Elmers Contest

In many of my previous posts I have talked about my friend Sarah who runs Sarahs Deals. She is on of several bloggers who were chosen to "host" a contest on their blogs. Five people (chosen at random) will be chosen to win a $100 Walmart gift card each. All that needed to be one was to use an Elmers Tri-Fold Display board and get crafty. So, I thought, What the heck, I like to craft, an I like free money even more!

The first 2 ideas that popped into my head were 1) a family Thankful tree where we made hand print leaves and we write things that we are Thankful for and 2) a Christmas countdown calendar. When I asked Marc which he liked better, he said, "Why don't you combine both ideas into one display board?" So, that is just what I did! I decided to call our creation "Counting Our Blessings To Christmas".

I headed to Walmart and bought my Tri-fold board an a few other Elmers items that jumped out at me and started brainstorming. Here are a few pictures of the supplies I used:I think I spent a total no more than $11 on supplies. I used a lot of things I had at home already. I bought some new markers, the boar, and some stencils. As a bonus my stencils came with a free mechanical pencil in the box. So after I gathered my supplies I decided it was time to get to work!

First thing I did was pencil in the wording and the tree.
And then I colored those parts in.From there it was time to make our family hand print tree. We picked out 4 different shades of green, 1 for each of us. We put Daddy's hand prints on first......
And then mine......

Then Marc's......And to finish off the tree, Samantha little hand prints.And this is how the tree turned out.After I got done with the tree we decided that there was too much white space around the outside edges. Marc suggested that I put a string of Christmas lights around the edge, so I dug into my old stamping box and found a Christmas light bulb stamp. I also added a Nativity picture, our names, and a few virtue gifts under the tree.Now that all the other work was done, it was time to start writing dates and Blessings on all of the ornaments and "hanging" them on the tree.The ornaments are "hung" on the tree with poster tack so after Christmas we can take them down without wrecking the tree. We will fold the poster up and store it in one of our Christmas decoration boxes for future years. I will cut out a new set of ornaments each year and each night we will decided something we are Thankful for and "hang" it on the tree. By Christmas our family will have decided on 24 things that we count as Blessings in our lives.