’s Hospital!) and we don’t have to figure out where to put the tree box…or the boxes upon boxes of decorations.  We have one large shoe box (from a pair of The Hubby’s boots) that have a few keepsake ornaments, a three sets of mini-LED lights for the windows, and some sleigh bells.  Other than that, (as I wrote about last year) we DIY.

Some of those DIY projects are perfect for witchlet magic lessons…

Chickadee’s Favorite: Blessing Chains

Chickadee had made an absolutely adorable video tutorial, that I had planned to post…but somehow, I deleted it instead.  It is no longer in the computer OR on the SD card.  Which is fine…because garland is wonderful all year long, and can be made to match the seasons.  We’ll just do the video at a later date, and stick to the written instructions for now!

The first thing you need to make a “Blessing Chains” as the Chickadee calls them, are blessings!  Next, you need some sturdy cotton thread and a needle.  Last, you need stuff to string.  We’ve used marshmallows, popcorn, cranberries, citrus slices, apple pieces, rosebuds, pretzels, animal crackers, macaroni, shells, glass beads, wooden beads, buttons, cereal, and more.  The only “rule” is to 1) pick stuff you like, and 2) pick stuff that can go back into to nature.

The Technique (as related by Chickadee):  Take a piece of stuff to string and then close your eyes and take a big breath in VAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARY slowly.  Imagine being filled with a warm light all the way down to your toes.  For blessings, my light is pink and smells like peppermint ice cream with sprinkles.  When you think your lungs will explode, stop and let the blessing grow in your brain until you are filled with it.  Then blow the blessing out of your body into the cranberry or popcorn or bead.  Open your eyes and string it…if you don’t open your eyes, you will poke your finger with the needle and that hurts.

Mom tip: Instead of individually blessing every piece, try blessing a bowl of each type of item with something different.  Or bless every fifth or whatever item, or take turns stringing items between a group.

When you have a foot or two or five, tie it off and hang it on the tree, or in the bushes, etc!

Sharkbait’s Favorite: Salt-Dough Tree Talismans

Talismans?  Really?  I actually had to check the dictionary on that one…lol!

Anyhoo…

Sharkbait is more of a hands-dirty type of kid, so these are a favorite of his!  We start with salt-dough–about 1 part salt to 2 parts flour, add just enough water until its the consistency of a thick play-doh like dough, and then a couple of drops of food color.  Pick your cookie cutters, then roll the dough flat and cut them out.  Make sure you poke a hole in them before you bake them.  Bake at ~200-250 degrees F, checking on them every 15-20 min.  They should take around 30-50 minutes to harden nicely. String them and hang.

Now, there are tons of things you can do to incorporate magic here–color and shape correspondences (pigs for prosperity!), adding herbs, decorating with stones, etc.  If you were making these as gifts, you could “add the magic” (say, a general blessing for health and wellness, or a home protection) while you were mixing the dough up.  If you are making them at home, with different shapes and colors for different things and people, you might wait until you are mixing the individual color (if you are focusing on color correspondences) or cutting them out (if you are focusing on the shape correspondences), etc.  We make most of these with a general sort of blessing, and then everyone makes one especially for them–some to represent ourselves and something we wish to emulate better in ourselves, and we tie it to the tree with a ribbon that has had a blessing written on it just for us.  After Yule, these special ornaments are put on the family altar.

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Household Hacks: Coffee Cans

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#plasticfree, #reuseit, coffee can, crafts, homeschool, kids crafts, recycle

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might know that we try to avoid disposable plastics in our home. This, of course, means that we end up with lots and lots of glass bottles, jars, milk cartons (from Daddy-Man’s creamer) and cans… particularly coffee cans (Daddy-Man is addicted). Rather than see them go into the waste stream (or even the recycling stream), we often try to find ways to re-use them.

Now, just take it to the beach!

Here are some things you can do with coffee cans:

Make an underwater viewfinder!
Vintage cooking: Make bread in a coffee can
Coffee Can Ice Cream
A Toad House for the Garden (and pest control!)
Punched Lanterns
Storage Containers (because you can never have too many!)
Coffee Can Bird Feeder
Coffee Can Bank (or a reward jar)
Bumblebee Birdhouse from a Coffee Can
Make your own (really) old-school Pinhole Camera
Decorate and combine with a few packs of bamboo skewers from the dollar store for a knife storage container
Storage Cubby–I totally want this for my yarn stash!
Coffee Can Drum
Coffee Can Stilts (anyone else remember doing this as a kid?!?!)

Other Can Crafts & Activities:
Tuna Can Pincushion
Family Totem Pole (I love this!)
Wishing Well

Kid’s Craft: Yarn Dolls

Tags

activities for kids, colonial crafts, kids crafts, yarn dolls

This weekend we went to a reenactment of the Battle of Great Bridge (which occurred early on during the Revolutionary War).  Sharkbait and Chickadee being old hands at “making popcorn”  (our description of musket fire in Civil War reenacting) stuck their fingers in their ears for every volley and hollered “HUZZAH!!” like champs when the battle was through. Chickadee also had a load of fun in the kids tent where she got to make a bookmark of her name out of hotchpotch alphabet charachters (you can find examples of the alphabet online, and there’s even an app for a memory game based on them that benefits the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation), taste some hasty pudding (yuck) with molasses (yum), drink wassail tea*, and make yarn dolls (instructions coming up).  She also got to be the littlest infantryman and drill (she can bayonet charge with the biggest of them, lol) and she visited the reenactor’s camp where she got to check out a reproduction hornbook, from which she would have learned her ABC’s were she a colonial kid.

*The (quite yummy) Wassail tea recipe is on the munchkin’s blog, at the end of the post under “Mommy Notes”, but I’ll be adding it to the upcoming Yule preparations post as well.

Making a Yarn Doll 

Materials:
A couple colors of yarn (we used one for the body, one for the arms/torso, and one for the hair
something about 6-8 inches long to wrap the yarn around
yarn needle (optional, but it makes some parts easier)
cloth scraps, buttons, ect (optional for eyes, clothing, etc)

Instructions:

1.

Wrap the yarn around your 6-8 inch long object until you have about a handful of yarn. Its hard to say how much to use…if you decide to braid the arms and legs, you need less, but if you are making a dress with the yarn, it looks better with more.  Either way, you should be able to tie it off pretty tight to form the parts of the body.

When you are done, tie off what will become the “top” of the doll so youhave a loop of yarn like so:

2.

To make the arms, wrap a separate, thinner section of yarn (we used the width of our guide, but you can use the length and trim the “hands” if you prefer).  The other choice is to wrap the arms, which makes them a bit pose-able, as we did (you can leave the hands as loops or trim the arms), or to braid them (the arms can be trimmed to the length you want).

3.

Tie off the head, insert the arms and cut the loops on the bottom.

4.

There are two methods to make the bodice/torso. For the first, you just tie off the torso under the arms (its the technique that the website linked in the first step uses). For the second, you wrap the torso, which forms a bodice (its a bit like making an ojo de Dios, in terms of the pattern it forms for the bodice).

5.

Add the “extras”–hair, eyes, skirt, etc.  For hair, take a loop of yarn for the hair, and cut it at one end, then tie it at the middle through the top of the head. For eyes (this is where a yarn needle comes in handy), you can tie and trim a piece of another yarn color, or you could sew in buttons.  A skirt or apron can be made from fabric scarves, as can a kerchief.