Crafty Christmas.

First off - Merry Christmas! I can't believe this holiday is already here...seems like yesterday I was waiting for Christmas commercials to appear before Halloween [which they did this year]. Now, it's my favorite holiday. We'll get into the details of the holiday later, after we've opened presents and I've made it through.

But this entry is to brag about the crafty stuff I did this year. Every year, I say that I'm going to do at least one homemade thing for the holidays. That doesn't always happen, but this year, it did. I did THREE homemade things for the holidays.

THREE.

My first craft is thanks to a Pinterest craze: felt Christmas tree.

My first crafy craft craft.

The one weekend I had to myself in October, I saw some of my friends talking about the felt tree on Facebook. JoAnn Fabrics just happened to be having a great sale on their felt [half off, holla], so I picked up different colors one cold afternoon [it flurried that day!] and went to work. Two hours, three templates and two pairs of scissors later, I finished the tree. I was so proud of myself and thought it actually looked decent, considering I can't cut anything out to save my life. I put it up after Thanksgiving, thinking JJ would play with it...

This was right before JJ took off all the ornaments and almost trashed them. Awesome.

...but he only played with it after I put it up. And he tried to throw all the ornaments away. I made the tree hoping he wouldn't mess with our real tree, but the plan backfired. Ah well. I'll keep it and make the time to make better ornaments, so maybe next year he'll actually play with it. Maybe.

My second craft was something my mom suggested for teacher gifts: yarn monsters. She saw it on the BabbaCo website [we've ordered stuff from their site before for JJ - love it], and she suggested I make them to be pen or pencil toppers for JJ's teacher gifts. During a night where I worked until 1am and was up until 3am due to stupid high winds, I decided to make them on my own - and it was so fun and easy! I made a couple and then let JJ help me make more. Of course, he only wanted to cut the yarn and nothing else, so I finished them off - but it was still fun. And easy. And cute. We might make a couple to put on our tree next year.

Hello cuteness.

My third craft is actually food-related...well, dog-related, at least. I decided to make our two family dogs, Maui and Kolu, dog treats. I found this recipe on the King Arthur Flour website and decided to try them out. I wish I'd gotten pictures of me actually making them, because JJ helped out. He loves helping out in the kitchen and did a great job pouring the ingredients into the mixer. Anyway. I couldn't find a dog bone cookie cutter, so I just made round biscuits and baked them. I made them as Christmas gifts but wanted the dogs to try them, so they each got one - and LOVED them. I'm so stoked they actually liked them; I was totally afraid they wouldn't. Maybe I'll try my hand at more homemade dog treats for them soon. I'll try to snap pics of them munching on them later today when they get to have more as a part of the Christmas festivities.

There's a couple of things I wish I'd made time for - homemade coasters being the main one - but I'm glad that I made the time to do these things. I'm already starting to think of things I can do next year and want to do more treats and sweets to give as gifts. And, getting crafty means I probably won't have to actually wrap gifts - I can stick them in gift bags. Hallelujah...because I hate wrapping. HATE. But that's a different story for a different day.