Christmas crafts - Pinecone Christmas trees and DIY holiday snowman cards

This week me and my daughter did some Christmasy crafts to get into the holiday spirit. We did some pinecone christmas trees and cards for the daughter's preschool teachers.

I had some pinecones lying around the house and decided to put them to good use by crafting them into Christmas trees. I had picked up some foam glitter stars from Michael's the other day. Those were used as the star tree toppers.

I did two kinds of pinecone trees. The first was very simple. Just some glitter glue and some glitter stars.

I arranged some pinecones in a plastic tub which used to be a takeout container (reuse!). Just added some red and white glitter glue and topped with silver glitter stars. I kept it simple so the arrangement can work for other seasons with some modifications.

For the second arrangement, I went the whole wintery route.
First, I made faux snow. There are different ways to do faux snow. I opened up a clean diaper and removed the powdery stuff inside and placed it in a transparent container. I used an empty earbud container! I needed 2 pullups worth stuff. Add water to wet it to a desired fluffiness. I needed a few handfuls of water. I also mixed in some kosher salt for some sparkle. I chose this method because it makes a wet snow which will be a good anchor for the pinecone trees. And it looks very much like the real snow.

I glued on craft gem stones on the pine cones to look like christmas ornaments. I had to use goop glue for this. This task is not for little hands due to the use of heavy duty glue instead of craft glue. Topped with the glitter star, they started to look like little christmas trees. To play up the bed of snow on which they were sitting, I thought a dusting of snow on the trees would look quite nice. So we applied some craft glue with a paint brush on the pinecones and then sprinkled on lots of kosher salt. Shake off the excess and we had beautiful snow dusted christmas trees on our hands.

I love how beautiful they look for so little effort!

For our christmas cards, we decided to do a snowman. The cards went through some trial and error. On the first iteration, I thought, since we had used kosher salt with success for snow, we could use it again on the cards. I mixed up kosher salt and regular sugar. We applied glue on the snowman drawing on the card and sprinkled the mix on. It gave us a light coating and the snow kept falling off the more we handled the card. I did another coat of glue and snow.To help the glue go on smooth, I mixed some water in the glue. It did give us a thicker coat of snow but we would have to do a glue-water coat on top to seal the snow. The big mistake I made here was using construction paper for the card. It is just not sturdy enough to handle that many layers. So we dropped this plan. Heres how it looked when we abandoned it. It might have worked on a heavier cardstock.

For the second round, I bought a heavy cardstock and cut it into card size. Actually the husband helped with the cutting. I could not cut a straight line to save my life. I cut out a snowman shape from a foam pad and decided to use it as a stamp. I glued on the snowman silhouette on a small cardboard and made a stamp.

Somehow this did not work out either. The stamp was too light and not clean looking at all. I am not really sure what went wrong but we dropped this plan too. We didn't have much time to rethink the stamp idea.
I still had the foam pad left after cutting the snowman out. I decided to use it.

I placed it on top of the card, held it firmly in place and let the daughter paint inside it with white paint. When she was done, I lifted the template to reveal the snowman. That made her very happy. When the paint dried, I added the details on the snowman with markers. I liked how the cards looked finally. Simple, minimalistic and some very good looking snowmen :)