Frosty Fingers Handprint Ornament

Last week Layton and I made some snowmen ornaments for all the grandparents. I found the idea here at this website:

www.betterbudgeting.com/christmasornaments08/handprintornaments.htm

I found this by googling home made ornaments. First we attempted making dough ornaments and made some hand prints but for some reason they wouldn't harden up enough even after baking them in the oven and they seemed so heavy for the tree so I threw them away and started over with a new idea :) I wanted to make something with Layton's hand print so they can look back on it each year and remember how tiny his hands used to be. I found this idea and thought how hard could it be? Honestly this project would work better with older kids I'm sure because trying to get an 18 month old to stick his hand in acrylic paint and make the "perfect" hand print on a round ornament was next to impossible. We tried about 5 or 6 times on the first one and kept wiping it clean and starting over. Then I lowered my expectations a little and we did the best we could. Layton kept smearing his hands all over it after we got the hand print. By the end of our little project Layton had white paint all over him and me and was in tears but we got 4 fairly decent hand prints. Here are the pictures of the before and after sorry I was by myself when we did this so I didn't get any of him actually with paint all over him because I had it all over me too.

Layton practicing making his hand print on the ornament after I explained to him what we were doing.

The hand prints on the jumbo ornamentsSorry these pictures aren't that great didn't realize they were blurry until I put them on my computer.

I ended up using sharpie markers to write his name and make the snowmen. It said to use paint but the sharpies worked great and was a lot easier to work with.

We attached these little poems to the ornament and wrapped them in a gift box. The poem reads

These aren't just 5 snowmen
as anyone can see . . . . . .
I made them with my hand
which is a part of me.
Now every year at Christmastime
when you deck your halls,
you can look back and remember
Christmas 2010
when my hand was just this small!
Merry Christmas!
Love,
Layton

Once again I got the entire idea from the website above. I thought they turned out really cute!

All the grandparents were happy to get them for their tree.