Since there is no job and very little income, this year, I've tried homemade gifts, especially for teachers and people that normally get more trinket-related gifts. I'm hoping these will be more well received than the normal gifts would have been anyway, as they are made with love by myself AND my four-year-old, Evan. It's hard to keep myself entertained without work to do, (I'm definitely a worker bee, I just enjoy being busy) I'm having trouble keeping Evan entertained with mommy too. So I racked my brain to shake out one of the countless kid friendly busy crafts and remembered yet another halloween craft I saw, bird feeder ornaments. I went to my dear friend, google, and found countless pages about it, and they pretty much all have the same instructions AND I had everything on hand except bird seed! I picked up a WAY too big bag at Walmart for $10. Now we'll have to make them for Valentine's day, Easter, Mother's Day and maybe even into Christmas next year.
Bird Seed Ornaments
What you'll need:
4 cups of bird seed, you want a smaller seed mix, I'll explain later
3/4 cup of flour
3 tablespoons corn syrup
1/2 cup water
string
cookie cutters
plastic straws
wax paper
painters or masking tape
canola spray
biggest mixing bowl you have
large wooden spoon
kitchen spoon
Get your work area ready. These are sticky, so you want to cover your countertop or table with wax paper. I secure mine with painters tape because it holds while I'm working, but it comes off easily when its time to clean up. Spray your cutters with canola oil. Cut straws into 1-2 inch pieces.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the seeds, flour, corn syrup, and water. Mix with large wooden spoon until mixture looks moist and you don't see any raw flour. Spray your cookie cutter with canola and use kitchen spoon to scoop mixture into cutter. You COULD use your hands, but it's pretty sticky stuff, so I used the spoon unless I had a real small area to get in to. It also worked well to sort of apply pressure while scraping with spoon outward in all directions. This compacted the seeds and scraped the spoon in to the cutter, rather than all over the work area.
Take a piece of straw and push in to seeds where you'll want the hanging string. This is why you want a mix with small seeds. My mix had sunflower seeds and something else that kept getting in the way of the straw pushing. Frequently I had to push away bigger seeds, get my straw in place, then spoon push more seed mix in.
The picture above is 3 batches of the mixture. I think one batch made at least a dozen standard cookie cutter sized ornaments or about 6 large ones. I'll have to update about the large ones after the overnight dry....they may be a little to heavy.
Let these dry at least four hours. I may even let them sit overnight just to be sure. Cut string to desired length and string through hole created by the straws. Hang out on a tree and let the bird watching begin!
UPDATE: I let them dry overnight and we hung one outside the next day. I dropped the Mickey Mouse head about 3 feet off the ground trying to get it hung on a tree and it didn't break, yay! BUT it was a soaking rain kind of day...I glanced out the window a couple hours later and it had smashed to the ground. I hung another one under the eave of the house where it was better protected from the rain, and it's still hanging 2 days later. I don't know if the first one just wasn't set enough yet or if these little cuties just can't handle a steady rain/snow.
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