Scented Shapes Gift Project
Home-made gifts are especially meaningful to receive, and when those gifts are useful as well as thoughtful, it only adds to their value. This project for a useful creative gift is a very simple one which can be adapted for use with younger or older children, or by grown-ups, according to need, and also offers infinite opportunities to customise the shape, scent and style of decoration. This project contains affiliate links which means I will earn a small commission if you purchase using them. You will Need DAS Airdry Modelling Clay Essential Oils Dried Lavender Cookie Cutters You will also need: Some clay modelling tools, such as a small rolling…
Create your own Magnetic Art Kit
I have dabbled with magnetic art in the past (see one of my early posts for junk magnetic art) – I love the simplicity, flexibility and infinite possibilities of magnetic art, and it is so easy to make your own unique sets at home. For this project I used my stash of painted papers, and purchased some thin self-adhesive magnetic sheets, which can be cut quite easily with sharp scissors. As an alternative to painted paper you could recycle some decorative wrapping paper, or images and textures from magazines. All that was required was to stick the sheets of paper onto the magnetic sheets and cut out whatever shapes I wanted. It’s also worth…
Personalise some Arty Pencils
It’s been a long time since I last added something to this site – life has simply got in the way, with moving home, school holidays, and lots of other things going on. Although there are lots of other potential events on my horizon which might further disrupt attempts to get back to business as usual here, with the kids back at school again, I thought it was about time to give it some attention and make time for creative activities once more. With this in mind, and the usual back to school stocking up with stationery, I’ve been creating some personalised pencils. These are a lovely low-cost gift to…
Arty Lavender Sachets
Time is still short for me at the moment, so I hope you won’t mind if this week I use a project that I originally created as a guest post last year. I very rarely do guest posts – not because I’m unwilling to do any, but just because I’m far too shy about putting myself forward for them! These lavender sachets are a simple idea for creating a small gift with your children. I think they would look especially good presented as a set of 3 or 4 in a box, and they are another gift which is both unashamedly sentimental yet also useful – my favourite kind. All…
Decorative Drawer-Liners for Mother’s Day
Ever since we first tried making Paste Papers, I’ve been wanting to do more – it’s over a year since we did our last batch, so half term seemed like a good opportunity to have another go and try some different techniques. I had the idea to create some decorative drawer liners, which meant that fairly large sheets of paper were required, so out came the old flip chart again. This has proved to be such a good investment, as I find myself using it quite a lot. The paper is also quite thin, and is therefore ideal for the particular technique I wanted to use. Last time…
Arty Pencils
One of the Christmas gifts I made this year, to go alongside a set of Artwork Jotters, were these artwork covered pencils. I was quite pleased with the result, which looked I thought fairly professional, so thought I would share them with you. If at all possible, these are best created using plain wooden pencils as a base, otherwise when you sharpen them, the original colour may peep through beneath. This may or may not bother you, depending upon how much of a perfectionist you are. I just used some unused patterned pencils which I had to hand. You will need: Glue Matt acrylic varnish Brush for Varnish Pencils Decorative…
Doodle Decorated Mugs
These doodle decorated mugs were created using ceramic pens and plain white ceramic mugs – personally I find the pens are simpler to use than brushes. I came up with the idea while browsing in my local craft shop. I was in the ceramic painting section, and a sample mug had been placed by the ceramic pens so that customers could try them out. And try them out they had – the mug was covered in multi-coloured doodles, rather like a piece of graffiti, and I thought actually looked rather good. I liked the idea of a collaborative project which had developed ‘organically’ and I thought it was an idea…
Children’s Art Jotters
I said I’d look at some ideas for home-made gifts for grandmothers over my next couple of posts, so this, somewhat later than anticipated, is my first contribution – though I think the second one may have to wait now until after Mother’s Day! For me, often the most successful gifts are those which are both useful and which also have an added dimension – such as being beautiful or having meaning. This gift has the potential to have all 3, as well as being yet another way of using children’s artwork. The jotters allow you to either use some existing artwork, or alternatively create some specially. For the interior…
Kids Bag Tags
For this post I decided to have a go with some shrink plastic. It’s not something I have any experience of, but I found it was really good fun, if sometimes a little unpredictable. I bought a pack of A4 sheets of ink-jet shrink plastic, which I found on Ebay, and which worked out at about £1 a sheet. You can print on it (which I fancied doing for my own purposes) or draw on it directly using pencil crayons or felt-tips. It’s great to use with kids too, as it is quick, clean and ‘magical’. In fact it’s obviously quite popular as a kids activity as Shrinkles produce party…
Crayon Cookies
Following on from my last post on wax crayons, I thought I would introduce this project for Crayon Cookies which uses up all those odd bits and pieces of broken crayons that you always end up with. Method Remove all the paper from the crayons – I found this was easier if they were soaked in water for a few minutes first. Using an old muffin tray, divide up the crayons between the different sections. The advice is to use an old muffin tin, but I thought I could get round this by using muffin cases – wrong! The wax still got onto the tin, but it did clean up…
