Kids Crafts at Christmas

(This post is part of my Frosty Festivities Blog Event)

I love crafting with my kids at Christmas. My daughter always makes some cards, and there will be some baking involved at some point, plus each year we make some decorations. 

This year so far we've made these Peg Doll Angels:

I got the idea and tutorial from here. We jazzed ours up a bit, making the dresses out of white felt, which my daughter drew on and stuck sequins all over. She also drew on the faces and hair, and helped me cut the feathers. Then I wound on the halos and glued all the bits together using a hot glue gun.

I haven't decided yet if we're going to hang them as decorations or leave them as dolls. My daughter wants to give one each to her two best friends, so we'll only be keeping one of them:

I've just realised one of the angels has a wonky halo in the photo, and it's the one with the slight smirk. I think she's been at the sherry!

My daughter has also painted a snowflake window decoration that we got from HobbyCraft, she was concentrating on it very well:

And I know we'll be making our usual Reindeer - we draw around feet for the head and hands for the antlers, so each year the reindeer grow as my kids do! Eventually we'll have a whole gallery of them, but this photo is from the first year we did it, using my hands and feet and my daughter's:

They look very cute lined up on our wall each year!

Be Inspired:

• Use feathers on your next winter project
• Make a window decoration
• Use your hands as a template for something, or do some finger painting!

Don't forget that a comment on this post, or on any of my posts from this weekend, will count as an entry into the Grand Giveaway {NOW CLOSED} - but only if you've registered your interest in winning that here!

Have you ever done any crafting with kids at Christmas time? Any tips for what we can make next?

See you again soon - sorry the posts are running half an hour behind - I'm trying to catch up on finishing them off! x

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Things I've been making...

... some with help from a certain three-year-old!

I promised a post with a catch up of some of the things I've been creating the last couple of months. I haven't, shock horror, made a single scrapbook page. The urge deserted me for a while, but I have one in my mind now that I just need to find time to put together! Instead I've been art journaling / card making along with other bits and pieces. Here's a few things for you to see.

First up is an art journal spread I created about some of my pregnancy thoughts. I included a scan photo, and my daughter helped me out by printing a hand print onto the bottom right corner:

Then at the end of March it was my dad's birthday, and we also sent cards to my mum for mother's day at the beginning of April, so me and my daughter made these (see if you can guess which ones I made!):

For my dad:

For my mum:

At the beginning of April it was my friend Rosie's birthday, I don't have photos of the cards we made her, but I also made her this bib style necklace. It ended up a bit bigger than I intended because I kept finding more bits and pieces I wanted to add to it (the large buttons and flowers were made by me too):

And then, last Friday me and little miss sat down to an afternoon of creating. As it was Earth Day 2011 I set my daughter making this:

It sort of looks like the world! I know it's not a very accurate depiction but hey, she's three, and it was still useful, as it helped me to talk to her about countries and seas, etc.

While she was making that, and in between me having to wash blue paint off her fingers and glue from her hair, I was making this:

Nothing to do with Earth Day, but it was inspired by something I'd seen a couple of days before on Julie Kirk's blog, about how to use stamps to make a cute photo-booth strip. You can see her post about it here, or the tutorial on how to make one is here on the 'it's a creative world' blog, so check them out - Julie's examples are so sweet and fun!

I don't have a huge array of stamps with characters on, most of my stamps are twirly backgrounds or phrases, but I managed to find this frog and bird, who I think had a little romance going on in the photo-booth! It was fun to make but now I want more cute stamps to create with. I was thinking you could also use the same technique to create a simple comic strip, so I want to try that out too.

That's all for now, but hopefully I'll be back soon with a scrapbook page. Especially now my study is all tidied and organised since it was swapped around with my daughter's room. She keeps telling everyone with pride how she's now got the BIG bedroom. I sulk a little bit at having my stash depleted and squeezed into small spaces, but I know I'm lucky to have a separate room to work in at all, even if it's a small one. Next year I'll probably have to give this one up too, when the new baby (due in July) moves out of our room. Until then I'm going to try and appreciate having my own space! x

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art journal page, a sweetie boot, & kids halloween, what a mix!

As promised, the first thing I have to show you is an art journal page (a double spread) that I made following week one's lesson of Art, Heart and Healing:

The left page was therapeutic - writing down negative thoughts and then covering them with layer on layer of prettiness, finally adding a sentence of how to use those negative thoughts positively.

