Sunday, December 21, 2008

Stuff we are making

The kids love to do crafts, but the finances are very tight. I found some really cheap crafts for us to do this year and we are loving it!


These are snowflakes we made from Borax (have it on hand for laundry anyway), pipe cleaners and thread. Total cost was $2 for a package of pipe cleaners and they were ready overnight. You can read the instructions here.

I also found some really cheap fresh cranberries at the store and made these:


I boiled equal parts sugar and water to dissolve, let it cool for a bit (so the berries didn't pop) and added the berries. After soaking them overnight, I drained off the sugar water and rolled the berries in a little sugar. Doesn't it look like snow? They are tart-sour-sweet-yummy, too. Oh, and all those good antioxidants surely make up for the sugar, right? Who cares, it's Christmas!

We also made homemade marshmallows, which are yummy but not as fluffy as I'd like since I was using a hand mixer instead of a heavy-duty machine (my Bosch broke in our move here) and a trash bag wreath. I'll post pics of those in the next couple days.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

both of those look like fun! Do you get just one borax snowflake per wide-mouthed-jar-of-solution? What if you had, say, a big family and everyone wanted to make one?

Did you re-use the sugar-syrup from the cranberries? Could you use the used sugar syrup in lieu of the corn syrup in the marshmallows, perhaps?

A Frayed Knot said...

Yup, one jar one snowflake. We had some smaller ones made in pint jars. Each of the four of us made two snowflakes, so eight jars.