December Fun: Cinnamon Ornaments!

In addition to making these ornaments, I decided to try my hand at making cinnamon ornaments this season as well. I had no idea how to make them, so I hopped on Pinterest and found a recipe.

There were several recipes to choose from, but the one I used called for craft glue, apple sauce, and ground cinnamon.

To begin, we put 1/4 cup of applesauce in a mixing bowl.

Then, we mixed one cup of cinnamon in with the apple sauce.

Finally, we added 1/2 cup of craft glue. This is where things got a bit tricky. If I was to use this recipe again, I would use school glue instead of tacky glue (I chose this because it's what I had on hand). Tacky glue was a bit too - well - tacky. It was incredibly difficult to mix and I ended up adding additional glue and using my hands instead of the spoon to mix everything together.

Once it was all mixed, it looked like this:

We set a timer for one hour to let it "set".

After an hour, I rolled the dough out with a rolling pin. I had read that if the dough was too thick (which mine was, even with the addition of the extra glue), then I could mist it with water. That helped a ton!

After rolling out the dough, we used a cookie cutter to cut out a few bear shapes (the only somewhat "christmas" cookie cutter I had on hand, haha). I also traced around Brianna and Brenson's hands and cut out that shape as well.

We then laid them out on a pan to get ready to put in the oven. They smelled sooooo good!

Here they are, ready to put in the oven (2 hours at 200 degrees - just enough to speed the drying process). We used a straw to make a nice hole in the top of each ornament for easy hanging.

Once they finished "baking", we put ribbon through the top and hung them on the tree! Not only do they smell good, but they are super cute as well!

I did write names and dates on the hands with a sharpie. I want to remember these little hands forever.

While Brianna and I (and Brenson, too) had fun making these ornaments, I wasn't overly impressed with this recipe. I've seen other recipes that do not call for the glue that I would like to try. I was surprised at how much trouble I had getting my dough smooth. I think the problem was that it was just too dry, but when I misted it, it discolored a bit (you can see the discoloring in the photo above). They are cute, but they certainly didn't turn out perfect. Next time, I'll either try different glue or a different recipe all together.

Love, love, love the way they smell, though!