Flower Fairy Button Ornaments

We decided to sign up for The Crafty Crow's Kids' Ornament Swap this year. It sounded easy: you and your kids make a few ornaments in keeping with the year's theme, then send them to your swap partners, who in turn send you ornaments they've made with their kids. Our theme this year is Fairy Tales, and for some reason, I got this idea in my head immediately that we should make handprint butterfly ornaments on shrinky dink plastic.

We ran into several problems. First, I couldn't find the clear shrink plastic; they were out of it and only had bright white. But I didn't want to procrastinate, so we went ahead with gosh-awful white plastic. Then, even though I knew they would end up small and cute, the handprint butterflies had to start out pretty big, and my kids pooped out with the coloring about halfway through the first of 5! Last but not least, they simply weren't that cute in the end. So we completely scrapped that idea and found new inspiration in the form of button ornaments from Martha Stewart!

These were so easy and turned out so cute! Martha originally made Santas, snowmen, and reindeer, and we made what we dubbed "Flower Fairies." You can pretty much make whatever you want as long as you can find buttons in the right colors! I want to do a Nutcracker set, complete with Nutcracker, Clara, and Mouse King. Junior Society even posted a project using the same idea to make a button menorah! I think our entire tree might end up being button ornaments!

And as of yesterday, we have received all of our ornaments from the Swap. Sometimes in swapping I feel like I get the short end of the stick (am I the only one who feels that way?). I put so much love and thought into my packages, and sometimes what I get in return has that thrown-together-with-no-thought feel. With this year's Kids' Ornament Swap, I feel like we struck swapping gold! The ornaments we received are just beautiful, and I for one can't wait to put them up for years to come!