Kids Craft Weekly giveaway!

Good news, guys! Amber from Kids Craft Weekly saw my blog post yesterday about her Christmas card swap and Christmas craft PDFs and wants to give away one of her PDFs to a Penny Carnival reader. 

Leave a comment below that's somehow related to Christmas crafts. You could briefly describe one of your favorite Christmas crafts, tell me about an ornament you made as a kid, link to a project you've done as an adult or link to a project you'd like to make one day (or have someone else make for you). Whatever.

Leave your comment by this Friday at noon, Pacific time, and a randomly selected commentator (commenter? person? bumble bee?) will win the 20-page Kids Craft Weekly Christmas Cards PDF.

Thanks, Amber!

Update: I didn't mean to exclude folks who celebrate other holidays. By all means, leave comments about Hanukkah crafts, winter solstice ... everything. Even though Amber's e-booklet is about making Christmas cards, there are ideas in there that you could apply to any holiday. 

Comments

[Jen Moore]

Sad story, was moving and a friend of a friend packed all my xmas ornaments in the back of his truck and while i was following him down I-90, I saw the containers with all my ornaments fly out and scatter all over the freeway. I pulled over and cried. Not just my xmas ornaments, but the ones I made growing up. They were gone. The one i remember the most, was we took popsicle sticks and glued 4 of them to make a square and then attached a black piece of construction paper on the back. Then in white glitter pens we write whatever we wanted on the front and attached our school photo on it, I think it was 3rd grade. So we basically made a blackboard ornament, it was fun!

[Brandie]

My favorite childhood Christmas craft was cinnamon ornaments. You take an insane amount of cinnamon (thank you Costco) mix it with applesauce until it's a very thick dough consistency then roll it out, cut it out with Christmas cookie cutters (gingerbread man is my favorite), punch a hole in the top for a ribbon and bake them at 250 for an hour or so just to dry them out. Tie a ribbon through the hole, paint them, glitter them, whatever!. I've started doing this with my nieces and daughters as well.

[michaela]

When I was in kindergarten, I made a little wreath as follows: newspaper base, then glued down a bunch of cockleburs, which were then spraypainted gold. It is HIDEOUS - and I adore it to this day. (Small wonder that my mom gave it back to me, right?!?)

[michelle]

i love doing basic christmas crafts with my kids. anything with scissors paper, glitter, glue... i remember making a paper christmas pudding when i was about 6 years old , with long accordian style legs. my grandmother always hung it on her Christmas tree as an ornament. when i was older, it still felt special to see it on her tree!

[Michelle]

I have many ornaments from over the years. There are 2 I cherrish. A pair of christmas mice my brother and I made for our grandparents (the grandparents are still alive, but stopped putting up a tree, so they gave them back) and a simple needle stitch pillow given to me by a friend in the 9th grade. Thanks Linda

[Megan]

Oh, Jen! That's so sad. You must have been screaming "noooooo!" as you saw it all blow away. He must have felt terrible.

I'm loving all these ideas. Keep 'em coming!

Michelle, what in the world is a Christmas pudding? I'm trying to picture a bowl of pudding with legs and I'm cracking up.

[Vicki Hodge]

I love to save Christmas cards and use them for crafts the following year. It reminds us of the people who send the greeting as it is refashioned into an ornament, bookmark, or new card.

[Valerie @ Frugal Family Fun Blog]

Hi Megan, I just found your blog and love it. Looks like you and I have a lot in common! (You may enjoy my blog too.) As for holiday crafts... I recently made a fabric dollhouse for my daughter (age 5) that was intended to be a holiday gift, but well... I just HAD to give it to her early! You can see it here:
http://www.frugalfamilyfunblog.com/2009/11/handmade-holidays-fabric-dollhouse.html

What a fun giveaway... thanks for the chance!

[Deb]

Last year we started a tradition of making ornaments - i bought boxes of the clear glass baubles and we did a variety of them for our family + all the kids' classmates. we did 3 ways: fill with paints and swirl. add glue and glitter and swirl, add tinsel on its own...
then i used a sharpie to nicely write the child's name on one side and we used fancy Xmas stickers on the other side. We added a nice ribbon for hanging.
this year we are adding new ones for our immediate family

[Angie]

Each year when we decorate our christmas tree I make my husband look at EVERY SINGLE ONE of the bazillion ornaments that I made growing up, while telling him the story about it. Its his worst nightmare, but one of my favorite traditions! Now that we have kids, they have to suffer through it as well. I would love to make more, and have my kids do the same things to their future spouses!

[Laura]

Each year I make Christmas cards using pictures of my nieces and nephew. It's a family event to come up with the theme for the card and then hunt for the pictures taken earlier in the year or hold an impromptu photo shoot. It's always so meaningful to send those cards and friends and family love getting them.

[Lauren]

Every year we would make our own ornaments out of what I think were salt cookies. We would mix up the dough and press it out with cookie cutters and poke a hole at the top and then bake them. They came out very hard (you wouldn't want to eat them:))and when cooled, we would paint them, put a ribbon through the top and hang them on the tree.

[Elissa]

I remember making a macaroni xmas tree in kinder. I am very excited because my daughter is 3 now and the perfect age to start hand making our decorations! We will glue some macaroni to a cardboard cone and spray with gold paint and then glitter! Of course there will be many, many paper chains and painted pine cones as well :)

[denise]

umm...i already blogged about your site and joining this card swap and so want to write something interesting but i'm just up too early for a potty break and too exhausted...so for now i'll leave you with the idea i've had of collecting each year's xmas cards that i receive in a hardbound journal/scrapbook...in a bright red color or something holidayish...and writing "2009 holiday cards" on the front with the card we sent that year (always a photo of our family from the past year) in the middle and having this on our coffee table along with past years so we can flip back through the years of our friends and families lives or at least keep up with the current year if i can get around to doing this...i've saved the cards...thanks for the contest! love your site!

[denise]

be sure you only enter me once...i'm "awake" now and more coherent...just remembered that each year we have a wallet sized photo taken of our children with santa and then frame it to hang on the tree (making sure the year is written on the frame somewhere)...we have other photo ornaments from our wedding and honeymoon...i love photos! so want to win this! three friends from my co-op preschool joined the card swap, too...

[I wanna be creative]

I've got a huge list of Xmas projects starred in my reader, left over from last year. So that I actually DO some of these great projects, i have invited the girls over for craft night, to get started. Button wreaths, felt cones, paper snow flakes - here i come!

[Melissa]

My favorite christmas craft is making homemade snowflakes, bringing snow inside is wonderful. You get the simplisticness of snow with the warm of the indoors

[Julie]

Do you have any idea if there is another Christmas Card Swap going on? I just found out about the one you entered and would have loved to do it with my four kids!!! It was already full:(