Welcome to the last week of "A Homemade Christmas"! If you still are looking for ideas and haven't seen the other 7 weeks of a homemade Christmas you can find that here.

This first picture is one that my friend Venessa e-mailed to me. It is off a neat Country Christmas Garland she made using spools, fabric and it looks like red wooden beads. I can just imagine how cute it would look in lots of different places. Thanks so much Venessa for sending me the picture! I think I will have to work on saving spools this next year.

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One of the gifts that Mara and Jonathan helped me to make this past week was Playdough for the younger two. (Megan is really loving playdough but happens to be a little hard on it so it has a tendency to go bad quickly. I think she will be very excited with this gift.)

Jonathan put stickers and labels on old (and clean) peanut butter jars for storing the playdough in.

The recipe is:

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup salt
• 1 tsp. cream of tarter
• 1 tsp. oil (optional)
• food coloring
• And we had fun adding some mint extract to make it smell good.
• 1 cup hot water.

Mix dry ingredients in a pan. Add wet ingredients (though if you want more than one color of dough wait to add the food coloring until you are kneading it.) and cook and stir the dough until it leaves the sides of the pan and becomes a big ball. Stop cooking and knead it (be careful! It will be hot) until it is nice and smooth and the coloring is all worked in. That's it! Store in a sealed container.

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Another fun gift (and actually one I want to make today, these pictures are from when me sister Anna made it last year) is "Sugar and Spice Nuts". Or you don't have to give them away, they can just make a very nice treat.

Sugar and Spice Nuts

Mix:
2 tablespoons water
1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon pumpkin pie seasoning

Then add:
2 cups nuts of your choice.
(I am planning on trying mixed nuts. My sister used just pecans which was very yummy.)

Spread on ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 250 degrees for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes. Store in airtight container.

Do you have anything you would like to share? I would love to hear what you are doing!