Soulemama, always an inspiration for me, has helped her children make the most wonderful calendar. The children did all the drawings during the year, and collected and collated the images for Amanda to scan. What a fabulous project to do with the kids.
As part of our month of crafts for children, we will be posting links to cool ideas and inspiration as well as tutorials and articles. We are still taking tutorial and article ideas for the month so please email your ideas and stories to me at whipup[at]gmail.com.
who would have thought that needle felting would be an ideal craft for kids - but looking at this great tutorial for needle felting a cute owl over at reprodepot blog - I think it would make a great project to do with some supervision for your kids.
As part of our month of crafts for children, we will be posting links to cool ideas and inspiration as well as tutorials and articles. We are still taking tutorial and article ideas for the month so please email your ideas and stories to me at whipup[at]gmail.com.
craftastica has an excellent tutorial about natural dyeing of eggs (easter is coming up…) - what a great project to do with your kids.
onions and red cabbage were the best, but i also had success with beets (brick red, but only after soaking for several hours — before that, a displeasing brown, alum or not), tumeric (very similar to yellow onions but less dappled and more likely to stain everything), and hibiscus tea. i expected the tea to result in purple or blue eggs, but instead got a sage green,
This is a fun exercise in finding shapes, both complex and simple for children (and I am guessing adults too!) using paper maps as your guide. Last week some of my students made these fun and fantastic artworks using a simple process with the maps I gave them. I asked them to open the maps and look at the rivers, railway lines and borders by squinting at them to find new shapes. Then they took a sharpie marker and drew the objects or shapes they were able to find. Then they cut out the new objects and used oil pastel on them to accent what they had found. Finally, they glued the new pieces down to large pieces of paper and finished off their collages. I was simply amazed at the variety of work which came from this project. More photos of this process are at my flickr.
As part of our month of crafts for children, we will be posting links to cool ideas and inspiration as well as tutorials and articles. We are still taking tutorial and article ideas for the month so please email your ideas and stories to me at whipup[at]gmail.com.
We love the shopping issue at kids craft weekly, and particularly the great cash register made from recycled trash.
As part of our month of crafts for children, we will be posting links to cool ideas and inspiration as well as tutorials and articles. We are still taking tutorial and article ideas for the month so please email your ideas and stories to me at whipup[at]gmail.com.
Arounna from Bookhou will be a weekly guest on B:Kids writing only about art/craft projects you can do at home : BloesemKids. the first project for kids is this neat tissue paper landscape.
As part of our month of crafts for children, we will be posting links to cool ideas and inspiration as well as tutorials and articles. We are still taking tutorial and article ideas for the month so please email your ideas and stories to me at whipup[at]gmail.com.
Alisa wrote in with this great letter and kids craft idea:
For Christmas I made playsilks for my kids. I bought the Habotai silk scarves from Dharma Trading for only about $3 a piece then I dyed them in the microwave with koolaid. It was a super quick and really satisfying project. Plus cost effective. It was only about $40 for 10 scarves instead of paying well over a hundred dollars somewhere else for playsilks. And my kids (2 and 5) seriously play with these all the time. They are a hit with all the neighbor kids too, boys and girls alike. We were even able to make the hankie dolls with them. There are a million great tutorials for dying with koolaid. Here is one that I used: Sara’s Toy Box.
As part of our month of crafts for children, we will be posting links to cool ideas and inspiration as well as tutorials and articles. We are still taking tutorial and article ideas for the month so please email your ideas and stories to me at whipup[at]gmail.com.
We love these fingerpuppets made by school children and posted at dolls stories. The faces all have such expression and individuality.
As part of our month of crafts for children, we will be posting links to cool ideas and inspiration as well as tutorials and articles. We have some great contributor tutorials lined up for the month including the very sweet and easy hankie dolls and worry dolls. We are still taking tutorial and article ideas for the month so please email your ideas and stories to me at whipup[at]gmail.com.
I love this quiet book by elsie marley - and her cardboard dollhouse is really a cool idea.
Plain winter gloves make a great backdrop for creative finger puppets. A great project that all kids can do … here goes.
Supplies: felt, pom pons, fabric markers, and tacky fabric glue. Everything found at a local craft store. You really could use any crafty item to create your puppets. I have purchased a set of fabric markers and they have lasted me a couple of years. For the glue, you can use a hot glue gun - young children would need supervision, but fabric glue is fine, you just need to wait a little bit for it to dry.
Decide what your puppets are going to be. We chose farm animals to go with the song “Old Macdonalds farm”. You could do story book characters like the Three Little Pigs or the Little Red Hen or to go with kids songs like “5 Little Monkeys” and “four Green Speckled Frogs” and have the thumb be the log. Matt wanted to make a Dinosaur Alien puppet. He designed it himself.
Cut out the shapes you need first for each finger and place them on to see if they work. Such as eyes and mouth and ears etc, then glue each piece on. You will need to wait at least one hour, maybe more just to be sure. We did have to re-glue one or two places [perhaps some quick hand sewing to be double sure].
Now you have a fun new puppet. You can sing the song or read the fairytale as you play with your puppet. I am going to bring it in the car for a little playtime distraction.
About the maker: Marie is a 30 year old stay at home mom, who loves to “make and take”. Before life as a mother, Marie graduated with a Teaching Degree in Elementary Education and taught 4 years of Kindergarten. After her
first child, she now stays at home wiping noses and tying shoes, bringing the crafty classroom ideas home to her kids.
Models in photo: My kids - boy: Matthew, girl: Lucy. Learn more about Marie at her blog Make and Takes.
These worry dolls are fun and easy to make. Children of Central America would tell their dolls their worries at bedtime and then place them under their pillow. When the children wake in the morning, voila! Problems solved.
