Christmas Craft Party

I had my second annual Christmas craft party this past weekend. It was a lot of fun to hang out with my friends from the art class, to make some Christmas crafts, and to eat delicious food.

Everyone brings something to nibble on which makes things much easier.  I baked brownies, cut up some veggies, and whipped up some of Sarah Richardson's Spiced Nuts (recipe from this post).  They are delicious, although they burn easily so watch your timing on them and I only put half the amount of cayenne in because I'm a spice-wimp.

Sarah Richardson's Spiced Nuts

The bag was opened and then the bottom was rolled in under itself to hold the chips up near the top - clever, eh!

This year we made four different crafts at three different stations.  I had them set up so people could just move between the tables whenever they were ready to.  

You can see the three stations in the dining room and family room below - thank goodness for open concept homes at a time like this.

Here's the low down on what we made:

1) Twig Stars 
They were simple to make and looked so pretty all lined up along our bench at the end of the evening (why is it that Juno photo-bombed every single photo I took of our finished stars).

Here's what you need to make twig stars:

• twigs - I used some dogwood branches that I clipped from our bush in the backyard
• glue guns
• clippers 
• different sized star templates
• ribbon, twine, and berries to decorate the stars

2) Glass Ornaments and
3) Glass Tea Light Holders

These two were at the same table because they took many of the same materials. Everyone got really creative here and there was a lot of variety in how the ornaments and tea light holders were decorated.

Here's what you need to make these:

• glass ornaments
• glass tea light holders
• glue
• paint
• glitter
• paint pens
• small containers to put the glitter, paint, or glue into
• small funnel for pouring the glitter into the ornaments
• paint brushes

and this is how pretty the table covering looked after the party 

4) Orange Carving

We actually did this last year, but almost everyone's oranges went mouldy except mine.  I put mine on the floor heat vent for two weeks and they dried out perfectly.  You can see the ones I made last year all dried out and displayed on my mantel this year, in the photo below.

Orange carving requires the following:

• oranges
• a carving set - the kind for carving linoleum
• a bowl to catch the carved orange peel

Not everyone in the class lives in a home with floor heat vents so I'm drying mine and a few other people's.  And now my family room heat vents look like this and the whole main floor smells like oranges.

You can see what crafts we made last year in this post (one of my favourite crafts we did last year were the beaded stars which I used in the first photo of this post).  Have you ever been to a craft party? We had ours extra early this year to accommodate everyone's schedule - which means, apart from the tree, the house is decorated for Christmas. Wahoo!

Linked to DIY Christmas at It's Overflowing