Saturday, November 22, 2008

Oranges with Cloves

Smells bring back memories for me, and the smell of cloves and oranges reminds me of Christmas growing up. I love to make these decorations, and this last week made them with some of my husband's cousins. This project is probably more suited for slightly older kids (I was making them with a 6 and 9 year old) Basically you take whole cloves and push them into an orange. You can then hang the smelly decoration in your home.

Some tips that we found to be very helpful:

-Draw the design you want in pencil before starting.

-use a dull pencil, a knitting needle, or shish-ka-bob stick to poke holes in the design you want. That makes it much easier to poke the cloves in.

-if the tops of the cloves are hurting your thumb, try wrapping a band aid on your thumb for some added padding.

-if you want to hang with ribbon, placing cloves on either side of the ribbon will help it from sliding off.

They smell so good!