As part of our month of crafts for children, we will be posting links to cool ideas and inspiration as well as tutorials and articles. We have some great contributor tutorials lined up for the month the first of which was the very sweet and easy hankie doll. We are still taking tutorial and article ideas for the month so please email your ideas and stories to me at whipup[at]gmail.com.
We love these pencil toppers which are perfect to little kids to sew and then to take to school. [via craft] check out the instructions and templates at one crafty mama
chickpea sewing has a lovely post on making a swaddling blanket, changing pad and burp cloth with just 3 yards of flannel.
If you happen to have some old books that you’ve finished with (or if you haven’t, any white elephant stall/ thrift shop/ op shop/Goodwill has Plenty!) then there’s a list of links for using them as craft materials on the Bookshop Blog here. Embroidery, journals, sculpture, stash boxes and more. If you’re in the summer holidays of the southern hemisphere right now, this could be an inexpensive and entertaining holiday craft activity.
Alternatively, maybe you’d like to buy a book made into a clock. This is from recycleeh at etsy.
Happy mundane has spray painted all the ornaments in metal primer and they look lovely in their whiteness.
I might have missed the boat this year with getting my advent calendar organised in time - but I do love this one by wise craft.
I love that ornaments come in all shapes and sizes and themes.
The Tardis [via extreme craft]
Mr Pickle from my paper crane
Holiday wreath making at Julie re
pretty pink scrap fabric wreath at nest decorating
betz white - felted sweater wreath [via craft] with tutorial
recycled wool scrap wreath [also via craft] at swallow field.
When you grow up under the earthy shadow of a Hippie mother who likes to eat raw tofu and give you sage tea instead of taking you to the doctor when you’re sick as a child it can seem like the benefits of such an upbringing are few. When I left home at the tender age of seventeen I didn’t remember the sage tea fondly, it always made me want to gag. I tended to focus on the pot growing in my parents window that the neighbors recognized and reported to the police. I remembered the plethora of unshaved armpits coming in and out of my house. I vowed to myself that I was an urban chick in boots and I would be damned if anyone would ever call me “earthy”
However, when I was nineteen I got my first apartment without room mates. I was working as the shipping manager at a clothing company in the mission district of San Francisco and my hours were long and hard. Not having room mates was great. I wasn’t interested in going to night clubs anymore or hanging out in hip bars. I preferred staying home and recovering from my long work days in the peace and quiet of my very first solo apartment, never mind the cockroaches and the sleazy lobby in which bums would congregate.
It was in this apartment of mine that I found out how impossible it is to sever ourselves from our parents, our past, and our roots. I found myself drawn to the bulk herb sections in the health food stores I sometimes shopped at. Those sections smelled good and seemed to overflow with possibilities. Without meaning to, I bought myself an herbal book with recipes for things like shampoos and lotions. Without meaning to I bought myself a little enameled pan in which to make decoctions. I told myself I wasn’t anything like my mother because I was wearing Doc Martens and 1940’s slips as dresses. I convinced myself that I wasn’t an “earth-mamma” because I listened to Kate Bush while making my potions.
The truth is, I secretly wanted to become my own apothecary. I wanted to have shelves filled with herbs and powders. I’ve never stopped believing that modern medicine has it’s place in my life. I haven’t ever felt that natural herbs can cure everything that ails us, as my mom did when I was growing up. I believe that we need both. Now that I am much older, my mom and I like to do a lot of things together that I never imagined would be so much fun.
My mom, some years ago, got a certificate in herbology and shares her knowledge with me. She can make salves, tinctures, decoctions, and knows which plants to include in a medicinal herb garden. So when I starting talking to her about being able to make my own bath products and using essential oils to scent them she was very excited. We made several trips to the bookstore and got ourselves some good books on aromatherapy and on making homemade cosmetics.
Mixing your own scent using pure essential oils is really satisfying. You can make scents that improve your mood, calm you down, help you relax, or just make you smell really damn good. Playing with little bottles of scent is like being your own perfumier. One of my favorite bath products is bath salts. I like them strongly scented and in pretty containers. Although I would like to be able to make my own lotions eventually, bath salts are a great place to get your apothecary feet wet; to explore essential oils and scent combinations. They are easy to scent and to present in pretty packaging. They aren’t very expensive either, which means that they make fantastic gifts for all the people you know who love some luxury bath items.
I would like to share my favorite bath salt recipe (it’s my own) and to give you a couple of ideas on how to present them. You need to start with salts which you can find in herbal shops (sometimes health food stores will stock bulk beauty items near their herb section) or you can find many sources for them online. I like to make a mixture of 50% Epsom salts to 50% Dead Sea salts. The Epsom salts are especially good for relaxing muscles and the sea salts are most noted for the trace minerals that help soften and nourish your skin. I have found coarse Epsom salts are great, though often it is offered in a super fine form. Either kind will work. You can use just one or the other if you prefer.
My favorite scent mixture (right now) is pink grapefruit and fresh ginger. The grapefruit is uplifting, cleansing, and stimulating. The ginger (you want the kind made from fresh ginger, not from already dried root which smells musty) is warming, comforting, and fortifying. Who doesn’t need all that? Together they make me feel like singing really loud (but I won’t because the only song I know by heart is “freight train” and most people don’t want to hear songs about being buried). I like to use more grapefruit in proportion to the ginger because as a sufferer of depression I particularly like the uplifting quality of the grapefruit, but the main point is: you can do whatever the hell you want.
If you want to try scenting salts but aren’t sure about the scent recipe I’m offering here, I suggest you find a store that stocks pure essential oils and spend some time sniffing them all. The salts are pretty cheap, but buying oils by the bottle can be costly so you want to make sure you buy scents that really do it for you.
