Stale bread and...

...glitter.

Christmas brings out the crafter in me!
I really enjoy messing about with bits of card and a prit stick, but I have learned from experience that any craft I attempt must be simple, and need nothing that cannot be found around my home. This idea fitted the bill perfectly.

First, I took half a dozen slices of white bread out of the freezer. It was the very cheap, very white, very plastic kind that I pretend not to like, but secretly gobble up, smothered in cheese spread, but any sliced bread will do.
They didn't take long to defrost, just long enough for me to search the kitchen cupboards for my plastic Christmas cookie cutters. Bought these for about 75p from Asda several years ago, in the after Christmas sale.
I cut out as many shapes as possible, mostly stars because I like them best. Used a straw to poke a hole in each shape. And then I left them to go hard and stale. After I cooked dinner in the oven, I put them in there with the heat tuned off, and left them again. Remembered to take them out before I turned the oven back on the next day, then did the same again. Basically, I just wanted them to dry out thoroughly, and go hard and dry.
When I was happy that they had dried out as much as possible, I set out to decorate them. Some I painted, some I covered with glue and glitter. I tied a thin bit of ribbon through the hole. Some of them were pretty dodgy (I could pretend a small child made them), but most of them looked quite nice. They would have made nice decoration for the tree, but I used them to decorate Christmas presents that I had wrapped in brown paper.

Making them satisfied my need for a bit of glittery creativity, without the need for an expensive trip to Hobbycraft for supplies.