12 Dates of Christmas: Handmade Holidays

For the ninth Date of Christmas, my true love gave to me, some handmade felt ornaments for our tree.

The holidays can be an expensive time for many of us, but not all things fun and festive need to be expensive. We heard about Handmade Holidays on Twitter. For the past few years, the Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design has been offering FREE Christmas craft workshops for the five Fridays leading up to Christmas.

Last Friday, we joined them for a session on felt and styrofoam ornaments at their store, gallery, and workshop space next to the Halifax Seaport Farmers Market. We arrived a little late, and a group of kids, young adults, and parents were already hard at work on their handmade ornaments. There were a number of designs to choose from – skates and snowmen and trees and glitter balls. Drew immediately got to work on a glitter ball…

I opted to make two different felt trees. I initially went for green felt until our instructor reminded me that trees didn’t need to be green – especially not folk art trees.

We had fun getting OFF our phones and using our hands to make some handmade trimmings for our tree. There were two instructors, both artists, there to help out, and it was cool to see that couples, young families, and even a teenager and her dad turned out to the event.

The two hours flew by. We ended up with three souvenirs to take home and hang on the tree, a memory of fun times spent together.

In addition to having some fun new ornaments for the tree, gathering together to make our ornaments meant I had everything I needed to make my craft and no mess on my dining room table.

There is one more Handmade Holidays this year. Check it out on Friday December 19th from 6 pm – 8 pm (people were coming and going). They’ll be using pipecleaners to make some fun poinsettias to decorate your gifts with. I was able to grab a shot of next week’s project below. You can also give a Nova Scotia Centre of Craft and Design workshop to someone as a Christmas gift. Check it out on the 2014 Local Wishlist HERE.