tissue paper snow-flakes

Mother Nature isn’t providing us with much snow this year, and any that we’ve had doesn’t last long, so we’ve had to make some snow-flakes of our own.

This is a super-simple craft that looks really pretty, and only calls for a couple of materials: some white cardboard (about the weight of a cereal box) and some blue and white tissue paper.

The pics are fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll just quickly tell you what we did.

I printed a snowflake template from an online colouring page.  Cut that out, and trace it onto your cardboard.

Now cut out your cardboard snowflake.

Drizzle some glue on your cardboard.

Crumple squares of tissue paper (I cut mine in approx. 3 or 4 inch squares).

Stick your tissue paper all over your snowflake.

So simple!  Isn’t it pretty?

cinnamon-sugar snowflakes

Ok, super simple snack today.  Scott from Brick by Brick shared a recipe for Cinnamon Snowflakes yesterday that he’d passed along from cometogetherkids.com.  We’re all about snowflakes here right now, even though we haven’t seen any real ones in a while.

We used small tortillas for ours snack, but you could use larger ones too.

Microwave your tortilla for about 10 seconds so it softens up and doesn’t rip.

Then fold it in half, and then in half again, and cut it as if you were making a paper snowflake.

Place your tortillas on a baking sheet (I used my baking stone), brush with melted butter, and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar.

Bake at 350 for five to ten minutes until they start to turn golden brown.  I had mine in the oven for about 7 mins and I think they could have been in longer.  I let them sit on the stone for about 10 minutes after taking them out of the oven and they crisped up during that time.

That’s it!  Aren’t they pretty?  They’re tasty too!  We ate ours just as they were but ComeTogetherKids dipped theirs in pudding.  I’m thinking some real maple syrup would be awesome to dip into!  And if you’ve ever had a Canadian “Beaver Tail” (Oh My Heavenly Scrumptiousness), you might agree that a little squeeze of lemon juice would be a nice addition too! Mmmmm-Mmmm!

stamped snowflakes

If you’ve been poking around my blog, you might have guessed that I’m a pretty happy gal when we have a holiday to base our crafts around.  Sadly, our Christmas crafting has come to an end, but fear not, we’ll find things to craft about.  For now, we’re going to focus on our winter theme, although the weather kind of makes it hard to believe that it even is winter.  This is what the thermometer on the deck looked like at 11 o’clock this morning.  Crazy, I know.

Yesterday we started our stamped snowflake project.  I had this piece of padding from an old bike helmet.  I’d been hanging on to it because I loved the shape of it.  I knew I’d find a purpose for it if I waited long enough. 

Sure enough, it occurred to me yesterday that it would make a fine snowflake.  Unfortunately any acrylic paints that I had in an icy-blue colour had long dried up (that’s the downside to acrylics – they harden up over time).  Fortunately, Andrew’s bedroom is blue, so I grabbed the can of paint that I’d used for his room in a couple of years ago.  Having such a large amount of paint to work with was great because I was able to pour a lot into our tray for stamping.

Stamp away, Hooligans!

Once we’d had our fill of stamping, we left them to dry by the fire.

Today, I punched some holes in them and we headed outside with some paintbrushes, glue and bag of artificial snow, and we finished them up!  

And while the Hooligans napped, I strung them together with some white yarn.  Aren’t they pretty?LookLooking for another snowflake craft?  Have a peek at our beautiful tissue paper snowflakes!  They’re so easy to make!  Our popsicle stick snowflake ornaments are pretty sweet too!

popsicle-stick snowflakes

Ok!  Super-duper easy craft here.  I came across it last week over at Dilly-Dali Art.  Aleacia has been a real source of inspiration for me this week!  Her Christmas Tree Star gave me the idea for our tin-foil trees, and I have to admit I have been a totally shameless copy-cat with her snowflakes.   

No need for a real tutorial here.  The pictures pretty much say it all.  I’ll just give you some brief details.

We started by painting up some popsicle sticks.

We’ve been using my acrylic craft paints for a lot of our crafting up until now, but they’re not washable, so I picked up some Crayola Paints the other day.

While the sticks were drying, we worked on our other craft du jour: our plastic icicles.  You can see them here.

Once the sticks were dry, I quickly stuck them together using a glue gun.  You could use kids’ glue but I wasn’t sure how long they would hold up that way.

We used A toothbrush dipped in white paint, and scrubbed across a piece of screen to “speckle” the snowflakes.  This didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped so we ended up using a plastic fork to run the toothbrush across.  Much better. 

Attach your string or thread for hanging, and you’re done!  Super easy, and super cute!