Christmas craft day

Most years I am running around like a mad women the day before Christmas Eve, buying the last of the presents, and then I stay up until the wee hours wrapping gifts.

I am trying my very hardest not to do that this year. I have a good start on my Christmas shopping and I’m hoping to finish it up (online, mostly) over the next week or so. I am also going to get my outside decorations (which will be a bigger deal than the inside decorations given that Mr. Much More Patient is gone until Christmas Eve so I won’t have a tall helper) done this weekend if Mother Nature cooperates.

But I actually kicked off my Christmas “to do” list last weekend when my best girlfriends and I did our annual Christmas craft day. This started as a bit of a joke because none of us are crafters. At all. But we wanted to get together to hang out somewhere other than a bar without having to add further trauma to our Christmas season budgets. The way it works is that I scour the web for interesting looking crafting projects and then send a list to my friend Jilian who chooses the project we’ll do. I gather all the supplies, everyone brings a little food and drink, and we hang out at my house being silly and attempting to make a little something.

Last year we made beaded snowflake ornaments that were really cute although labor intensive.

My friend Jilian showing off a previous year’s craft: beaded snowflake ornaments.

This year we made pipe cleaner figures based on an idea from Martha Stewart. They looked cute and we figured that pipe cleaners were probably pretty forgiving for us novice crafters.

We made skiing Santas, skating snowmen and reindeer (and a few random things later on).
Now of course you knew that ours wouldn’t look like Martha’s, and I should add that our efforts were hindered by the fact that Martha must have special super fluffy pipe cleaners made specially for her because ours looked a little anemic compared to hers.

Here’s how mine turned out next to Martha’s version. See if you can identify which is Martha’s and which is mine.

Did you guess that the ones on the right were mine? You did? You are a bunch of super sleuths!

Here’s what the whole menagerie of figures we all made looked like.

The black blobbish looking thing in the front is a very accurate pipe cleaner depiction of my friend Julie’s dog.

A few things that should be pointed out about this picture: 1. We took an intermission from crafting to go to the bar and watch the Wisconsin Badgers game. 2. Julie’s hair looks crazy because we started putting pipe cleaners in it. And she let us. And then she went out in public with them in her hair. See why I like these girls?