Christmas makes

A December filled with last minute Christmas craft and middle son's birthday in early January mean my blog has been a little ignored recently. However, Christmas and birthday are now out the way, school and nursery have started back and I have a bit of time to devote to this again.

So I'm starting with a very belated post with my Christmas makes. These mostly went into the boys' stockings so I have to pretend they are Santa's handiwork but I am secretly proud of (most of!) my efforts.

- Rainbow peg dolls

We painted a set of six rainbow peg dolls earlier in the year to match our mini Grimms rainbow, and I wanted to fill in the gaps for the 12 piece rainbow for T's stocking. I was pretty pleased with our colour mixing efforts for the second six, I think the lime green doll is my favourite.

- Rainbow cones

In hindsight, it probably would have been easier to spend my money on the Grimms rainbow forest rather than decide to have a go with liquid watercolours myself. But having invested in some pretty expensive watercolours and some beautiful wooden cones from Ukraine (the joys of the internet!) I decided we had to give it a go. Our test run with some cheap wooden spools was a bit of a disaster but the cones turned out really well. We dyed a set of plain wooden beads from Ikea at the same time because you can never have too much colour.

- Story stones

The story stones were definitely the most frustrating Christmas make. Most of my inspiration for these came from a small business called Imagistones and they definitely earn their money as it isn't as easy as it looks! I drew the first half with Sharpies and was really pleased with how neat they looked, only for all the pen to run when we tried to varnish them. I did the rest with paint pens and they survived the varnishing much better, although my selection of paint pen colours is not great and the ones I have are too thick for much detail. 

- Seasons peg dolls

My set of season peg dolls are definitely the most successful of my projects, and look the most like I had hoped! They draw heavily on a set of peg dolls on [website] although with less detail on the capes. I managed to rope my husband into helping with these as well so some of the embroidery on the back is his handiwork.