Iron Craft 1 part B: Dry Snowglobe

I had some finishing touches to do on this one (like figuring out the Shrinkadink with Mom & Jasmine) before it was ready. But now it's done and ready to share!

With three kids five and under, I have to be really careful about what kind of breakable things I make or use. Partially inspired by our Christmas in July series, I made a Christmas-themed "dry snowglobe" that won't make a big mess if my kids get into it.

Materials (Iron Craft secret ingredients in bold):

• Scissors
• White feathers
• Hot glue gun
• Baby food jar
• Shrinkadink
• Sandpaper
• colored pencils (or no sandpaper and colored sharpies)
• Muse token
• Aluminum foil tape

Cut the feathers into small pieces and put them in the baby food jar. (Alternatively, you could use a good amount of glitter. I used both, but the glitter didn't work very well with the feathers.)

Sand the Shrinkadink and use the colored pencils to draw your shapes to go inside the jar. I did a reindeer, Santa, and a North Pole sign. My larger figures were about 4-5 inches tall and shrank down to between a third and half their original size. (We shrank the shrinkadink in a 350 degree oven for 3-5 minutes—but follow the directions on your materials!)

I covered the baby food jar lid with aluminum foil tape on the outside. Inside the lid, I used a muse token (covered with aluminum foil tape) as a backstop for my figures.

The muse token and the figures are stuck in there with hot glue:

The North Pole sign was too short to see over the neck of the baby food jar, so I used other pieces of shrunken Shrinkadink (that I was going to use to make a necklace with my other muse token but I didn't like how it looked) to build a platform. I glued about four of them on top of one another.

To finish your snowglobe, just screw on the lid:

You may want to adjust how much "snow" you want in your jar. My jar was a little over half full of feather fluff and the best way to see my figures was to lay it on its side like this. Right now, it's kind of a cross between a snow globe and one of those "I spy" in a bag games. But that might make it even more fun for my kids, right?

What would you put in a dry snowglobe?