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!

paint-print ghosts

We started out doing some ghost-writing this morning.   I got the idea over at Teach Preschool recently, and thought it looked like fun.  The Hooligans really enjoyed it. 

We poured white paint into black styro-foam trays, and orange paint into white trays, and the kids had fun writing with their Q-tips.

That soon turned into painting on black construction paper with the Q-tips.  Miss Mess particularly enjoyed this, and stuck with it much longer than the boys did.  They were eager to get back to their playing, as this was our second craft of the morning.  We’d already made our Tissue Mummies.  One craft is usually all that they have the patience for, but it was cold and rainy this morning, and we were stuck inside, so I was kind of pushing my luck.  Anyway, Miss Mess worked away happily, until she was satisfied with her work.  

When she finished, I called the boys back, and handed out smaller pieces of black construction paper so they could make prints with the left-over paint. (Forgive my blurry pics today, I’m playing with the settings on my new DSLR camera, and clearly, I am in need of some photography classes!)

They just pressed their paper into the paint tray, and lifted it off to reveal a “print’.  And, whaddaya know?

The prints looked like they would make some fine, little ghosties, so we let them dry, and added some button-eyes!

Cute, huh?

apple trees with sandpaper, foil and cork

We did another apple craft today.  I thought apple trees would be fun to make, but I wanted to use materials that were more interesting to work with, than just glue and construction paper.

I put out several different grades of sandpaper, and had the Hooligans touch them all to feel their coarse-ness.  We compared the sandpaper to the bark on a tree, and used the sandpaper for the trunks and branches of our apple trees.  

Next they dipped tin-foil balls in green paint and “stamped” leaves all around their branches.  

The last step was dipping a wine cork into red paint and dabbing “apples” on their trees.

Really simple, and really cute.

apple-stamping

‘Tis the season for picking juicy, ripe apples off the tree, and I’m seeing a lot of apple crafts happening out there these days.

We decided to do some apple crafting of our own this morning.  This was really simple, and looks so pretty.

hooligan art

I haven’t kept many photos of the Hooligans’ art projects, but here are a few that I’ve managed to drum up.  I’ll be sure to keep and share pictures of the little artists at work in the future!  For now, here are some simple ideas to get your little ones creating some masterpieces:

these grocery store fruit trays are great for mixing up finger paints

cut items of clothing and accessories out of catalogues, and glue together to create people

feet fish: trace feet & decorate

we made stamps by using a pencil to draw on styro-foam trays. Glue styro-foam to a bottle lid or yogurt container. Our ink pad is a sponge covered in paint.

painting on paper towels with coloured water

cut a variety of shapes out of thicker styro foam & dip in paint for some stamping

paint and feet are always a great combination. Squirt some paint into styrofoam meat trays and let the kids go crazy on a large piece of cardboard or paper

I’ll post more pictures of our art when the Hooligans return to daycare in the fall.  Meanwhile, we’d love to see some of your masterpieces!