Three decades of Christmas crafts

[mellicious]

I saw the prompt from a few days ago about Christmas crafts, and it got me to thinking. The thing is, my mother was an elementary school teacher, and we grew up doing LOTS of crafts. It was how she kept us entertained, quite often. I'll have to go see what I can find as far as pictures. I know I used to have some of that old stuff still around. And well, I've looked, now, and I can't find pictures of anything that was one of my mother's projects, so far. I know that one thing - probably the oldest I remember - was pasta glued onto cardboard and spray-painted gold. And those were hanging around for a surprising number of years. And I think maybe there were some salt-dough ornaments, and I know there were some felt birds that were mostly Mama's doing, because they date from before we were old enough to have been much help, there. I'm pretty sure I still have at least one of those birds around somewhere.

I don't put this in the "Mom craft" category because I'm pretty sure that these came from Sunday school (where they likewise had a huge arsenal of crafts to keep everyone occupied). I'm not sure if I made this one or my sister did, but I found it in with my mom's Christmas stuff after she died:

Not the nutcracker, the clown. Recycling (I won't try to call it upcycling) toilet paper rolls is not a purely recent idea.

My mom kept everything. I made this (from a kit) in high school, and she hung it in the living room every year for the rest of her life:

(I am trying to resist the temptation to be snarky about it. My mother loved it, that's what counts, right?)

I didn't stop doing crafty stuff when I got out from under my mom's roof, either. This was our Christmas tree topper for many years:

This was another kit, but I was getting a bit more creative by this time and I changed the colors, which, in true 80s tradition, were two shades of dusty rose for the angel's robe. I didn't think that would match my tree all that well, so I changed it to red.

(I think that's enough creativity for one day, don't you?)



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