Finishing school for the semester left me with a lot of free time that had previously been occupied with homework, so since I had so much fun making my Nutcracker ornaments I decided to do a bit more Christmas crafting. I again made something really easy, but I’m quite pleased with the way they turned out.

For the past two years I’ve made my Christmas ornaments - in 2011 my tree was a simple bare branch with some mirrors and home-made felt doves, and in 2012 I pulled out my mini tree and strung a pompom garland and added some white snowflakes. This year I decided to again use my mini tree (although I seriously considered getting myself an adult sized tree – maybe I can find one for a huge discount after Christmas?) and rummaged around my storage locker for my ornament collection which has been steadily growing over the years. I was going to take the easy route and skip the DIYing this year and simply use what I had, but where's the fun in that? All I needed was some inspiration.

One day I was roaming the aisles of my favourite craft store (aka Dollarama) when I spotted some plain wood nutcrackers in a couple of sizes and I knew what I was going to do. I bought a few packages in two sizes as well as a picture hanging kit and brought them home.

My first task was to attach hangers to the top of my nutcrackers. I used the eye screws from the picture hanging kit and screwed them into the top of each nutcracker after first drilling a pilot hole. That was honestly the hardest part of this project.

After adding some temporary string I took my nutcrackers for a swim. Doesn’t the Para Paints Furby Fuzz (PF63) look a little like the Caribbean sea? I could have used a small paintbrush to paint the nutcrackers, but it seemed easier to simply dunk them, and then use the brush to remove the extra paint. Once they were thoroughly coated I hung them up to dry using some chopsticks wedged under some cookbooks which I think was a rather ingenious solution to figuring out how to dry them without the nutcrackers touching anything and ruining the paint.

Once the nutcrackers were dry it was simply a matter of adding some silver string and then hanging them on my tree.

It turns out I rather massively overestimated the number of nutcrackers that could fit on my wee little tree – while I put them all on for this shot I think the tree is better suited to about half as many. I guess I should take that as a sign I really need to get a ‘grown-up’ tree for next Christmas. 

As a member of Para Paints Blog Crew I was supplied the paint in this project free of charge.

I know I normally post my love post on Monday’s but I was a little distracted over the weekend so it got delayed by a day. I wish I could say I was distracted by something good, but I pretty much spend a lot of it marooned on my couch.

It wasn’t all bad though – it gave me the opportunity to catch up on my Christmas movie watching which, along with baking Christmas cookies, turkey and decorating trees, is an integral part of any Christmas in my humble opinion. Here are a few of my favourites:

Do you have any favourite Christmas movies? Do you watch them all December long, or do you save them for the days just before and after the big day?