all duct tape and safety pins inside

Official Name: DIY Felt Wreaths

Listed Price: $3

Age Rating: 6+

Description on Package: makes 2 wreaths

What it Actually Came With: instructions; 6 long strips of felt: 2 in light green, 2 in dark green, & 2 in black; 2 12in pieces of wire with the ends covered in hot glue for safety; 2 3in squares of red felt; 27 mini pom poms in rainbow assortment; 2ft long piece of white ribbon.

Notes: This was the most time consuming of all of the kits. The instructions are tiny, both the font and the pictures. They do great explaining the first half of creating the wreaths, cutting the felt strips into squares and putting them on the wired. After that, they get vague. They don't tell you how to finish off the wreath after you get the felt squares on the wire, they just tell you to "prepare the bow" with no instructions on how to cut the pieces from the red squares of felt, and then you just get a picture of the finished product. What takes so long to make this is first cutting 90 squares from your green & black felts for each wreath, then stringing them all on the wire. The instructions did say to cut the squares at 3/4in, but the felt strips are wider than that by a fair amount, so I just eyeballed where to cut to be about square. I still had enough felt strips for another wreath. The instructions also said to cut the wire down to 8in. I did not. Those extra inches gave me room to work and after I got things twisted into a circle to make the wreath, I twisted up the ends to make a hidden wire hanger. I did figure out how to make the bows from the picture. Mine are slightly larger than the finished examples wreath pictures, but it still only took 2/3 of one red square of felt to make both bows. I wasn't sure how the pom poms would look. The example shows only red, white, and light pink pom poms, but it gave us a bright rainbow assortment. Now that I have had some time to sit on it, it looks okay. Even covering the wreaths in pom poms, I have a 3rd of them left. Because it didn't give me any glue and I was worried about drying times, I used hot glue. So, so many glue threads on felt, but it worked great. I tied the ribbon to the metal hangers I made, and still have a third left. The wreaths themselves are sized perfect for a Barbie house. I think my favorite part of this one was that I have enough of everything except wire to make a 3rd wreath, so no fear of needing more material, had I screwed up.

Official Kit Name: Gingerbread House Activity

Original Price: $2

Age Rating on Package: 3+

Description on Package: 3 paper houses, foil sticker sheet, twine (24in)

What Was Actually in the Package: 3 small paper bags cut to be house shaped with a gingerbread house design outlined on the front to be colored in (approximately 5in x 4in x 2in); a foil sticker sheet full of images of candy, gingerbread people and animals, and a tree; 24in of red & white twine; a package of 9 red pom poms; and 4in tube of white glue.

Notes: There were no instructions aside from the computer rendered image on the packaging, not that is really needed it. I am fairly certain the pom poms and the glue were not supposed to come with it. I used a different decorating approach with each house. The first one, I decorated everything that looked like it was supposed to be piped on icing with white India ink and I did the dots, hearts, and candy cane striping with a red acrylic paint pen. I filled in the windows using a silver paint pen. And I decided to glue one of the red pom poms on the door knob. It's very sudate, but looks good.

With the second house, I tried to decorate it it more like a kid would using more colors of paint pens and as many stickers as I could fit on there. I had meant to try colored pencils or crayons on this one to see how they did on the bag material the house was made of, but they were not accessible at the time. The white paint pen did not get nearly the amount of coverage the India ink did. The stickers were surprisingly perfectly sized for decorating the house. Usually with these kinds of kits, they are either way too big or too small.

On the third house, I did pretty much the same thing as on the second house, except I stuck with a red and green stripping theme.

All three house came out good. There was exactly enough twine to tie all three houses shut. I have almost all the pom poms and glue leftover and 2 of the bigger stickers. It was a lot of fun. While they are intended to be shelf sitters, they would make good goodies bags.