Our Christmas Craft for 2014

Every year my husband and I make gifts to give away to friends and family. Most of the time our gifts are homemade goodies. I have a killer cinnamon roll recipe, from the Pioneer Woman. Or I make dozen of delicious Norwegian Sandbakkles. One year we made Kahlua. I am not one to repeat myself. I always like looking for something new to try, except for the Sandbakkles and cinnamon rolls. Those will always be repeated!

Like most women, I was perusing Pinterest and found the cutest nativity. I clicked on the link and found that from the site, Dream It, you could buy the wooden blocks. Once I got the hubby's approval we decided to make 15 nativity scenes for friends and family. We had to purchase the wooden knobs separately. We found the best price for a large volume of wooden ball knobs was through American Woodcrafter Supply Company. Craft Warehouse had assorted sizes of wooden stars and the craft wire. We bought all of our wood paint from walmart for fairly cheap. Through the website where we bought the wooden blocks is a pdf of the tag.

The price break down was:

$1.50 per set of wooden blocks

.20 cents per piece for the 1" ball knob

.41 cents per piece for the 1 1/2" ball knob

.66 cents per piece for the 1 3/4" ball knob

.40 per piece for paint (We spent $1.50 per bottle for the wood paint. We had 4 colors, plus a glitter. And there was plenty left over.)

.26 cents per wooden star

.26 cents for craft wire

.10 Cents per gift tag

$2.00 roughly per piece for shipping of the wooden blocks and the knobs

Total per piece = $5.79, add a little bit extra for tax here in WA. I would round it up to $6 per nativity set. I had left over string from a previous project, and used our printer to print out the tags. The biggest expensive were the blocks and knobs. However if you were to make a large amount, or go in with another family, it could possibly get even cheaper.

It was definitely a successful project, albeit time consuming. We started in early October with painting each block. Our three year old even helped paint some of the pieces. It was easy for her since each block was a single color. We painted the stars silver, and then added a coat of silver glitter paint.

My husband was the brains behind attaching the heads. He drilled a hole in each body piece and inserted a wooden dowel. He added wood glue to cement the head and body together. Jesus' head was only glued on. The star was attached by drilling a small hole in the shoulder of Joseph and the star, then using wood glue to cement the pieces to the wire. The entire project took 6-8 hours over several weeks.

I loved this nativity because of its simplicity and durability. Many of the Christmas decorations we have are off limits to our little ones. This nativity was durable enough for my three year old to hold, without fear she would break it. I also loved that it was a project the entire family participated in. Every year as I look at our nativity I will think of the time we spent together.