My family loves traditions especially my youngest daughter. As the years go by and families change it becomes increasingly difficult. We have to create new traditions. Children grow up and some move away. Eventually they create families of their own and then there are great grandchildren, grandchildren and in-laws. It can get really complicated with these extended families and travel schedules. Everyone has to be flexible. This is why we try to maintain just a few traditions. Most years around Thanksgiving my daughter comes to my house. We go out in the woods and cut pine and cedar boughs for decoration. It is a simple tradition but always fun. Afterwards we may go downtown and look around for new ideas, but mostly it's about spending time together.
Another tradition is planning a Christmas craft we can do together. We decide on something that can be done in a few hours. This year we wanted to try folding a paperback book into the shape of a Christmas Tree. Thrift stores are the perfect place to find supplies without a huge cost. If it doesn't work out, we don't want to invest a lot of money. For this project we looked for Christmas stories in a paperback book of about 350 pages. The resale stores usually save the Christmas books until the holidays and put a lot of them out together. They are usually 50 cents to $1. There are also a large variety of picture frames for under a $1. A book, a frame, scrapbook paper and some glue is all we needed for this project.
The plan was to come to my house, but we changed the location to my daughter's house. She has a She Shed full of paper, trimmings and about anything we needed and even some things we didn't even know we needed.
This was the process. After choosing a book without a lot of cuss words or compromising situations, we started breaking down the spline so the book would lay flat. Finding the center of the book and pressing down in both directions was the best way to flatten it out. Next we started folding each page. First fold from the top right to the center and then fold again to the center. Continue folding about fifty pages toward the back of the book. Then in reverse and fold another fifty pages toward the front.
When all the pages are creased and folded they will stay in place. After the tree is finished, it's time to pick the background paper, decorate the tree and glue it onto the backing.
These are our completed projects. Cute, cheap and fun to make. At first I thought it would take hours to fold all those pages, but it didn't take long at all.
These are a few of our crafting projects from the past few years. A painted gnome sign, a fabric Christmas tree, tee shirts and a candy cane vase. I still have most of them except for the candy cane vase. In the future we will not be making anything with real candy canes unless we store it in the freezer. You guessed it. Last summer that one melted into a sticky puddle. Good thing we have picture memories.
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