My Gingerbread Children

A few weeks ago, Leah from Almost Unschoolers posted some cute craft foam snowman photo ornaments that she made.  I love the snowmen, but I was particularly interested in the photo of the gingerbread photo ornaments she mentioned making a few years ago.  I knew we had an upcoming week of gingerbread fun and I thought I might have to make gingerbread photo ornaments myself.  I looked for a post on her blog, but I think she made them before she began blogging, so I didn't see any directions. I guess I could have asked her, but they seemed simple enough to make without directions.  And yet, I am posting directions now. 

Well, then I forgot about them until I was in the craft store and saw a kit to make your own gingerbread men photo ornaments.  The kit made 35 ornaments (I only wanted 4) and it was expensive ($15!), so I bought some materials (about $2) and decided to make my own.  This is how I did it:

Materials:

• one large sheet of brown craft foam
• one gingerbread man cookie cutter
• one sticky back white sheet of craft foam
• gumdrop stickers (these were left over from our paper bag gingerbread houses; they aren't necessary)
• photos (I used wallet size school photos for the kids and printed a small picture of Kelly (our dog))

Directions:

First, I traced around the gingerbread man cookie cutter using a white pencil on the brown craft foam.  I traced it four times and cut them out.

Then, I cut out some squiggly white sticky back pieces to look like icing.  Believe it or not, I could not freehand it to look right, so I drew some squiggly lines on the paper backing and cut them out.  I stuck the lines on to make two gingerbread girls (the line along the bottom makes it look like a dress) and two gingerbread boys.

I stuck the gumdrop stickers on to look like buttons.  You could use the white sticky craft foam to make buttons or you could use a different color. 

Finally, I cut out pictures of my three children and my dog.  I used the wallet size school pictures and tried to cut as close to their faces as possible so that the background would not show.  I used regular Elmer's glue to stick the pictures on.

The last step is to poke some ornament hooks through the top of them and hang them on the tree!