I’m sure you’ve all been wondering where the latest craft posts are–it’s football season, I say I do crafts in football season and yet–no posts. Sorry about that. We’ve been crafting, I promise!
One of my favorite craft projects has always been decorating a gingerbread house for Christmas. I’ve tried (and failed) to construct gingerbread houses on numerous occasions–I blame it on the altitude (we live at 8,700 feet!), but I’m probably just doing it wrong. That said, I’ve been known to decorate a box and just pretend it was gingerbread–shh.
This year I thought it would be fun to get Amelie involved. She’s 2 and loves crafts. I was reading another mom’s blog eons ago and remembered she’d done a “gingerbread house” project using those inexpensive bird houses from the craft store, so off to Michael’s I went. I was able to buy 2 unfinished birdhouses for $1 each, because they were on sale! I also bought a tube of white acrylic paint and a big paintbrush. Amelie’s first project was to paint the houses white–a project she enjoyed, and one that was truly hard for her to do “wrong,” so win-win. The white paint was done so that later we could wash off the frosting and candy and use them again, year after year.
Our first project was for Halloween, and Amelie and her dad decorated the houses with brown frosting, candy corn and black licorice. They turned out super cute, Amelie had a great (very messy and sugar laden) time and it was a craft project Bryan could wrap his brain around while mommy attempted to run the baby weight off on the treadmill.
We scrubbed off the hardened frosting and candy right before Thanksgiving, and Amelie was given white frosting and candy canes to decorate with while I made our Thanksgiving meal and her dad cleaned the house. Since she’d already done “candy houses” once before, she totally knew how to do everything and needed very little help from us. I’m pretty sure she fed the dogs candy canes during the process and there was frosting all over the floor afterwards, but it kept her busy for a half hour and she loved it. Just like last time, we put them up for display, and she was SO proud to show them off when our Thanksgiving guests arrived.
Super easy project, lots of fun, and if you keep the color palette simple, they’re pretty!
-Danielle
Ethiopian Orphan Relief's Blog 