Creating Christmas - Peppermint Ornaments

Last year I told my hubby that our small apartment tree was not going to cut it in the new house, so this year I am going from a 6 foot tree to a 9 foot tree. Of course that means I need more decorations and ornaments, but instead of spending a lot on decor that is only up part of the year, I scoured Pinterest for ideas on ornaments I can make.

I fell in love with these peppermint candy ornaments from HelloHomebody and thought how hard can it be?

I had 6 cookie cutters in 3 sizes. In the largest I used 9 peppermints, in the medium I used 3 peppermints, and in the smallest I used 1 peppermint.



It wasn't that hard, but here is what the simple four-step procedure gorgeously depicted on Pinterest doesn't show you:

- Spraying cooking spray on the inside of a cookie cutter is messy and hard to do without a lot of over spray. I sprayed in short bursts and then used a paper towel to help get the spray into the corners of my stars.

- Cookie cutters are not flat against the cookie sheet. I noticed this when I first put them on the cookie sheet, but took a chance to see what would happen. Yes, some of the peppermint candy oozed out underneath the cookie cutter, but I found that I could score it with a toothpick while it was still warm and it would easily break off later. And even the scoring is not always necessary.

- If the candy cooks a bit too long, it will start to bubble up, but as long as it isn't burnt, it still makes a cool ornament. On a couple of batches, the candy was in the oven for a minute or so too long and created a more swirled design.

Out of my 3 batches, I lost about 3 stars which broke completely (too thin?) and I have a couple of stars that points broke off, but I am going to try to repair with glue or modge podge. Since I don't plan to eat mine, I am going to coat them with modge podge or acrylic medium so they aren't so sticky to touch.

The debris pile - mostly from candy that oozed under the cookie cutters and had to be broken off.
I plan to try to reuse it to create some more ornaments.

Mobile - A Sky Full of Stars

As I was browsing Pinterest back in the Spring for nursery ideas, I came across a pin of a mobile made from a bicycle wheel and paper airplanes. I loved the idea. But where to get a bicycle wheel? I finally found one I liked through eBay - and the 20" size was perfect for a mobile.

Then I put my engineer husband to the task of figuring out the best way to hang it. This is where the power of the Weatherwaxes come into play - "Weatherwaxes create!" (Makes me think of "Thundercats roar!" - hopefully some of you know what I am talking about.) My darling hubby, his mad CAD skills, and his CNC milling machine created a beautiful connector / bracket that pinned into the wheel and then into the wire cable. He even made sure that he could fit a wrench into the connector to tighten down the nuts. (Not sure I would have thought about that in the design process. I would have been more concerned about the aesthetics. We have lots more creative projects brainstormed, and I can't wait to share them - but they are Christmas presents so.... Turns out we make a pretty good creative production team.)


I thought the paper airplanes looked cool, but I wasn't sure if that's what I wanted to hang from the mobile. So with more browsing, I came across all kinds of origami and folded paper ideas. Then Coldplay came out with their new album Ghost Stories, and I saw the Target commercial with "A Sky Full of Stars," and decided I wanted to use stars, but I wanted them three dimensional and all of the origami versions I found were flat. That's when I turned to using papier-mâché forms and decoupage. 


My original idea was to use sheet music, and after much back and forth and consideration of other papers (leftovers form the Alphabet series, book pages, etc.) I stuck with the sheet music. I found a cheap-ish book of Jazz sheet music at the local Half Price Books and started tearing it up. I used the same PVA glue from the Alphabet series to collage the pieces of sheet music onto the stars and the sphere. The final decision was whether or not to add any color to the stars and moon, but they look so great just the way they are that I decided to leave them black and white.