Posts Tagged ‘Christmas’

For a quick and easy to make, but lovely to receive, Christmas gift, try making vanilla-infused sugar.

Just place a few vanilla beans in an air-tight jar and fill with sugar.  Allow to sit for a few days and the sugar takes on a wonderful vanilla essence.  This vanilla sugar can be used in place of regular sugar in everything from baked goods to coffee.

For added elegance, print out a white mailing label and punch the top and bottom with a decorative edge punch before applying to the jar.

Gingerbread cookies are a must at Christmas.  Martha Stewart has a recipe for Gingerbread Snowflake cookies that is just dreamy.  Since I do not have a snowflake cookie cutter, I made gingerbread trees, instead.  I piped the outline with royal icing and topped with Wilton Cake Sparkles.

Note: Martha’s cookie recipe is a bit spicy for younger children.

I am so far behind on Christmas crafting, baking, and blogging.  I just can’t seem to convince myself that it really is almost Christmas.  The dusting of snow we got today helped.  Hopefully, the 3 – 6 inches we are supposed to get tomorrow will even more so.  I did make Gingerbread Cookies today, though.  I will post the recipe and pics after I decorate them with icing tomorrow.

I thought I would link to a couple of my Christmas posts from last year.  Here are a couple of simple melt and pour soap tutorials that are fun to make, give, and receive.

Christmas Tree Soap

Snowflake Soap

Last month, I had the honor of hosting a Martha Stewart Crafts house party through House Party.com.  House Party sent me all of the materials to make some fantastic craft projects using the Martha Stewart Crafts product line, available at Michaels craft store.

Here are two of the projects.

Using the same techniques of layering punched and decorative papers and embellishments, I made Christmas cards and gift boxes today.

That holly edge punch is from Martha Stewart Crafts.

Did you know that Christmas is only 5 weeks away!  Yikes, I had better get posting and crafting!

Above is the cold process soap I made for Christmas this year.

First, I made the trees in a tree-shaped silicone muffin pan.  When I was making soap, I made a bigger batch of soap than I needed and colored the extra with green chrome oxide and scented it with Holly Berry fragrance, both from Brambleberry, and poured it into the tree mold.

After the trees were hardened and unmolded, I embedded them in a loaf, again scented with Holly Berry, and colored with gold mica and a burgandy oxide swirl.

Here is the loaf before I cut it.

I can’t wait to box these up in white boxes decorated with punched craft paper.  I’ll be sure to post a picture of the packaged bars.