Thankful For Crafting

{picture fail ... which makes this post nearly worthless but I don't want to miss posting ... hopefully I can add them in tomorrow}

For me, part of keeping the focus on people at the holidays is taking the time to craft with the boys. I enjoy it, they enjoy it, and we end up with lovely things to gift to others and decorate our home. It's easy for me to get so busy with cooking, baking, and other prep that the craft projects that we've dreamed about fall by the wayside; slowing down and keeping my mind on the true meaning of the holidays (the true meaning for me, anyway) helps me remember that to these boys taking the time to craft with them is every bit as important as making green beans.

I found this printable banner at DimplePrints via MoneySavingMom. I was really excited because this year we purchased a color laser printer to use as our AirPrint printer (we still use the b/w laser printer for most of our printing). I grabbed a ream of high quality laser paper and was so impressed with how the pages printed.

To make the banner we cut out each triangle, mounted it to metallic card stock (really subtle sheen), and then cut it out again (we were able to use a paper cutter for some of the cutting). I used a repositionable glue dot runner to adhere the triangles to the card stock, which was a good thing as at some point the triangles got moved and we did a couple of them incorrectly and had to redo them.

J-Baby and I then used a hole punch in the corners and connected the triangles with brads. I had thought to maybe use clothes pins to clip them to twine, but this thing is long -- about 12 feet!

We also made a few signs and the boys cut out little thankful flags for our guests to write on and hang in the tree.

Overall I spent nothing to make the banner other than what I had already spent in the past (toner, card stock, glue runner, and brads). We'd actually bought the pack of card stock just to get the silver (for a robot J-Baby created), so that was a total bonus.