Jingle Bell Doorknob Hangers

This was an extremely easy craft that just hit me as I was walking around Wal-Mart and caused me to immediately leave and head to the Dollar Tree. I thought of how I could make jingle bell doorknob hangers with bangle bracelets, curling ribbon and large jingle bells. Each jingle bell hanger cost me approximately $1 and I made them myself, I like that.


Materials Used:
Sparkly Bangle Bracelets (3 in a pack for $1)
Sparkly Curling Ribbon (3 colors for $1)
Large Jingle Bells (Pack of 9 for $1)
Scissors


Start by pulling a length of ribbon off the roll and tie the end to a large jingle bell leaving about 6 inches for curling. Use your scissors for curling your ribbon by pulling the ribbon between your thumb and the blade of the scissors. Hold your bell by the ribbon and tie onto the bangle braclet allowing it to hang approximately 6 inches from the braclet bottom, cut off about a foot length for curling. Do this to 3 bells, each one hanging 2 inches below the other until you have what you see in the photo below.


Curl each length of cut off ribbon and you are finished. I did add an additional 2 foot of ribbon tied and curled in the center to make the curls look fuller. You can add as many lengths of ribbon and curl as you want.


This craft takes about 10-15 minutes from start to finish and will look quite nice hanging from your doorkknob this Christmas season. Happy Holidays!

Kemi Doran

Thanksgiving Folded Fan Turkey

Here is a fun, easy craft for thanksgiving decoration. He can be made to look so many different ways depending on the paper pattern you choose.

Materials Needed:
Scrapbook paper, printed computer paper, wrapping paper (if thick enough), I purchased what you see at the dollar store, I got two packs of printed computer paper and a pack of scrapbook paper.
Brown, Red, Yellow, and Orange Foam Sheets
Thin wooden hearts (I purchased these at Michaels for $.25 each)
Googly Eyes
Tacky Glue
Scissors

Now who doesn't remember how to make a hand folded fan? Hopefully everybody knows what I'm talking about here. The photo will show you somewhat how it is done. Start your folding on the shorter side of your paper, folding back and forth until you run out of paper to fold. When you get to the last fold, hold it flat and then fold the whole thing in half and squeeze it and crease it good at the fold. Let it open up some and using your tacky glue, glue the two center end pieces together and press it all together again like you did when you creased it, I put a book on it for about 2 minutes to make sure it was glued. I failed to get a photo of the folding and glueing process, but I will add a photo if anybody doesn't get what I'm trying to accomplish here.

Hold your fan to the end of your brown foam sheet and just make a mark about 1/2 inch above the fan. Draw the shape of a fat, flat bottomed bowling pin (see the photo above) as tall as the mark you made on the foam. Cut out your turkey body.


Trace the wooden heart onto your orange foam sheet and cut out the shape and glue over the wooden heart. Glue your fan to the center of your heart base. Glue the googly eyes on your turkey head, cut out a yellow foam triangle and a red foam tear drop shape and glue on as shown below. Glue your finished turkey body right in front of the fan on the heart base.


I just love this turkey, and each paper pattern you choose will look different than the next. The first photo shows you how each turkey turned out with the different papers. Holly made the turkey on the right. Happy Thanksgiving!

Kemi & Holly Doran

Licorice Wreaths

I was watching Modern Marvels, an episode on candy making, and watched how they make Red Vines Licorice. My mind was on our website and suddenly I "saw" a craft made with the licorice. This is so easy a three year old could do most of it. If they can tie a bow, they could finish the project.

Red Vines Licorice
Ribbon, red looks very good!
Pipe Cleaners to match the ribbon
Thin matching ribbon or thread
1 Bell

Optional: Spray Glitter


Take a piece of licorice and eat it. Now for the next one, cut off the tips and round out the opening. Match up 2 pipe cleaners and push through the opening all the way through the other side. End up the ends again. Twist then all together into a fat 2 inch stick, bend it over to form the eyelet area for a Christmas hook.


30 inches of ribbon (doubled makes 15") makes a nice bow. Tie on the bell with thread or thin matching ribbon with the little knot on the backside of your wreath. Optionally if you have some spray glitter, give it the once over.


