Crafting and Jesse Tree

 

One of our photo prompts this week was to take a picture of my table right now as it is.  Really?  You really want to see this messy thing?  Well I got to thinking about it and it certainly does show just what I've been up to for the past week. 

 

 What I really needed to take a picture of was my fingers after painting. Who knows I still might have the chance with all the crafts that I've been doing.

 

I think I mentioned Aussie painted his favorite flag on an ornament.  Here he is with his flag from Qatar.

 I finally finished the big craft project I wanted to start at the beginning of the month, but didn't get to start until this week.

At the end of last Christmas I was introduced to the Jesse tree.  This year I was reminded of it with even more people talking about it on Facebook.  Even though I'm late doing it this year I still wanted to make it.  It is a series of devotionals that start at the beginning of the Bible and go through the line of Jesse to the birth of Jesus.  Each story told has an ornament with a symbol that represents that story.  What I've found while making these ornaments is that not everybody who has written devotionals always use the same stories.  Most of them are the same but there are a few differences.  As well as many people use different symbols for different stories.  So that made it a little difficult in knowing what ornaments to make.

I decided that I would go with the Ann Voskamp devotionals which if you are interested you can find HERE.

Originally I wanted to make the tree and ornaments out of felt but when I found out how easy it was to make and paint salt dough ornaments I decided to go that route.  I found my inspiration through several sources on the internet and for some I made my own symbol for the stories.  Here are the ornaments I made:

 

On the back of each ornament it has the scripture we should read for that day.

This is what our tree will look like when we have read all the stories and all the ornaments are on our tree.

 

But while we are waiting for the next day I'll keep them in this bowl.

According to some you should start the devotionals at the end of November and finish on Christmas Day with the birth of Christ.  Some say to start on the first day of December.  I am obviously far behind, but I will go ahead and just start with day 19.  I plan to make this a tradition in my family and do this every year. (That is if the world doesn't end on Friday. LOL!)