Vintage Christmas Fairy Doll Printable
Over the years I have always tried to add a free printable project at Christmas – I’m not sure I’ve managed it quite every year, but I recently came across this Christmas Fairy Doll in my collection of vintage items. It dates I think to the 1930’s. The original is pretty small, so I’m not sure if the original intention was for it to be scaled up manually, but today at least in the digital era, it should be rather easier to enlarge! To use, download the image, print out, attach the fairy onto lightweight card – I used double-sided adhesive film for this (affiliate link), customise and cut her out.…
Artful Advent Ideas
It has been a long time since I’ve managed to post anything on here. There are lots of personal reasons for this, which I won’t go into here, but with it already approaching the festive season, I thought it was about time added some new, and hopefully useful content. For the last couple of years I have been trying to find the time to establish a proper directory of resources on Artful Kids – it has been something of a stop-start project, but hopefully it is now, finally, starting to take shape. It is a combination of resources already on this site, external resources elsewhere which are free of charge,…
Creating Artful Christmas Tree Ornaments
Who says that art materials can’t be festive or decorative in their own right? If you’re looking to create an artfully themed Christmas Tree for a studio, creative space, or just at home, here are a few ideas you might like to try… Festive Paint Brushes Give those old worn out paintbrushes a new lease of life by transforming them into decorations. Decorate the handles with brightly coloured paints in any style you choose, and then dip the tips into glitter paint, or PVA sprinkled with glitter. Use the hole in the handle to thread a hanging ribbon through, and away you go. Alternatively you can just arrange them in…
Snowflake Colour-In Wrapping Paper
Each year I like to produce something as a Christmas ‘gift’ for readers, so this year’s offering is a snowflake colouring sheet which can also be used as a creative wrapping paper. Colour-in wrapping paper is I think amazingly versatile, offering lots of scope for personalisation by both the giver and the recipient. I think they look just as effective partly coloured as fully coloured, or even left plain. This snowflake themed sheet is very simple, and can be made to look very pretty with the addition of glitter glue, or metallic pens for colouring or outlining. Just click on the image and then right click to download it for…
Postage Stamp Christmas Wrap
Christmas is creeping up ever closer, and for the last few years I’ve tried to offer readers a Christmas gift in the form of a seasonal free printable. I think I must have forgotten in 2013, but in 2012 it was 3 sheets of vintage Christmas wrapping paper, and the year before a printable Christmas Tree template to decorate. This year I’ve put together some sheets of Postage Stamp Christmas wrap using the scanner – one of my favourite tools for art making. My Dad has always collected stamps, but he was having a clear out recently and offered me a large number of Christmas stamps that he’d collected over…
A Card with a View
Another Christmas Card project! This one is a very simple idea which is really easy to make, and has the added benefit of recycling your old Christmas cards, so unless you’ve saved some cards from last year, this may be one to keep for the future! When I was a child, we inherited a few old early 20th century cards from a great-aunt, who had kept them because they were rather more special than your average card. I don’t know what happened to them, but I remember a couple of them in particular took my fancy. These were 3 dimensional snow scenes with a snowy window effect on clear plastic…
Keepsake Christmas Card
Christmas is getting ever closer, and I thought it must be time to start getting things ready preparing our home-made cards. We alsways need plenty of time for this, and this year is no exception. These days rather than making a whole pile of home-made cards at Christmas time, we’ve got a bit lazier and tend to send out just a few to special friends and relatives – this means we can spend a bit more time on them too, so it’s a little less like a production line and the quality is higher! So for this year’s card me and the kids put together something which can also double…
Vintage Christmas Wrap
I’m still here! Something terrible hasn’t happened, I’m not ill, and I haven’t got bored and decided to do something else. No the reason why I haven’t managed to write a post for 3 weeks, is simply because of Christmas. I was full of plans for projects and features here this Christmas – it’s such a fabulous time of year for children to be creative, but unfortunately they are all still lying around the house half finished 🙁 So in the meantime I thought I would offer up an early Christmas gift in the form of 3 sheets of original vintage Christmas wrap for you to print off. These come…
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A last minute Christmas post before I sign off for the holiday, and I still haven’t wrapped the presents! Back in June when I took part in Mommy Labs’ Forest Fiesta Blog-hop, I promised to put up some scanner art trees to embellish. Unfortunately I never got round to it, so my Christmas gift is a template for a scanner art Christmas tree on a stand just waiting to be embellished. All you need is some thin card, (we used an empty cereal box) scissors and glue to get started. If nothing else, it might keep the kids occupied for a while over the holiday period! To get your own…
Thumbprint Gift Tags
More arty preparations for Christmas, this time in the form of simple gift-tags made with finger or thumbprints. I love finger and thumbprint art much more than that using hand and footprints, which (with some notable exceptions) I often think can look rather contrived. In contrast I love the simplicity of finger and thumbprint artwork, and the fact that you have to embellish them and add detail to turn them into something else. The robins and penguins were created from a single base thumbprint in black or brown, followed by a finger print on top in white or red. Details such as eyes were added with paint, and legs with…
Snow Paper
Christmas is such a wonderful time for making things and my head has been buzzing with ideas for projects recently – I just wish we had the time to do them all, but it’s also the busiest time of year for Artful Kids, with lots of orders to fulfil, so time is frustratingly in shorter supply than usual. To make sure that I squeeze in some time for creating, two things tend to slip – housework (that’s my excuse anyway) and browsing online 🙁 Our latest project has been making some ‘Snow Paper’ – a really simple thing to do, with lots and lots of different uses afterwards. To begin…
Artful Discoveries
On my travels around the internet I often come across really good art and craft ideas, or ideas that really appeal to me, In view of the season, I thought I’d share a project which I came across at Glittering Shards for making these beautiful hanging mosaics using plastic bottle tops. They make lovely tree decorations, and they can be as simple or complex as you like. The original tutorial which I used can be found here. I varied it slightly, in that I made just one hole in the plastic, and threaded a single piece of wire through, doubled back to form the loop. I also sprayed the lids…