My negative thoughts were all about worrying that I'm not a good enough mum, wife, friend, artist etc, because I feel I try to do too much to make any of it perfect. I decided my negative thoughts are trying to tell me that if I want to try and balance these things, then I need to stop stressing about them all being faultless. It doesn't matter if my daughter sometimes watches more TV than I'd like so that I can cook the dinner, and if I want to spend an evening watching telly with hubby then I shouldn't stress about not getting an online challenge done that I'd wanted to do. This is a message that I knew already really, but hopefully having an art journal page to remind me will help me be strong about it:

The right hand page is sort of a self-portrait - one that doesn't necessarily look like me, but is supposed to represent me. It must look like me a little bit, because when I showed it to my daughter she said 'it's mummy!'. Tam suggested we should take a word that sums up the positive move forward and write it on the portrait somewhere, so I chose 'balance' - you can just about see it between the collarbones:

I loved creating this page. The lesson was a video with Tam talking you though all the steps, and it gave me real confidence with shading and building up layers. It was also great to finally get use out of some watercolour pencils my mum bought me years ago (thanks mum!) but which had been sitting in the bottom of a cupboard. Now I want some more! If you'd like to give the class a go, you can still join up and see this lesson. The course is free, you just have to sign up to Tam's ning site (also free). Go to http://www.willowing.ning.com/.

Next up tonight is an item inspired by the Paper Variety blog - their challenge this week is to create a project that incorperates candy or other sweet treats. So I made this:

My husband lived in Germany until he was 6 years old. He doesn't remember huge amounts from living over there, just because he was quite young when the family moved back to England, but every December he reminisces about St. Nicholas Day on the 6th of December, when german children wake up to a boot stuffed with sweets, nuts or fruit. I'm not sure if this is a tradition in other countries too? I'd never heard of it before I met him anyway.

Every year I mean to make him a boot to stick some sweeties in (I certainly wouldn't want to just put sweets in his smelly shoes!), and this Paper Variety challenge has given me the push to finally make one, after 10 years together!

I made it by sticking together some loo roll inner tubes onto a base cut from a cereal packet:

And then I used modge-podge to stick xmas papers and tissue papers all over it. I chose blue papers because that's my hubby's fave colour. I also stamped and stuck on the tag saying 'St. Nick's Day' placing it so it looked a bit like a boot tongue. I used Copydex to glue silver laces on too:

Finally I used glamour dust to glitter the toe of the boot and the top rim:

Now I just have to try and remember to actually fill it with sweets and leave it for him to find on the morning of the 6th. I bet I'll be posting on the 7th of Dec saying 'arrgghh, I forgot!'. If you want to join in with the Paper Variety Challenge you can see it here.

Okay, a last couple of pics to show you (thank you if you're still with me!). This morning I read the lovely Rachel's latest blog post, with some kiddies halloween crafts she'd been making with her son. I was inspired, so today me and little miss have made these:

Fun eh? I think my daughter enjoyed making them, though she wasn't too sure about painting her hand white until I did mine first. She has a bit of a fear of getting her hands sticky. I love the faces she's created on the ghosts, especially the one with freaky green and brown pupils! Thank you Rachel for giving me the ideas!

Right, that really is it. Until tomorrow morning when I'll be back with my recipe as part of the Let's Eat Blog Hop. Sorry if you're getting sick of me! xx

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Ooh christmas is coming!

I've been working a month of weekends away, but I haven't got another until the end of January, so now I can get very excited about xmas! I've been in a christmas frenzy: decorating, baking, planning presents and making pictures with my little girl!

Here's some reindeer we made (after seeing the very cool ones my niece had done) - you draw around your foot for the head and your hands for the antlers then stick them together, adding eyes and a nose and drawing a mouth. Quite fun and a good way to record hand and foot size if we make them every year!:

A cotton wool snowman which my daughter had fun making until she got glue and fluff stuck to her fingers - then she started moaning that her hands were messy!:

I have just finished making some mince pies, I made my own mincemeat for the first time which I'm very proud of. The pastry went a bit elastic though - I don't suppose anyone knows what I might have done wrong to cause this to happen? I was following the recipe by the hairy bakers from their xmas special last year. I like their cheeky, laid back approach to cooking and I'm looking forward to this year's xmas special which is on this coming wednesday. Here's the pies:

And finally a shot of our lovely christmas tree with our lovely little pixie in front of it! She loves pointing out all the decorations (penguin, snowman, tigger etc.) and tells me off when the lights aren't on! She is also loving a singing, dancing santa which is driving me crazy! It sings the chorus of 'last christmas I gave you my heart' over and over again. I've had to tell her it's broken a couple of times so that I could switch him off for a bit and get her to stop setting him off (noise activated)!

Hope you're all having fun with your own decorations / creations!

x

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