This year's Christmas decorations: finishing them up.

After several days of drying, the cinnamon dough decorations are ready to finish. I'd transfered the decorations to wire racks after a couple of hours so that they could get some air ciruclation around them, but weren't so soft that the racks would leave lined imprints on the back.



Here, I've got everything all set up and ready to go. I bought fake gems in a variety of shapes and colours. The ones in the flat packages along the bottom of the photo are the adhesive backed type used in scrapbooking, along with one package of larger gems that required glue. There are some metallic pipe cleaners, mini-bows, glitter glue and some narrow ribbon for hangers.



I decided to use a small crochet hook (a 1.75mm I'd just picked up for another purpose) to draw the ribbon through the holes. I'd originally planned to use a tapestry needle, but the holes were too narrow and I didn't want to take of chance of breaking the decorations. I actually ran out of the green and gold ribbon I had, and finished using a super sparkley crochet thread. I started the actual decorating after all the hangers were on. Of all the dough cut out, I lost only 1, and that was pretty much a lost cause from the start. I'd cut a large heart shape with a small heart shape cut out of the middle. The result was too narrow. When I put the toothpick through to make the hanger hole, it broke. I tried sticking it back together, but it just wasn't worth keeping. One loss out of the bunch is actually really good, I think! I half expected to loose a couple of others, but they survived.



The first decorations I did were the smallest - just big enough for the larger craft gems that needed to be glued on.



Some of the decorations used little to no glitter glue at all. I had some concern that the adhesive backed gems wouldn't stick well with the glitter powder we'd worked into the dough while it was still wet. That was actually an issue for a couple of them, but for the most part, they stuck to the dough really well. The adhesive is surprisingly strong - good for sticking to the decorations, but not good when a tiny gem flips and gets stuck to my finger, instead! *L*

I've got photos of all the decorations on my flickr account. Check them out here. Some of the photos were taken while the glue was still very wet. By tomorrow, they'll be ready for hanging, or giving away to friends.