Posts Tagged ‘christmas tree ornaments’

Make Your Own Holiday Dough Ornaments


With daily schedules bursting at the seams, decorating your home for the holidays can seem like just another chore on your to-do list. Although it may seem quicker and easier to buy your ornaments at your local discount store, consider clearing some time in your schedule to make your own holiday ornaments.

You’ll find that the time spent creating your unique holiday creations will be well spent. Christmas Family Ornaments

Here’s a recipe for making your very own Dough Ornaments. It’s simple, fast, and very expensive. More importantly, they are fun to make with family, and you will love the sight of them hanging from your Christmas tree!

Homemade Dough Ornaments

For the dough mixture, you will need:
4 cups of flour
1 cup of water
½ cup of salt
Food Coloring bottles (optional)
Cookie Cutters (optional)
2 cups ground cinnamon (optional)

For decorating your ornaments:
Ribbon
Acrylic paints and brushes
Glitter, Stickers, Stamps, Etc.
Clear protective paint sealant

Mix the dry ingredients together, and then add water. If you’d like, you can add food coloring to your dough mixture. You may want to mix up several batches of different-colored dough, or you can plan on decorating your ornaments later with acrylic paints.

For an extra special treat, mix two cups of ground cinnamon into your dough mixture. Your ornaments will be tinged with a wonderful cinnamon scent! Carolers Figurines

If your dough mixture feels too sticky, add more flour. Knead the dough until it is smooth and stiff. Use a roller pin to flatten out the dough. Once the texture is smooth and consistent, use cookie cutters to cut out different shapes. You can also shape the dough into a design of your own.

If you used food coloring to create batches of different-colored dough, now’s the time to get creative. For example, if you’ve mixed up a small batch of red dough and another batch of regular-colored dough, you can create candy cane decorations. Simply create one batch of red colored dough, and leave aside a portion of regular dough. Then flatten out the dough and cut out two long strips from each batch. Intertwine the two strips to create candy cane decorations!

Once all the dough has been shaped, use the tip of a pen or straw to make a small hole at the top of each of your ornaments. Then place them on a baking sheet, and bake them in the oven at a low setting for about an hour.

After your ornaments have baked, remove them from the oven and allow them to cool. Once they are cool to touch, the fun part really begins. Pull out the paints, felt-tip markers, stickers, glitter, and anything else you can think of, and begin to decorate. Be creative.

When you’re finished decorating, let the paint dry for several hours, and then seal your work with a coat of clear protective sealant. When the ornaments have dried, string a ribbon through the top and tie into a knot. You can also use metal hangers. Hang your new creations from the Christmas tree and enjoy! Granddaughter Gift

 

Sleigh Christmas Ornament

No Comments »Written on July 31st, 2010 by
Categories: Christmas Blog

Tis the season when lots of people drag a real tree into their house and decorate it. Some people buy live trees that are balled in burlap instead of a cut tree. A live tree is a great idea, but many people make serious mistakes when it comes to handling a live tree, and they end up losing their money. The information in this article also pertains to any live tree you are planting, be it now during the winter, or during the summer. Musical Christmas Ornament

1. Before you even take the tree in the house, dig a hole for the tree where you expect to plant it after the holidays. Put the soil in a wheelbarrow and park it in the garage. You’ll need loose soil to backfill the hole, and the ground might be frozen after the holidays.

2. Keep your live tree in the house for as short a time as is possible.

3. Keep the ball plenty moist while in the house, but not in a tub full of water. You don’t want the ball to dry out completely, but by the same token it shouldn’t be soggy all the time either. Just moist. You can wet it thoroughly, but then don’t water again until the water is almost gone. Resin Nativity

4. After Christmas move the tree outdoors as soon as possible and plant it immediately. If you were not able to dig the hole earlier, the ground is frozen, and the tree cannot be planted, leave it outside and pack bags of leaves or bales of straw around the ball. Find a way to heel it in in such a way that the amount of sun and wind the root ball receives is minimal.

