Santa Box

Without boring you, I will just say that I have not posted on my blog in the last few months due to some insanely busy times in my house.  I love being busy and keeping my days full but what I don't love is when I miss out on some of my favorite things because of the crazy day-timer!  When I say favorite things I mean, of course, reading, sewing, baking, and BLOGGING!

With Christmas around the corner, and my Pinterest addiction in full swing, I have been motivated to get into the spirit of the season.  I've been signing up for potlucks and secret Santa's, buying and hiding special gifts, and planning out my baking list for this year.

My eldest daughter is currently in pre-school and is big time into making crafts.  I had some free time this afternoon (what?!) and decided to spend some quality (holiday inspired) crafting time with her while the little one was sleeping. I have a big box of "kid-friendly" crafting supplies - not to be confused with my "mommy-spent-too-much-on-these-supplies-so-don't-touch-them supplies" - that I pulled out and we looking around the house for some motivation.
Before long, I had gathered an empty cereal box, a toilet paper roll, and brown paper bag.  We decided to go with the cereal box and worked out a Santa Clause idea.  I love what we came up with because it was so easy and was something a four year old could easily work on by herself.

The supplies we used were:

1. An old cereal box;
2. Construction paper;
3. White glue & tape
4. A pair of googly eyes (dollar store); and
5. Some white puff balls (dollar store).

I had my daughter trace out the red paper and we covered the cereal box, using white glue.  We then traced out and glued on Santa's belt (using sparkly construction paper for the buckle). Next we put together Santa's face and curled up some white construction paper for his beard (we used tape to adhere this to his face because the white glue was not strong enough to hold it in place).  After this, we glued on his hat and the white puff balls along its edge.  To make his legs, we just folded up paper and taped it onto the bottom of the box. The shoes are black construction paper with a piece of the sparkly paper for little buckles (also adhered with tape).  Voila, a super simple and fun craft - my daughter was beaming with pride when we were done!  

If you have a bunch of empty boxes, you could also make other holiday inspired figures - a reindeer, an angle, or a gingerbread man are a few ideas!

If you are looking for more Christmas crafts, check out a post I put up last year for cinnamon scented ornaments!  They make your house smell A-Mazing when you are making them!

Cheers!

Handy Crafts

One of my favorite things to do with my three year old is to make all sorts of different crafts. Today our theme was hand prints - partially inspired by Pinterest and partially inspired by my daughter's favorite show, Out of the Box. We had a few things on our to-do list that I thought we could incorporate into our craft time today and below is what we came up with: Our first step was to start out with tracing a bunch of hand prints. The plan was to do a few thumbprints and footprints too but we didn't get too far with that plan!
Next job was to colour and decorate up the prints (before cutting!). I tried to convince her to try a few different colours but, come on mom....that's crazy talk!! :)

In addition to tracing out the hand print and colouring them, we also made some prints by covering her hands with some acrylic paint and stamping it down on some paper.
This one was my favorite of the day. I had seen this on Pinterest and it originated from a blog called A day in my Life. We needed to make a thank you card for my aunt so I thought this would be perfect. We glued hearts on each hand, one saying "i love you..." and the other holding our note of thanks. The middle section, of course, completes the message with "i love you...this much!". Next on our list was to make some hugs to mail to some out-of-the-country family. We made these ones out of the hand prints we had cut out. Then we measured my daughter's arm length and cut out a piece of ribbon to that measurement. And voila! A hug, just her size!

For the top one we had cut out a matching hand print and wrote out our message on it. Below, both sides of the hand prints were decorated so we just cut out some more hearts, pasted them on and wrote out a small message.

And finally, my daughter made a card for her to give to my husband. We made a few thumbprints, using the acrylic paint, and a set of hand prints to make a cute face. I just hand wrote a message on the card but you could also print off a message and paste inside. This card reads "I love you the most..." on the front and then on the inside I wrote, "hands down!".

I love making little projects with my daughter and I can hardly wait until my youngest is old enough to join in. It's so much fun to see them experience and explore different types of crafting, especially when it crosses a few things off of my very, verrrrry long to-do list!

Happy Crafting! :0)