Kendall's Crafts: Is it Worth the 5 Minutes?
By: Kendall Webber
Now, we’ve all seen cheesy weird holiday hacks on Instagram, TikTok, or even Youtube and question our life decisions, and wonder why they feel the need to waste their time on that video. This article will provide some wonderful “holiday artwork” to show to your mom like you’re in elementary all over again. But for this review, I’ll be giving my take on holiday hacks, crafts, and proving if it’s worth your time or not. For these crafts and hacks, I'll be getting the instructions from mainly youtube and or any platform that gives a spike of interest. Warning for the photos, be prepared to burn your eyes looking at the excessive amount of glitter on more than half of these crafts.
For my first craft, I will be testing out homemade snowflake ornaments. In the original video, it was a cute lightbulb covered in glue and looking like a classic for a Christmas tree, but mine on the other hand it was nowhere close to a classic. It looked like a 2nd grader made it in class and brought it home to their mom and then forced their mom to hang it up on the tree. Anyways on with the show for this craft, I needed hot glue, penne pasta, pain, and don’t forget the glitter. I will be following the video tutorial the best I can. It was very hard to keep the pasta glued together due to the flour on top of it. The glue took a while to set, The pasta also didn't keep symmetrical, and was hard to make the snowflake fit evenly; this craft was like a puzzle piece that didn't want to fit. For a 5 minute craft, it took me about an hour plus to get everything to stick together before I could even paint. I highly suggest not doing this craft because it wasn’t really worth the hours trying to put it together. My honest I rate would be a 2/10.
My second craft is a glittery light bulb that consists of old burnt-out light bulbs once again doused in glue and abnormal amounts of glitter that you’ll never get rid of. One question of mine is the video asks is who keeps their old burnt-out lightbulbs, don't you throw them in the recycling bin? For this craft, you will be needing mod podge, glitter, a burnt-out lightbulb, twine, and hair spray. Yes, hair spray. But honestly, this craft is a very smart idea to recycle light bulbs and save you from spending lots of money on ornaments. But one problem is you have to spend a lot on your upcoming electric bills for this craft and a lot of glitter. Fair warning for my photo is I don’t have those cute quirky light bulbs, I have bulky LED lights for my house and this will be a very interesting look for the tree… Anyways this craft honestly was fun and fast to finish and was worth the time; It ended up being kinda cute. Though, I was not looking forward to the glitter being everywhere. This craft actually went by really fast; it did take about 8 minutes to make. I didn’t really have any problems other than glitter, but this deserves a good 8/10!!
The third craft is making a Christmas tree out of plastic. To be exact plastic from a sprite bottle, yeah you read that right from a 20 oz sprite bottle. There are honestly not enough words in the dictionary to express my feelings for this entertaining “tree”. For this decoration, you’re going to need a 20 oz sprite bottle or bigger. My thoughts through this made me think why not add glitter? What is life without glitter at this point in these crafts and hacks? Anyways, on with the project! When I first started I thought it would end up actually good up until the part where I had to hot glue the plastic to the paper, it was hard to do so and sucked trying to get them to stick. During the process of using the candle, I burned myself multiple times along with trying to get the pieces to stick to the paper with the hot glue. The whole project was messy and never ended up looking anything like the reference photo. It’s supposed to be a 5 minute craft but ended up as a 40-50 minute craft. This was a complete waste of time and I don’t recommend trying this. I rate this a 0/10.
My fourth project is making a 3D Christmas card with paper, hot glue, and pom-poms. I was honestly expecting to burn myself, mess up by folding the paper wrong, and just find a way to mess this craft up. I was hoping to find a way to mess up this project to seem like it can be messed up easily. But sadly I didn’t burn myself more than 3 times which was a big surprise. The only issue with this craft is having to be careful with burning yourself and making sure the paper didn’t stick together with the hot glue. This craft did take about 20 minutes with cutting the paper, gluing, making the card part, and making sure it all stuck together correctly, get it? Stuck together? No need to laugh, I know it was funny. But it ended up being a lot of fun to make this card. The only problem was burning my hand on the hot glue once or twice, but other than that it was very enjoyable, and I highly suggest making this card 10/10!!!!
For the grand finale, I will be dealing with more pasta. Yeah, more pasta-, But at least it’s the bow tie pasta instead. This is supposed to be like the classic popcorn string on the tree but instead made out of paste, pasta, hot glue, twine, and yeah you guessed it glitter and hair spray. Anyways on with this catastrophe show. This ended up not being too hard to make and took about 10 minutes to make. There were 2 issues with this, one was the pasta didn’t want to stick to the twine like the last pasta craft, and the glitter was everywhere by the end of the night, even after vacuuming and thoroughly cleaning my desk it managed to survive and stay on everything in my room including my cat. I give this a 6/10
Conclusion
I doubted most of these hacks work, and honestly, I was proven wrong. These hacks ended up being really fun to make and ended up not looking too bad. They all ended up decent and most looked way better than expected. My favorite hack definitely was . 2 /5 of these hacks are worth your time.
Links to the hacks and crafts I made:
Christmas tree card- https://youtu.be/XC6dvMHF2HA
Lightbulb & both Pasta ornaments- https://youtu.be/bPSsQ2PXuWU
Sprite tree- https://youtu.be/AJ-hfkUY1Gs