5. Try and plant the tree immediately if you can. You do not want to store the tree on top of the ground during the winter if you can avoid it. Putting it in your garage is not a good idea either, it is likely to dry out in there. The absolute best place for the ball is in the ground, even if the ground has frozen after you dug the hole.  Just set the tree in the hole and backfill with loose soil. Make sure there are no air pockets around the ball. Backfill only with small particles of soil. If this cannot be done because the soil is frozen, just set the tree in the hole and backfill as soon as the weather permits.

6. Check the ball for nylon string. Cut and remove any nylon string. Sometimes the diggers wrap the string around the stem of the tree. If the string is a cotton type, like sisal twine, you can leave it on the ball but remove it from the stem. If the burlap is nylon it should be cut in many places or removed. If the ball is wrapped with a wire basket I recommend leaving it on. It will help to secure the tree and keep it from rocking back and forth with the wind. The roots will find their way through the wire and the burlap. Just cut the burlap where you can.

7. Do not plant the tree too deep. This is the number one reason for plants that do not survive. They should not be planted any deeper than they were in the nursery. The top of the ball should be one to two inches above the ground level. If you have heavy, wet, clay soil, you should plant it even higher and build a bed up around the ball. When you plant them too deep the plants literally suffocate.

8. Do not fertilize the tree at the time of planting. You can fertilize it in the spring, but only with an organic fertilizer. If you have compost available, mix some in while planting. Fertilizer can do more harm than it can good. I always recommend organic fertilizers. It’s hard to make a mistake with organics. It’s always a good idea to stake trees when you plant them. If the wind is constantly rocking them back and forth they will have a difficult time establishing new roots in their new home. Sleigh Christmas Ornament

 

Christmas Ornaments – Unraveling the Truth Behind the Tradition


Whenever the holidays come, anyone makes sure that they have Christmas ornaments prepared. These decors have been the known accessories to always accompany the cheerful spirit of Christmas. However, despite the fact almost all of us use these wonderful holiday accessories, not everyone happens to know the history that they hold.

The celebration of Christmas has been established by the Christians as a form of remembering of the birth of Jesus Christ, but this tradition opened doors for more practices to evolve.. And among these various new traditions is the usage of Christmas ornaments to adorn the also-known Christmas tree. But not until you really analyze it will you get to see: what exactly do these decorations have in them that makes them be related to Christmas whatsoever?

In the 1800s, people found the use of Christmas trees as a good way to enhance their celebration of the holiday season.. Back then, the main types of ornaments are in the form of fruits, most specifically apples and grapes. Because of the colors of both fruit (red and green) and their round form, they were the most sought after decoration. Since then, red and green became the basic color schemes of Christmas and the spherical forms of common decorations begun.

From such tradition came the Christmas bauble or Christmas ball, carrying the same color schemes and the very same spherical look. Because the use of fruits were someone wasteful and inconvenient, the Germans came up with these newer ornaments. But Christmas balls were only just the beginning to more intricate and fascinating forms of Christmas ornaments. After the Christmas balls, another icon in the form of the so-called ‘Santa Claus’ came into the picture. And since then, he was the inspiration of kids every holidays.

And as the years go by, the faces and forms of these Christmas ornaments changed. For one, they have been made through so many processes. In the present, we can even see the various forms of materials used to make them like wood, glass, metal and even ceramics. Plus, the varieties have expended accordingly. Now, there are also icons such as stockings, candy canes, Christmas bells, mistletoes, and more.

We can safely say that the traditions attached to Christmas have no particular connection to the birth of Jesus Christ. But if you really analyze things, you will realize that these traditions are not useless at all. Christmas ornaments and their corresponding trees are what we use to symbolize the cheerful feelings that we have every single year, and these feelings are what Jesus really wish for us to have.

Also see Christmas Postcards and Christmas Sweatshirts.