Faith, Joy & Love
Ever since we started having children, Pavlo and I set aside one evening before Christmas to do a major analysis of the “toy situation” in our house. We sort through all of the toys and divide them into 3 categories: save, donate and ditch. If we didn’t do this we would have mounds of broken and unused toys, many of which would be greatly appreciated by less fortunate children elsewhere. Another benefit of doing this every year means that the toys in our house get a thorough cleaning and reorganization.
This year during our annual “save, donate and ditch” day I decided I would take a closer look at the ditch pile and see if there was any possible way to reuse those toys (or at the very least, parts of them). In this year’s ditch pile one toy did give me an idea. It was an alphabet puzzle with several missing letters.
I know, I know, seemed like a pretty pointless toy to us too which is why it ended up in the ditch pile. Since I was going to throw the puzzle out anyways I decided I would attempt a project with some of the remaining letters. What can you do with a bunch of little, wooden (and somewhat beat up) letters you ask? Well, I started to form as many words as possible from them. However, I didn’t just form any words, I formed Christmas words! Let me tell you something, it’s a little tough to come up with multiple Christmas words when you’re limited to just one of each letter AND you’re missing a few. I was extremely proud of myself for being able to come up with 3 (Faith, Joy and Love) only after messing with the letter “Q” to make it into another “O.” Yup, I had to get extra creative to maximize my use of the remaining puzzle pieces!
First I carved the letters to be sure that once they were painted they still looked like the letter
Then I hot glued the letters together
Next, I spray painted them all white
Finally, I took a piece of twine for each and hot glued them to each word in the shape of a loop.
The end result was 3 adorable (and free) ornaments for our Christmas tree!
And just for kicks here is a picture of our 2011 Christmas tree!
