Little crafts with magnets and cinnamon

A couple of weeks ago I had some friends over for a Christmas crafts afternoon. We focused mainly on cards (which I won't show because I'll be posting them soon), but I also tried out a few other ideas that had stuck in my brain recently.

Of course I can't remember where they came from anymore, but they were about recycling old Christmas cards. The first was to cut a pretty shape from an old card, glue it onto a small bunch of cinnamon sticks and hang it with ribbon. Easy Peasy.

Actually the reindeer was from a card-making kit and was already cut out. Even easier.

Then I tried the same idea with some buttons.

At the moment they are just decorating my fridge.

Along with idea number two. Which was to cut up bits of old cards and attach a magnet to the back. Now I don't have a lot of magnets lying around, and I didn't want to be wasteful. But then a light bulb appeared.

One seriously chopped up magnetic real estate agent calendar later...

The main red and white bits are these vinyl cutouts that Rhiannon brought along for cards, the penguin is from an old Christmas card, the porcupine is a button, and the shapes on the stocking are stickers. I wasn't sure the thin magnet would hold much stuff, but it's proving sufficient.

Sarah brought some scrapbooking stickers and they made great magnets too! Attach sticker to magnet, cut around, put on fridge. Genius.

Kitchen themed and all.

Then I was looking at my card-making stuff and found these old plastic butterflies I bought at some point for some reason.

This has the tinest bit of magnet attached to the middle and it still stays up.

And really, I have more than half of the calendar left. And that was just 2011! I'm never throwing magnetic junk mail away again!