Christmas Project!

For Daniel's side of the family, we've all decided to have everyone buy gifts for the children, but as for the adults we wanted to try something different. Instead of doing gifts for everyone, we thought to draw names out and have each of us just focus on one adult. Then we could get one significant, well-thought out, quality gift for someone. We made this decision last year at Christmas. Here we are and it's November of the next year already and I was given the task to figure out who would get who. SO based off of the traditional names in a hat idea, I made a little project out of it and thought I would share.

First, here is mostly what you need, I say mostly because I might have added a few extra things by the end of the project (after the photo was taken):

The Christmas banner was made by me in photoshop and I'll make it available for download. Also, not pictured above is another file you'll be able to download. Links will be later in the post.

Of course, there are many variations of this, so just go with what you have ;)

The first thing to do is coat your container/jar with an even layer of mod podge:

Then take your choice of glitter and dump some in the ready-to-go jar and over top the scrap paper you have laid down, you'll want to roll and tilt the jar to help spread the glitter:

Now set that upside down on the scrap paper to dry:

While it dries (I let it do so overnight, though I don't think it necessarily needs that long) write the names on the sticks. I alternated the red and green markers for the names:

The next day I came to a dried and clear jar coated in glitter!

This is when I added the banner, to do this I used sticky dot things haha

and here's the banner on the jar!

Click HERE for a .png version or HERE for a .jpg version of the banner to download 

This is the time where I had to decide what to use as a filler to hide the names and keep the sticks in place.

I played with many ideas. You can use marbles, rocks, sand, fake snow (maybe too light), buttons, beads, etc...

I went to Michael's and found these necklaces for a couple dollars and on top of that they were on sale.

Thinking these were perfect I dropped them in and thought I was done...not so fast. The sticks were hard to get in and it wasn't umm fluid? smooth? whatever. It just wasn't working for me like I wanted. SO I decided to cut them up into singles. It was perfect.

though, be safe when cutting these up. It can be mesmerizing and you don't want to cut yourself!!

Then after that I thought to make a card next to it. This just lets them know the "rules" since in my case it will be sitting out for people to grab on their own time. Here's what it looks like:

Click HERE to download it as a word file. Click HERE to download it as a PDF. 

Turns out the PDF is the only one that maintained the same font. I'm keeping the .docx one up though so you can download and edit it to your own fonts if you want. 

That's the END!! Hope you enjoyed it, I'd love to see your versions of it! Let me know if you try it!

Until Next Time!!