St. Patty's Decor

The kids are on Spring Break this week. Monday is library day, so since they are home they got to pick out their own books. KL chose a book of St. Patrick's Day crafts. This isn't the first time, she's an artistic child, she has checked out several "learn to draw" and craft and kid themed cookbooks in the past. Most the time, she looks through them and maybe picks out a few to try. Most the time it gets brought to me, I say I need to check and see if we have what we need, and it usually gets forgotten or we don't have the materials/ingredients.

This week, all the crafts were pretty simple, and she picked out 4 (I think) and only 1 did we not have the materials for. So here's what we made:

Cute little window garland. (She chose to let it fall down instead of combining them for a long chain across the top.)

These were pretty simple, I cut a ton of 2" paper strips in the colors of the rainbow. She glued them together to make long chains, and then folded them, what I always called, "snake" style. (Where you stack two and then flip them one over the other.)

Here's a few action shots:

(And a peek-a-boo, twin

The first 2.

Having fun folding, after she got the hang of it.

While KL was working on this, the twins were busy playing with the scraps. Since construction paper is 9" wide and I was cutting 2" segments, I had left over 1" lines. So I split these among the twins, gave them a glue stick and said have fun. (They don't get the glue very often, so they were pretty happy.)

Here is what KM came up with:

She made a lot of "x-rays" (this is what she currently calls the letter X), and then didn't want to be done with the glue yet, so she glued all of them on top of each other.

Here's KN's:

Sorry, the brightness is way up on this photo, I was doing my best to try and get the color to show (I should've taken the photo before I hung it in the window). I think it slightly resembles a prism - she was just gluing strips together randomly, there is not pattern to the madness, just simply glue and paper.

Also while KL was working, KK looked through to see what ideas were in the book and she found the rag/scrap wreath. So here's how her's turned out:

 The book used lots of green, I thought a touch of gold would be nice too.

So here's our all involved, individually, decor. It was a fun way to spend the first day of Spring Break, here's hoping we can continue to stay busy, but we also have a new round of sickness moving in so we'll see.

That's all for now,
Jo!

Spring Wreaths

As yesterday's entertainment for spring break we made Spring wreaths.
It was a pretty simple craft. We started with wreath circles cut from cereal boxes.

And used Mod Podge to attach crumpled pieces of tissue paper in Spring colors.

Finally we added a bow made of curling ribbon in green, pink, and blue.
In the end we had 2 very cute Spring wreaths that are both hanging on our front door.
KK's:

KL's: (She decided to make hers look like flowers and crumpled balls of tissue paper and glued them to the middle of each paper.)

That's all for now,
Jo!

December Crafts

In no particular order, mostly because I don't remember what order we did them in, here are some of the crafts we did in December :)

Cardboard Christmas Trees:

These were so easy and turned out adorable. Take a cardboard box you have lying around (especially if it's Christmas season) and cut it into triangle. Then simply glue strips of paper onto it. we stuck with green and red colors predominately, with the occasional blue and yellow per request. When they were done with it I used a couple washi tape strips to cover the bare spots. So simple right?!?! We ended up stringing them (as you can see) and hung them on the window that the tree was in front of. We called it our own little tree farm.


Coffee Filter Snowflakes:

Another simple craft! Simple water paint coffee filters and then fold and cut like snowflakes! They turned out so cute and kept my girls busy for about an hour (and that was just the painting!). We hung them from an old baby gate across the stairs so we walked through them every time we went up and down the stairs. (The littlest K girls loved to stop and stand in them while being carried down the stairs.)

Rudolph Wreaths: 

 These were my parents' craft with my K girls, and one for my nieces, technically. But I helped with the execution! Aren't they adorable? And KL was too cute holding the eyes over her own! These are a little more complex if giving every step but very basically: they are 6 in x 12 in strips of tulle knotted around a Styrofoam wreath. Skewers and hot glue hold the eyes and foam antlers along with the red nose (which were Styrofoam balls painted red- the eyes are unpainted but given a black pupil). The ribbon was just tied around (because the kiddos wanted it).

and the last craft that me and the K girls did together...
Snowman Slime:

 You can see even the littlest Ks got in on the play (and loved it)! 2 Tablespoons each of water, liquid starch, and glue- that all it takes. The original recipe I saw said 1 cup of each but I thought that would be way to much of a mess. It takes a little kneading when you first mix it before it gets to full slime-y goodness but it's so much fun after. We added a little blue, silver, and gold glitter along with snowflake shaped glitter (you can see a few in the close up picture) to give it the winter feel. They played with this so much and were quite upset when I decided it was time to throw it away. It will probably make a reappearance though so fear not!

That's all for now!
-Jo