Organic Granny

We have come to the end of our 10-day junket through the joys of combined crafting and cooking-baking until next Christmas!  We have one more craft and one more batch of cookies to bake... are you ready? We are going to look at some fairly simple but artfully placed center pieces as our last craft. If you have stashed away your Christmas  pine cones of all sizes  and greenery from years past-- maybe even inherited some along the way-- you will be well on your way to being able to design and put together a centerpiece that you can take pride in. Relax with a cup of tea and your favourite seasonal background music.  Now, with no judgements on how hard this is, or how skilled you are, etc. etc. etc., watch the video and catch the vision!  If you want to send me a photo of your creation, I would be very happy to post it here!  Just let me know in the comments and we will arrange something. 7 Christmas Ornaments with Pine Cones DIY  The video: And now to cap our Cookie Recipes for the seri

We are Celebrating Day 9 of 10 Days of a Gluten-Free Christmas with a recipe for GF plant-based Snickerdoodle cookies and a beautiful tissue paper paper craft that may grace your window, or perhaps become a gift in someone else's window! One of my all-time favourite Christmas crafts involves tissue paper.  If you are someone who 'saves' your wrapping paper from year to year, you likely have a number of tissue paper caches.  Get them out and make beautiful window "stained glass" using clear contact paper and pieces of tissue.  Below is a design for you to copy from, or you can find many other "coloring pages" to download and use as templates for what you want to display. Make a frame from black poster board, or just black construction paper.  After you have put the design on the one sheet of contact paper, cover with a second sheet of contact paper.  Be sure to provide a small hanger as is shown here.  Tape it to a window.  The idea is to relax and creat

A traditional Christmas craft that is the epitome of recycling is making decorative gifts and crafty items using last year's Christmas cards. YoyoMax shows how to do some beautiful bookmarks. I am definitely going to take some of my glut of old cards and fold some of these.   (Video is below the following image) These are particularly handy if you are giving books away as gifts-- putting a beautiful bookmark into the book makes the gift just that extra little bit special.  You can even use these lovely bookmarks as fancy gift tags!  YoyoMax also has other Christmas card crafts that she tells about at the end of the video. Everybody's fave: Gluten-Free Crispy Rice Treats!  To be a truly gluten-free treat at this time it is necessary to purchase 'brown rice treats' because, for some reason, the white crispy rice products must all contain malt, which is made from gluten-containing barley!  Perhaps this will change at some point (check the labels) but not in 2019, And... if

Hope you are warm and cozy and enjoying the Christmas season! Today's craft is something I am quite sure we have all done before: paper snowflakes! Now, before you feel indignant about the simplicity (I can almost hear some of what some of you are thinking !!!!!!) I would like to point out that I have selected 3 videos that give exquisite tutorials in how to make a notch-up on the snowflakes we cut out in second grade! Take a look.  There is no voice in these particular videos which might be a good thing, since sometimes differences in pronunciation can distract and throw off auditory learners.  In these videos it is highly possible that the women do NOT speak English.  They very ably show how the snowflake is done using only their hands and visual cues. So, get your paper and scissors and give it a try! (Don't forget to come back for the cookie recipe!) https://youtu.be/6TIRmsln8F4 https://youtu.be/59dOIF3PMjY https://youtu.be/CdndXaH2VSs There you go! Kind of a nice meditati

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Hi there! Welcome to Day 6 of 10 Days of Christmas Crafting and a GF Christmas treat recipe! Today's 4 crafts are on a video and I thought it would be both a handy way to see the instructions without having to click to another site.  I also thought that the four crafts would give you a couple of good ideas for the weekend, so that you can use the crafts on the video to have fun all weekend (or go back to the days you might have missed and do them on the weekend). As someone with an interest in our environment, I truly was attempting to look for crafts to RE-use stuff we have cluttering our houses, and not just a project that requires running out to the local dollar store to bring in more junk. I am also not keen on the use of glitter and the toxic chemicals in certain crafting supplies.  Microplastic glitter often ends up in our water ways and is ingested by the animals.  Because of the findings of  a study by University of British Columbia, the Art Centre in Richmond, BC, has bann

Here we go with Day 5 of the Christmas Craft and GF Christmas Cookie season! On Vancouver Island, this December 5th, 2019, it is cloudy, threatening more rain, chilly but well above zero.  I can see my neighbours' outdoor huge ornamental candles planted into their green lawn.  This is not Christmas Card Country-- or not yet this year!  But the spirit of Christmas is nigh. Our craft today is a little goofy, but that's okay. Have you checked out some of the really interesting Christmas trees decorated in malls for charity auctions and stood gawking at one that would never have occurred to you: say, covered with bright red and green dinky toy vehicles like the one your Uncle has on the shelves in his 'man cave'.  But doesn't it show just how creative people can be when push comes to shove?  Christmas trees range from the most majestic and elegantly decorated to the blah red bows that you might see in an apartment lobby. In between majestic and blah, you might find a tr