Annie Laurie: Christmas Crafts and other such Merriment.

My Mom showed me this awesome gift idea, and so I made it and it turned out really well!
You can google it and hundreds of different recipes will show up for it. But here is the wonderful recipe I used:

The Homemade Brown Sugar Scrub
-Mix together 1/2 cup (or less) sweetened almond oil [or just regular] with 1/2-1 tsp vanilla extract and 1 tsp of Vitamin E (optional-you can cut open a few vitamin E liquid gel caps to get this) in a medium sized bowl.
-Add 1 cup brown sugar.
-Pour into small glass jars and print out FREE cute holiday gift tags from www. LollyChops.com and stick a small circular one onto the lid with double sided tape and/or tie a holiday gift tag with ribbon around the bottle and give give GIVE!!

*A website did tell me that you can substitute almond oil for pure sesame oil (not roasted), vegetable oil, or extra virgin olive oil since almond oil can be expensive and hard to get in bulk*
*When you double the recipe, about 3 small-medium size jars are filled*

Like I said, this made a stellar gift:

The oil will separate from the scrub so you just need to mix it a little before use.

Me and my friends had a fantastic Christmas party just for kicks at my house last night, and we ended up making these adorable cookies:

(The most amazing gingerbread cookies ever, my Grandma Carolyn's recipe :o) )

And we made our own wrapping paper! That's something I like to do every year and so Savanna, Miranda and I just decided to do this at around 2:00 am the other day don't ask us why.

Basically it is craft paper that we cut into sheets about present sized, and then we painted foam Christmas stamps (found easily at Michaels) with paintbrushes and acrylic paint and stamped them on the paper! We also got a little crazy and added glitter and puff paint too :o)