Strawberry ornaments made of walnuts

I may have to start a new series of posts – maybe titled ‘Stir Crazy Crafting’ – for this time of year when it’s almost too cold to go outside. I find myself searching my own brain rolodex for easy crafts that I did when I was younger – back when I was a Camp Fire Girl (yep, I just actually admitted to that). Many years ago my mom came up with this idea for around Christmas time (she was one of our troop leaders) – and it suddenly seemed an ideal thing to do one cold weekend morning while the kids were waiting to get ready for a tree-trimming party. You use walnuts in their shells, and have kids paint them all red. We used the safe washable kid paint variety to start. I then put a super shiny coat of red nail polish over it all (you probably don’t want kids to do this) and then I added some green felt ‘leaves’ with a hot glue gun, since regular white glue gets too absorbed by the felt. When all is dry and glue is holding firm (not longer than 40 minutes, during which kids segued into doing their own paintings), I ask the kids again to dot the entire walnut with little black dots, adding the ‘seeds’ to the strawberries. I then stitched some simple black thread through the ‘stem’ so that they could be hung. In the end we had some handmade ornaments to offer up to our party host.