You can't eat these, and I wouldn't let the kids eat the ones without glitter either. They'll dry out and crack after the season so feel free to toss these after the tree comers down. But oh so cute! Little ones will enjoy this project and feel proud of their work, they can make a gift of it to grandma too.

Victoria Swanson

Reindeer Pencil Toppers

These little reindeer are darling, even if I do say myself. Last month I made a few pencil toppers and the spiral ones gave me the idea to create these odd fellows. Really fun at school and make nice gifts from kid to kid. I borrowed my niece Holly for these step by step photos. Holly is 10 and did a wonderful job as my assistant. These are the now famous “Reindeer Pencil Toppers” that we will be doing in our demonstration on Dec. 13th at Bookman's on Speedway in Tucson. Children of all ages are welcome at the show and please try these at home and send us a note and photo.

We love our little reindeer so much that we are making them available as craft sets (See the left column for details).

Items Used:
2 Pipe Cleaners
1 New Pencil
Spare Pencil
5 Shiny Pony Beads
1 Red Pony Bead
2 Googly Eyes

Tacky Glue or Heavy Duty Glue Dots or Hot Glue
(depending on child’s age group)


Directions for Righties: Pick up 2 pipe cleaners. Even up their ends (see photo above) and hold in your right hand. Using your left thumb press pipe cleaners against a pencil about 2 inches below the eraser at the ends and start wrapping tightly about 3 times around the top of the pencil with your right hand. Try to keep the pipe cleaners flat as you wrap upward toward the eraser, this will form your reindeer face area (see photos below).


Your thumb is very important to spiraling the pipe cleaners around pencils so hold it firmly while you wrap. Twist the 2 pipe cleaners together where you stop just behind the eraser, and separate them a little (like giant rabbit ears).


Take the spare pencil and repeat the spiral wrapping on each pipe cleaner antler. Holly took a short cut here by taking the spare pencil and placing it midway atop the reindeer pencil on the eraser end and wrapped both sides of the spare pencil. It looked like a big letter “T” her way. And I've found it to work great for me too. Gently slide the spare pencil out of the wrap you just created. Now your have 2 antlers and a plain face.


Through trial and error we have found that you should glue the face on last and slide the 5 colored beads down the antlers now, 3 on one side and 2 on the other. Glue on googly eyes and little red bead nose (I glued the nose vertically and the hole is seen from the side). On a few pencils at my house I tied a little bell on a thin red ribbon around the bottom of the reindeer’s neck, though this might not be a good idea for pencils to be used in school.


You have a cute reindeer pencil! Make some for your school chums and teachers as gifts.



Victoria Swanson

Fun Foam Autumn Happy Leaves Wreath

My sister Vicki found these foam leaf cutouts at Michaels at half price $4.99. Holly and I were there just the other day and they are still selling at $4.99 a kit. The kit originally came with the leaf cutouts, googly eyes, foam stick-on bow ties and black foam smiles. Vicki used the kit for her Thankful Leaves and gave me what was left over. I got 10 leaves and the bow-ties. I decided we were going to make a wreath out of the leftovers, and I've also seen something similar at the Oriental Trading website (but yet different). We started by adding the bow-ties and googly eyes to each foam leaf and then we used glitter glue to make them smile. We left them to dry for about an hour and started to construct our wreath.


We decided to use popcicle sticks or craft sticks for the base of our wreath. We constructed an octagon as shown above. We doubled the sticks on every other side to reinforce it. Next we just glued the leaves to the base using a glue gun and tied a length of jute rope to the top attached to the popcicle stick base and tied it in a bow after we hung it. This was an easy project that used the leftovers from another project. It's very easy and looks extremely cute.


Kemi and Holly Doran

Oreo Candy Turkeys

I found these cute turkeys in Google Images and wanted to give them a try. I want to give credit to Kimi who the original photo (not shown) belonged to. I didn't find any instructions on how to make them so I wanted to give it a shot at recreating them. I made them two different ways and will describe them both. They were messy to work with and I suggest because of all the handling, if you are going to serve these to guests or children wear some gloves.


