There’s still time to make your CHRISTMAS cards, let’s get creative!
So we’ve gone all churchy and made these lovely stained glass window style cards…. cutting shapes from the card, and gluing coloured tissue paper behind the apertures.
Eek… I let the boys use a scalpel!
These look fab with a tea-light popped inside (battery operated for safety) or stuck to a window.
So… what does one do with cereal boxes, if you can’t bear to stick them in the recycling, how about cooking up some cute little Papier–mâché seedling pots.
We ripped the cardboard cereal boxes and rice cake boxes into small pieces, and gave them a good soaking. Then pulped the pieces with water, in the blender (sssh, don’t tell Daddy).
Draining the pulp in a colander, squeezing the excess water. Flour the work surface, and mix, knead in some flour {SECRET INGREDIENT ALERT!}. And take small quantities, pushing into the silicone muffin cases to mold the little pots. We air-dried the pots over-night, however, for speed, you could pop them into the oven, if you were baking spuds, or home-made pizza anyway!
We DID try to make a batch of these seedling pots in conventional metal cake trays… FAIL!, they set solid, glued in… so yes, silicone rules!
First Published April 12 2013.
Updated September 2024 to include a link to a recent post from incredibusy about paper clay… here
Click this image below to watch the youtube video of our Google+ hangout – and watch Maggy from Red Ted Art sharing her shadow puppet theatre and her ‘everlasting’ picture frame, Playful Learners made another gorgeous puppet theatre Aly at Plus 2 Point 4 showed us how to use a box as a weaving loom, and my fave, Me and My Shadow and her vintage style secret book…
To read more on our gardening adventures click here to see where we got our delicious compost for our seedlings.
Fairy Tale crafts – taking inspiration from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves we decided to upcycle a charity shop mirror and create the famous Mirror Mirror on the Wall….
This was a fabulous team effort, and my son now proudly has this Fairy Tale Craft beauty hanging on the wall in his bedroom.
You will need:
Old sheets of newspaper
Cocktail stick
Glue stick
Stronger glue, (I recommend a glue gun!)
Instructions:
1) Roll the newspaper sheet diagonally from the corner, using the cocktail stick to get you started, so that the roll is nice and tight. When the cocktail stick starts to disappear inside the paper, gently pull it out, and continue to tightly roll the newspaper to create a long ‘stick’ – the first of MANY!
2) Flatten the ‘stick’ using a hard surface.
3) Taking your cocktail stick, start to roll the flattened ‘stick’ into a tight spiral, securing it with glue as you get to the end of the spiral.
4) When you have enough of these spirals, you can start to build up the pattern around the mirror – we found that the glue gun was the best tool for this!
You could also spray paint the spirals, however we like the newspaper spirals in their natural form!
Ali also blogs over on incredibusy.com and is a new lover of Instagram too… pop over and say hello! And I’ll be adding this to Lizzie’s#MagpieMonday as I love to salvage, upcycle and re-use stuff!
If you’d like to see more Fairy Tale crafts, firstly pop over to see our Jack and the Beanstalk Reward Chart, and then click the youtube link here, as I got together with Missie Lizzie who talked magic beans, Anthea with her elves’ shoes, Kelly talked Rapunzel, and Maggy at Red Ted Art (talking three little pigs) who hosted a Fairy Tale Craft google+ hangout.
Here’s a very simple stick craft we’ve been doing this week… great shadow puppets inspired by Chinese New Year:
You’ll need some sticks (!) from the garden, or as we do, collected on weekend walks by small children. Some black card, sellotape, a pencil, scissors and some ‘brads’ (the pins with bendy legs, I never remember what their name is!) Oh, and some coloured tissue paper or sweet wrappers. AND a torch if you fancy doing a shadow puppet show!
We drew the dragon ‘pieces’ out onto the black card – cut them out, and joined them together with the brads (we used a bit of plasticine behind the card, and pushed a pencil through to make the hole for the brad).
Attach the sticks with tape at the back and you’re ready to go! You’ll need a couple of characters for the shadow puppet show – standing behind a large white sheet – we dimmed the lights, shone the torch and tried them out. We made up some short stories for our characters and put on a fun silhouette show!!
Heart print wrapping paper, and gift wrap in general, can be expensive to buy, so we do make a LOT of home made paper – this heart print wrapping paper is so easy to do, and great for birthdays as well as Valentine’s Day.
