Attempts at Crafting…

Even when I had more free time I was never a crafty person.  I have friends who create amazing scrapbooks, decorate cakes and cookies, refinish furniture , and so on.  When they follow something Pinterest, it comes out like it’s supposed to.  I am always in such admiration of these skills.  I missed out on that gene I think.

I did at one point have a collection of crooked crocheted scarves.  Does that add to my credibility as a crafty person?

Well I found a craft that I could handle.  It requires minimal skill to pull off and makes a nice gift.

Paperwhite in a mason jar

What is a paperwhite?  I had never actually heard of them before I was presented with one of these as a gift from my mother.  A paperwhite is a winter-blooming flower.  It’s upkeep is simple, keep the bulb in a container and add water.  In about 3-4 weeks it will blossom and produce a fragrant flower.

You will need:

• A paperwhite bulb (I found mine at a local nursery)
• A mason jar
• cranberries
• string, twine, ribbon anything you want to tie around to decorate the mason jar
• water

The picture pretty much explains the whole “process”.  All I did was removed the center part of the mason jar lid (put the rim back on), filled the mason jar with cranberries, tied my string around the lid of the jar and topped it off with the bulb.  That’s it!

I gave these as gifts to friends at works so I did not fill the jars up with water to make transportation easier.  I added tags with directions to just add water.  My friends were fascinated by them.  I think that’s a good thing…

If you don’t want to add cranberries you could try marbles, pebbles, sea glass and so on.  I think I would be fun to play around with different variations.  Honestly, the hardest part about making these was tracking down the paperwhite bulbs, apparently that are very popular in the winter and many places I called were out of them.  Also, why are mason jars so expensive?  They had these really cute smaller jars but they were way more expensive than the larger ones!  So many questions…