Items Needed:
Oreo Cookies or similar sandwich type cookie
Peanut Butter cups
Whoppers or Malted Balls
Candy Corn
Cake Icing
Food Coloring
Sandwich Baggies
Butter Knife


Starting with the Oreo cookies, I tried to just shove the candy corns into the cookies but that didn't work. Carefully pry open a cookie and with a small amount of icing, add some to the top half and then close the cookie again, now stick in the candy corn and they will stick like glue, the icing is the cement holding this whole thing together.


Now lets put them together. First I was using just a butter knife to apply the icing, big mistake.


As you can see by using a butter knife I was using too much icing and it was making a mess, it was hard to not get it all over the cookie.

I decided to put some icing into a baggie and clip a tiny bit off one corner.


This worked much cleaner as you will see in the next photo, was easier to control and didn't get all over the cookie. I just squeezed a small amount of icing on one side of the peanut butter cup and on the top and pressed it onto the cookie as shown below, same for the whopper. For the beak, just break off the tip of one candy corn and use icing to glue to whopper.


This is the best one of the three I made, no visible icing on the cookie for the most part. Next use the icing to glue on googly eyes and your Oreo Candy Turkey is almost complete. Just remember to remind children or guests to remove the eyes before eating. You could also make the eyes out of icing, but I was too lazy, and I just love google eyes for some reason.


If you happen to have some writing icing use that to create turkey feet on the oreo cookie base. But if you don't, you can use a baggie and food coloring to create yellow or orange for the feet. I was using this old tube of writing icing and it wasn't performing well. I suggest not using old writing icing. I hope you enjoy this craft, it was fun and the kids will love to make them and to eat them. Happy Thanksgiving.

Kemi Doran

Pinecone Turkeys Galore!

Items Used for my 7 Turkeys
Pipe Cleaners
Feathers
Scrapbook Paper
Popsicle Sticks
Pencil
Beads
Antique Shell Sequins
White Glue
Hot Glue
Thin Wire
Small Foam Sheet
Piece of Scrap Cardstock
Paper Clips


TURKEY HEAD
Very Easy
Depending on the size of your pinecone, use a third or half piece of pipe cleaner. Bend the end a half inch in for the head and continue to bend so that it looks like a swan. Stick the “swan” into the area you want the neck to come out from. Maneuver the end into a spot where it will stay twisting the pipe cleaner to do it’s thing. You may spot with white glue if you like (I didn’t).


LOOP TAIL TURKEY
Easy
Take 3 pipe cleaners (all different or same, it’s your choice). Make 2 nice loops in each of the pipe cleaners. Place together as a tail and twist together the loose ends. I used white glue to make sure they would stay together and a benefit of that was that it became extra stiff. After drying, I hot glued the tail to the base of the pine cone and held it tight until it cooled

PENCIL SPIRAL TURKEY
Fast and Easy
5 pieces of pipe cleaners. Grab the pencil and create wrapped spirals. Leave about 2 or 3 inches straight, you’ll need to twist these around each other tight and securely to create the fan tail base. Glue to make stiff. Hot Glue the cute tail to the bottom of your pinecone.


BRIGHT BEADED TURKEY
Fast and Easy
Five pipe cleaners, with each one curl the tip over its self and create a small spiral. 7 to 12 beads (depending on the size of the cone) strung up to the spiral. Twist the five bottom ends together, stiffen with white glue and spread out like a fan. Hot glue the tail to the end of your pinecone.


TRADITIONAL FEATHER PINECONE TURKEY
Easy
Cut a 2 to 3 inch shape like a fat rainbow. Lay your feathers out on the “rainbow” to get an idea how many feathers you’ll need and to see how they’ll lay out. Use any type feather you like, but they are all different so test out your feathers before gluing. Hot glue is faster, I used white glue and it needed to dry overnight. Now dry, I wriggled the base of the “rainbow” cardstock (of which the feathers are glued to) into the last row of the pinecone base and it stayed tight.

