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…
Cut Paper Valentines
Another Valentine inspired craft, this time using cut paper to showcase pieces of children’s artwork. I love cut paper projects, so much so that I have been considering getting a digital paper cutter, as yet I haven’t done so as they are relatively expensive and I’m not sure yet whether I’d use it enough to justify the expense, but in the meantime I’ve been doing a few projects by hand with a knife and board, which is quite time consuming when it’s a detailed design, but ultimately fairly satisfying. This design is very simple and doesn’t take long to cut, but even so, because it involves using a knife, it’s…
Tissue Paper Valentines
Sometimes the old favourites are the best. This project uses a familiar, one might even say classic, technique of children’s artwork, to create something that looks a lot more sophisticated. I actually made these cards (along with a whole bunch of others) a month or two ago, but decided to hold them back because they weren’t particularly Christmassy. I will share some of the others too at a later date. The cards are created by taking tiny ripped up pieces of tissue paper, and scrunching them into miniature balls. The balls are then glued in place, either singly or packed tightly together to form a picture, depending upon what you’re…
A Christmas Gift for You
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…
Halloween Scanner Art
As the days grow shorter and the weather gets colder, the shops start to fill up with Halloween related products. In the UK this is a relatively recent phenomenon – when I was a child, although we were aware of Halloween, it wasn’t much ‘celebrated’ as such – there were few parties, and no trick or treating to speak of. All the festivities were reserved more for Bonfire Night on the 5th November. For my Scottish husband though, trick and treating was very much a part of his childhood, so maybe it’s more of a Celtic thing in terms of origin? Who knows. Anyway, the range of products now available…
Land Art in the Spring
With all the fine weather we’ve been having recently, I’ve been keen to spend more time outdoors with the kids, so following on from my earlier seasonal posts on a natural theme, I thought I would complete the series by taking a look at some land art for the Spring. This is the time when there are lots of flowers and plants available to inject some colour into your artwork and the weather is also better, so spending some time outdoors creating artwork is much more tempting. As with my other land art posts, this is a cheap activity which requires absolutely no materials whatsoever other than what is available…
Simple Valentine Cards
Messing around with paint the other day (as you do) I ‘accidentally’ discovered I could print quite effective hearts with my fingers, and with Valentine’s day coming up I thought it might be an easy and very personal way of making a joint Valentines card together with the kids. All you do is use the top third of your finger to create each side of the heart, laying it on the paper diagonally, first one way and then overlapping diagonally the other way. Make sure that you press the whole of your fingertip down, not just the top, or you won’t get the bottom of the heart, and of course…
Ice Lanterns
For the last of my ‘icy’ posts I thought I would include the ice lantern which we made over Christmas. Ice lanterns and ice bowls have been around for quite a while, and it seems the lanterns are even ‘traditional’ in some parts of the world. A few years ago I even had a commercially made, star-shaped mould for making one, until it unaccountably got distorted so that it was impossible to remove the ice, and had to be binned. Nowadays with freezers, you can make these at any season of the year, using whatever natural materials are available: flowers in the spring and summer, colourful autumn leaves, or in…
Icy Artwork
Following on from my summer and autumn posts about Land Art, it seemed appropriate to continue with a post about Winter Land Art. This is the time to create those snow sculptures – to go beyond the usual snowmen, and create snow castles and palaces, snow animals, or even abstract forms. Or how about some ice installations. Those beautiful cold clear winter days when the sun glitters on the frost, and turns ice into diamonds, and red berries stand out like drops of blood, are particularly inspirational, and if you and the kids are wrapped up warm they provide the perfect opportunity to get out there and be creative. I…
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…