We use the end of a toilet roll tube to do these (squeeze the end of the circular opening flat, and then bend in the top section to create a heart shape). Dipping the tube into the red and pink paint and printing onto the brown parcel paper, which can be bought fairly economically from office supply shops. Alternatively, we have also used metal heart shaped cookie cutters – (see photo, we used the same cookie cutter for our Plum Pie recipe) which works just as well… if a little less organically!
Using butcher’s string is another way to make the parcel look really special, particularly if you attach a home-made gift tag, which we created at the same time, using the off-cuts of the heart print wrapping paper… gently fold the printed hearts down the middle to cut a nice symmetrical heart shape and attach with the butcher’s string – lovely!
We created heart print gift tags, and greetings cards, at the same time as the heart print wrapping paper, to have a full set… and even print some extra to keep in the cupboard for that unexpected party or to use to send a pressie to Granny!
The one thing I really struggle to put into the recycling bin, is the toilet roll tubes, I can always think there is SOMETHING we can make with them, whether it’s planting seedlings in them, or making these lovely bird seed feeders. They are so easy to make, and the kids are tickled to be using peanut butter, to spread onto the loo roll tubes, cra-azy eh?!
So simple to do… basically, spread the peanut butter on the toilet roll tube, and sprinkle the bird seeds over the tube, pushing the seeds onto the peanut butter ‘glue’.
We do find some peanut butter a little dry, so – do as you do with toast! – paste a little layer of butter on to the tube before you spread the peanut butter onto the tube.
Then, slip the tube onto a thin branch, preferably in view of the window. We love eating our breakfast and watching the birds eat theirs – we have a favourite chubby blackbird in the garden, will try to get a photo of the bird seed feeder in action!
We’ve all of us got an old T-shirt lying about don’t we? I had a very favourite, Breton Stripe T which had sadly come to the end of its life, and was just to scruffy to go to the charity shop, so we decided to DO something with it, and as we’ve gone a little pom-pom crazy this month, thought we’d have a go at the old classic – a T Shirt Yarn Pom Pom!
So, you could use a big pom-pom maker, or, like us, grab a couple of ‘donuts’ of cardboard, and have a go…
Step 1 – using a mug as a template, we cut two circular donuts, and lay them on top of each other.
Step 2 – cut your T-shirt into long strips to make ‘yarn’ and lay one piece of this yarn between the two donuts.
Step 3 – Wrap the T-shirt yarn around and around the donuts, and tie off the centre strip of yarn in a knot.
Step 4 – Push your scissors between the two donuts and snip around the circle as you would a regular pom-pom!
We love how this one turned out and will be collecting our old T-shirts to have a go and MORE T Shirt Yarn Pom-Poms soon!
Paper cups are a great asset to a store cupboard… you never know when the post school playdates may descend on you, and for this time of year, paper plates and cups are often safer in the garden for the al fresco dining that may take place!
They are also VERY handy for a last minute craft session, particularly if you are practicing your alphabet crafts – and all you need for this W is for Whale paper cup craft, is two paper cups, some parcel tape and a couple of googly eyes!
You will need:
Two paper cups
Parcel Tape
Googly eyes
Pipe cleaner (white or blue)
Hama or Perler Beads in an array of blues and white!
Instructions:
1) Using the parcel tape, stick the two cups together facing each other to create the body shape of the whale.
2) Wrap the parcel tape all over the body of the whale to cover it.
3) Fashion the whale’s tail from more parcel tape and attach to one end of the paper cup whale.
4) Do the same with the two front flippers, and attach just below the position on the eyes.
5) Add the googly eyes, essential in any paper cup craft!.
6) Pierce a small slit where the blow hole on the top of the whale’s body will be.
7) Push the pipe cleaners, or wires, into the hole, and add some Hama or Perler beads to look like water drops and you are DONE!
Inspired by the button cupcakes we created for swing tags for Mother’s Day, we found some thin wire and got busy with this button flower craft.
The wire needs to be quite a narrow gauge to make it ‘bendable’ for smaller fingers – and choose buttons within a sympathetic colour spectrum to make the flowers quite beautiful!
For this button flower craft, I found that the best way to do this is to arrange the buttons in the size order you’d like, ie, larger buttons at the back and then feed them onto the wire.
IMPORTANT – make sure you thread the wire through the buttons across the diagonal if there are four holes in the button, this way the buttons sit flat on top of each other – I cut a petal shape from some off-cuts of green felt to make the petals.