WOODEN POPSCILE TAIL TURKEY
This was the hardest one to make.
14 and 1/2 popsicle sticks. Divide to 2 groups of seven. Warm up the hot glue. Take a peek at the photo of all the tails, the sticks start off as 2 sets-then they’re glued together with the half stick (you will need to shape the half piece to fit between the two tail fan pieces, scissors and a nail file is all you’ll need to make your shape). Now think how spiral stairs rise up from a single point. We’re going to hot glue the first pieces together at one end and it should look like a tight letter “v”. Hot glue the third stick the same way and it should look like a tight “w” now. Keep gluing and staggering the 7 sticks. You should have a piece that’s looks a little bit smaller than a quarter of a circle. To make the second side of your turkey tail, repeat the same process, BUT the rotation of the staggered spiraling needs to be done in the other direction. Now you have two wooden fans. Place flat on the table with the center sticks touching and the ends face up like a bowl, use something to brace the outer edges or they will come apart from their weight. You’re gonna hot glue the seam and place the extra half stick (shaped to fit now) on the seam to join the two pieces strongly. I tried to hot glue to my pinecone but the weight was too much. I carefully wrapped thin wire around the tail end and the rows near the base of the cone until it felt secure. Harder to do, but a nice natural feel and look with the wood and cone.


FANTAIL TURKEY
Most scrapbook pages are 12” by 12”. I found an Americana print, choose whatever you like, I recommend child drawn paper too. I cut a 3” strip off the side and slowly and carefully began to fold. I’m terrible at this so I treated it like origami and kept folding from even sections. Fold in half, fold each half in half…..I’m nuts, fold how YOU like. Warm up the hot glue. So it’s a really long folded strip. Fold it as small as it can get and wrap a pipe cleaner around the bottom to keep it tight. On the actual bottom of the tightly folded fan glob some hot glue over the edge as if you we’re binding a book. Do again for good measure. While it is cooling down, cut a piece of scrap card stock about 6 inches long by how ever wide your fan folds are. Put hot glue along its length and open up the cooled fan and glue its open bottom to the cardstock. Keep tight with paper clips. You have a lovely little fan tail that will stay open now for good. Hot glue the tail to the base of the pinecone.

SEQUIN TAIL TURKEY
Easy (replace sequins with anything you fancy)
Take a piece of sheet foam I choose red to match the pink in my sequins. I cut a freehand crescent that had the shape of a turkey tail. This one I shaped to fit into the last row at the bottom of the pinecone (No hot glue anywhere). I have used some antique sequins, you might have some yourself but you can glue any little items to the foam tail base. Right now I’m thinking dried cooking beans might look cool too! I white glued the sequins in overlaying and ascending rows to the top of the foam tail. Nice and slow, one row at a time. Let dry overnight. Refit into the last row of the pinecone.

Victoria Swanson

Fall Floral Pumpkin Centerpiece

This is a craft you will want to make no more than 3 days before it's use, the pumpkin will start to deteriorate about the 4th day depending upon it's freshness.


Materials Needed:
Pie pumpkins
Knife
Assorted Silk Fall Flowers
Moss
Styrofoam
Tacky Glue
Aluminum Foil (for stuffing)
Wire cutters

Using your knife, cut open the top of your pumpkin and scoop out all the insides and discard. A parent should always supervise any child no matter what age.


The styrofoam we chose was not as tall as our pumpkins so we needed to stuff aluminum foil in the bottom to raise it up level with the cut top of the pumpkin. Next we carved the styrofoam until it fit into the pumpkin and used the carvings to fill in around the edges and squished it all together so it looked as if it were one solid piece (see photo below). Apply tacky glue to the styrofoam and add a generous amount of moss to hide the foam.


Now the fun begins, start with any large flowers first and work around symmetrically until it looks perfect to you. There is really no wrong way to do it. You may want to start by clipping off all your flowers first or you can clip them as you go along, but you will need to do some clipping with your wire cutters to use only the parts you want for your centerpiece. I suggest the parents also do the clipping, Holly found it was a little hard to clip with her small hands.


This took us approximately a half hour from start to finish and they make a wonderful centerpiece for your fall or Thanksgiving table.


Kemi and Holly Doran