
This year is my daughter's first Christmas. She is 11 months old. I wanted to make something special to give to friends and family. My original plan was to do painted hand prints on glass bulb ornaments. I bought pretty blue glass bulbs and kid-safe finger paint. That plan quickly went out the window when I realized how messy, time-consuming, and how many I actually needed to make for gifts!
Plan B- what do I already have in my house? I had air dry clay which my husband had given as a gift when my daughter was first born so we could capture hand and foot prints occasionally- which I have done. It's not messy....perfect!

*Tip- When making a lot, do all the M's first, then the A's, then the Z's (well obviously not those letters unless your child's name is Mazie) and so on. Picking up all the little stamps and spelling out for every individual one takes a lot longer.
If you feel like not everyone in your child's life will want her thumbprint on an ornament, then you can also make the gingerbread men! Roll and cut with a cookie cutter. Skip thumb step, add other child's name and year and dig hole in head, voo-doo-doll-style.

I placed the ornaments in old shoe boxes to keep the paint from going everywhere on my front porch. Smart, eh? Except when one shoe box has some weird hole in the bottom for some reason- then you get silver spray paint on the old slate porch of your 100+ year old house and you wipe it up super fast before your husband even notices!
I did a few coats of silver paint. I let these dry for the appropriate amount of time, because otherwise the paint was putting a dusting of silver on my hands.
For the gingerbread men I used a larger ribbon. Same looping technique so that they face forward.
I had a bunch of these mini stockings (over-stock inventory from my husband's store) so they made perfect gift bags to hold the ornaments plus give them a little padding to keep them safe.