Christmas Crafts

So in November during the heat of Nanowrimo, I came across UHU's sample offer thanks to Go Freebies.com. Basically, they send you project materials and a sample of their product in exchange for your opinions. I thought the project sounded easy, so I sent an email, and quickly learned that there were no samples left to be had, but they had projects every month.

December's project was to create glass bead magnets. I've seen this done before where a family made a whole bunch to sell at a flea market using very small stickers. They were cute, but not appealing enough to me that I wanted to buy any. I requested a sample and was pleased to find that I'd been selected.

When my package arrived, I found they'd supplied me with a full size bottle of their Twist and Glue product, along with ten glass beads and ten magnets. I decided to go with a wintery theme for most of them, and used a couple old Christmas cards with snowflake images for all but one.

The instructions were pretty simple. The glue was pretty easy to use, though the glue did blow tiny bubbles a few times while I was using it. After gluing the paper to the beads, I used my hubby's pocketknife to cut away the excess paper and then glued the magnets on. The magnets had a little tendency to slide off the glue, but I remedied it by standing the bead on the magnet. The glue dried amazingly fast, and I was even able to use it to repair the plastic USB Christmas tree too.

Here are pictures of the finished product. Four of them are going to be a Secret Santa gift. I'm keeping the rest. I love snowflakes :)

Phew!

Once again, it comes down to the wire.

On midnight Sunday, I wound out having my most productive day ever with over 4,000 words written in a single day! This brought the total word count to 48,333, which meant that after 29 days, I finally managed to get caught up.

With only 1,667 words to write to make the 50,000 words, I was feeling relatively good. I worked for another hour and a half before heading to bed, which left only about 1,300 words to go. I toyed with the idea of calling in sick, and rejected it. I took an hour long lunch and banged out a few hundred more words. I spent my afternoon break writing a few more words by hand. I thought I might get more written on the drive home, but I managed to make it through the majority of the lights.

But once I got home, it was tough going. I got kind of stuck until about 9. At 10 pm, my son called me, wanting to talk while he waited to catch the MAX. I listened and continued to type. I still had a few hundred words to go. I knuckled down and managed to reach 50,000 words around 11:00. Feeling drained, I decided to call it a night at 11:30 with 50,264 words and 1,931 words written for the day, an improvement from last year on both stats.

I also came up with the grain of a possible idea for next year's Nano. It's bookmarked and I'll come back to it later. And I don't think I'm going to Las Vegas in November next year. So maybe I'll try for 51,000 words. :)