And so we used twine, tape and staples.

Of course, my oldest had to make some too.

I don’t know about you, but I was sure impressed with his creative skills

Here are some other kid-craft posts I’ve shared on my blog:

• Build-A-Bear clothes

• Easy, Cute Flower Craft

• Getting Crafty with Nature

• Melting Crayons in Tin Pans

 I guess this can count towards art class for homeschooling, right?

*Linking up at Mom Ideas for Busy Mom
and Miscellany Mondays.

Woo-hoo! Can you tell I’m excited. Heidi has tons of followers and she liked my post on making these CUTE paper bag Christmas cards (made by my SIL Sue) enough to share it with her followers! If you haven’t visited The Frugal Girls you should stop over there and check her out. She shares freebies and great frugal ideas including diy projects.

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My sister-in-law, Sue, made these cute paper bag Christmas cards and I had to post about them.  I haven’t sent Christmas cards for awhile but these got me thinking I might enjoy making them.

Here’s what you do:

Step #1 –   Get yourself some lunch-sized paper bags (they come in white and brown).

Step #2 – Lay out the bag and fold in half or determine however long you want your finished, folded card to be.

Step #3 – Now you will cut the open end of the bag to whatever length you want your bag to be as stated in step #2. Now fold the end and glue down. Also, glue  the other end of the bag where the fold is (the actual “bottom” of the bag).

Step #4 – Now the fun part! Decorate, embellish, stamp, color, glue, paint…whatever you’re heart desires!

I love how simple Sue made her cards. You could also use a hole puncher and make 3 holes at the folded side and then string yarn through for a different look. Make these as simple or as elaborate as you like! They are so cute!

Measure your finished card to see what size of envelopes you’ll need if you are mailing them. Sue’s envelopes came from ActionEnvelopes.com.

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*I’m linking this post with this A Holiday Haven’s Party,

Women Living Well, Raising Homemakers, and

The kits are meant for girls aged 6 and up but as you’ll see in my photos- we had boys aged 4 and up decorating too. The kits come with 4 fabric markers, 1 embroidered patch, 1 stencil sheet, 13 colorful iron-ons, 7 glitter iron-ons, 6 foil iron-ons, 2 rhinestone shape iron-ons, and one 10″ bear sized t-shirt and easy to follow instructions. The kits we received also had a $5 off a $25 BuildABear coupon on the backside of the yellow labels..

I actually brought a few of my shirts for my boys and I to decorate, but you can decorate hats, jeans, whatever. See the one I did below? Not too “kiddish” for mom to wear!

When throwing such a party its a must to have more than one iron- and having a designated “iron-on mom” is a great help too! Thank you BuckeyeVa for being ours   Thank you BuildABear for giving us the chance to try out these awesome craft kits!

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To see other Wordless Wednesday posts visit MomStart, and Go Graham Go.

One of my preemie-parent friends posted this project on her blog and did such a good job at it I decided to try the project myself, with the help of my boys. Its simply melting down old crayons into other shapes. Truly the hardest part was peeling the paper of the crayons.

There is more than one way to get the end results, I’m going to focus on sharing how I did mine. You can check out Lindsay’s post at her blog OurOrdinaryStories by clicking here.

After peeling the paper off the crayons I wanted to use (primarily our broken crayons), I  sprayed a little bit of cooking spray into the tins I wanted to use and wiped off the excess, then filled with the crayon pieces I wanted. I used three different tins or pans- one word of caution here- use only pans you don’t mind messing up. You may not be able to get all the wax or glitter (if using glitter) off the pans. I used a corn muffin pan, a muffin pan and a mini (tart?) pan.

I set the stove at about 350 degrees and just left in there maybe 20 minutes, when they looked melted I pulled them out. I let them sit for a little bit on the stove and then put them in the freezer to harden and to pull away from the pans. Almost everyone of them came out super easily. The corn pan which had some deeper grooves in it gave me a little trouble getting my orange corn crayon out. We did use glitter in some of the corn crayons.

I like that Lindsay used a silicon star shaped mold. I didn’t want to wait to go buy anything special so we just used what we had. These would make great stocking stuffers or party favors. At any rate, its a great craft to try out on all those broken crayons you may have around the house

Enjoy!

Kids love stickers. So when you get some unrequested address labels or other stickers in the mail, cut off the fun parts and give them to your kids or grandkids to use. My mother-in-law does this and we have a stash. The boys make pictures with them.

I keep a variety of crafty things for my kids to get creative with. Some of those items are wooden popsickle sticks, googly eyes, party confetti, sea shells, glitter glue, dry beans and macaroni…oh yeah, and markers and crayons and paints.

I get a lot of those items at the dollar store and as for markers and crayons I buy those when they go way down in price just before a new school year begins. I stock up on notebooks, markers or whatever I think we’ll use. You can get these items for as low as pennies.

Each of my boys have a notebook that I started teaching them how to draw or write in. Unfortunately for Jack (it gets harder to do all the same things with the 2nd child) his book hasn’t had as much work done in it. But I have a book or 2 from Brendan when he was about 2 yrs old or so and notes I made about how he said certain words. I was reading it the other day and realized I had forgotten some of the things I had written down. They grow up so fast ;(  They really do, its astounding. I imagine that for my own mom it probably seems like not too long ago that I was so young. In almost 10 years my oldest will be nearly driving. Okay, I’m digressing…

Anyways… kids need to be creative and my boys are no exception and it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money either! Be creative, think about the things your throwing out…old socks? My boys recently made puppets out of a few…and they seem to have forgotten about them almost as soon as they had them made. But you know what, the joy for them was in making them. And they did. And now I’ve put them away with the other projects I’ve saved. By the way, don’t be afraid to keep some and throw others out…I have to do it often- when they aren’t looking of course!

Enjoy them while they’re young!

Easy Kid's Craft

Paper Flower Bouquet.

The other day my 5 yr old asked me to cut out some flowers for him and then he told me to stick the pipe cleaner through it.  He told me he saw it on Caillou (kid’s PBS show that doesn’t seem to be on now, you can pick up the cds at the library).  I’m impressed he remembered such a  thing and was able to communicate it to me.

So we made a paper flower bouquet.

1. For a couple of the flowers I folded colored paper and cut one side then opened it to a full flower…
2. the others, my son drew and colored and asked me to cut out.
3. Just stick the pipe cleaner through and twist the top into a little ball and there you go.

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Make several and you have a simple bouquet.

Kids could make these for Grandma, or a sick friend, Valentine’s Day,

Mother’s Day,  a teacher…and so on!

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