Wednesday, May 10, 2017

How to Make Lovely Geodes in Your Own Kitchen

To make beautiful geodes in your own kitchen you need more patience and time than anything else! Here is the basic recipe to start you off in the world of beautiful geodes. ever free coloring

Project estimate & recipe:
- 3 Tablespoons Borax, about $4.00/box
- 1 Cup boiling water, on hand
- Food colouring, on hand or $1
- Pipe cleaners, on hand or $1
- Large jar, glass or pitcher, on hand
- Dish cloth, on hand
- Skewer, butter knife, chop stick, on hand
- Fishing line or curling ribbon, on hand or $1

Total:  about $4 and up


The colour of the pipe cleaner is what decides the colour of your crystals. For example, I used dark blue to get the sapphire colour. If you only have white pipe cleaners, you can use food colouring in the water to dye them.  Metallic pipe cleaners work best.

Shape the pipe cleaner(s) and thread fishing line or curling ribbon through the edge.

Put it in your empty container and using a skewer, butter knife or chop stick, tie the ends around it so that your pipe cleaner shape doesn’t touch the sides or bottom of your container.  Once you’ve got it tied off at the right height, remove it from the container before you add your water. Hello Kitty Coloring pages

Bring water to a boil and carefully pour into your container. Add the Borax and food colouring (if needed), stirring until the Borax is completely dissolved.

Add your pipe cleaner shape tied to the skewer, butter knife or chop stick and cover with a dish cloth.

Let sit overnight or about 5 hours. Uncover and be amazed!

Carefully pull out the fishing line or curling ribbon from your finished geode.

Notes:
1. Don’t throw your water away! To reuse it, heat the water to boiling again and add 1 & 1/2 tablespoons of Borax.

2. I believe that what little affect the food colouring has will fade pretty quickly. Cover your geodes with a coat of clear nail polish if you use food colouring.

3. The longer your geode is immersed in the water, the bigger the crystals will be.

4. I strongly suggest curling ribbon or fishing line to suspend your pipe cleaners. I originally used string and couldn’t pull it out of my finished geode.

5. For larger geodes, make a cage out of chicken wire and wrap it with pipe cleaners.

Easy Summer Kids Craft: Popsicle Stick Smores

It’s a simple kid craft idea that is perfect for the upcoming camping and summer season! Everyone LOVES s’mores so without a doubt – they going to love this easy DIY pretend piece idea as well! Using my FAVORITE craft medium of late – I present to YOU our Popsicle Stick Smores kid craft idea! Paw Patrol coloring pages

So gather up the supplies below and get “fired up” for some epic craft time! Don’t forget to make the real thing afterwards to celebrate your masterpieces! Happy crafting, my friends!!!



Smores Supplies:
* Jumbo Popsicle Sticks {9 per Smores craft}
* Small Paper Plate
* White/Black/Pink Craft Paint
* Paint Brushes
* Light Brown/Dark Brown Cardstock
* Glue
* Scissors
ever free coloring

Directions:

Step 1: First assemble the base of your s’more friend by gluing your popsicle sticks together to look like a fence {7 next to each and two across} Set aside to let it dry completely.

Step 2: Now grab your paint, paint brush and popsicle stick base. Have children paint the front of it completely white {the marshmallow} while you cut out some “graham crackers and chocolate” from the cardstock.

Step 3: To finish off the Popsicle Stick Smores craft, have children glue the cardstock pieces to the popsicle stick design, along with drawing on a face with the remaining paint. Then let it dry completely before displaying proudly!!!

Creating a Fun Marble Run Arena from a Cardboard Box

Use cardboard, craft sticks, and hot glue to create an epic marble run!  The marbles land in paper cups at the bottom of the track.  This is a fantastic engineering challenge for kids.  How should we position the sticks?  Which path will the marbles take?  How many will land in each cup? pokemon coloring pages

As always, make sure that the kids playing with the marble run are not putting the marbles in their mouths!

Aidan and I built this marble track, and then the younger kids have been enjoying playing with it.  Owen was going to help us, but he got distracted building castles out of the extra paper cups – very typical!


Want to see it in action? We started with cardboard sheets that my husband had cut from our IKEA sofa box.  Then all we needed were craft sticks, scissors, hot glue, paper cups, and duct tape.

We taped strips of cardboard to the sides to keep the marbles from rolling off.  I cut the rims off the cups before gluing them to the cardboard so that the marbles would roll smoothly into the cups.

Then we glued craft sticks to the cardboard with hot glue.  We did two sections with little short sticks to make it sort of like the Plink-O game.  It worked great!  We weren’t sure how much of an incline we were going to want for our marble run, but leaning it against the couch worked perfectly. Ever Free Coloring

We put our ottoman behind the couch for the younger ones to stand on, and they had a great time sending marbles down the track.  Janie and Jonathan worked together for a long time loading up the container, then sending them all down, then loading up the container again.

And of course someone had to pour the whole bucket of marbles down at one time to see what would happen!

Even though we felt like our sticks were evenly spaced, the cups at the bottom told a different story! You can see that the red sticks at the bottom diverted marbles away from the fourth cup.

Some marbles did roll between the cups.  We had little balls of tin foil blocking the holes, but Janie was very bothered by them and pulled them all out.  Just know that that is an option!  Cotton balls would probably work well too.

I would love to try this project in a classroom setting with different teams of kids building their own track!  Hmm, maybe I should think about that at our church’s homeschool co-op…

Popsicle Stick Craft for Kids: Trolls Poppy

This Trolls Poppy Popsicle Stick Craft for Kids will have you thinking it’s all cupcakes and rainbows in no time. One of my favorite things about Poppy from the Trolls movie is that she is not only the leader but also responsible, positive and upbeat all the time. I love her pink skin and sparkles too. So out of all the cute and adorable Trolls I chose to make her but you can always extend the group and make your favorites too. cartoon coloring pages printable


Materials:
- Popsicle sticks
- Bright and light pink craft paint
- Green, blue, and bright pink felt
- Pink buttons for nose (optional, or use felt)
- Blue tissue paper squares for flowers  (optional, or use felt)
- Bright pink faux fur
- Googly eyes
- Scissors
- Foam paint brush
- Hot glue/hot glue gun

Directions:

Step 1: Cut one of your popsicle sticks in half and place them horizontally about 1 1/2″ apart and glue 7 sticks vertically onto the two shorter ones.

Step 2: Paint your sticks pink with your foam paint brush and let dry. Ever free coloring

Step 3: Cut a nose and 2 ears our from your pink felt and glue the ears to the middle back side of the popsicle sticks and the nose in the center.

Step 4: Glue two googly eyes above the nose.

Step 5: Cut out a piece of faux fur that measures 1″ wider than your popsicle stick troll and about 4-5″ tall.

Step 6: Glue your faux fur above the eyes, turn your troll over and glue the top two sides into a point and secure the edges by gluing them to the back of the popsicle sticks.

Step 7: Cut out a thin green rectangle headband the width of the hair and secure with glue.

Step 8: Now you can either cut out small flower from your blue felt and glue them to the headband or glue small pieces of blue tissue paper to the headband like pictured.

Step 9: Draw a smiley face below the nose with your black Sharpie and little eyelashes coming from the eyes.

Step 10: Dip your fingertip in light pink paint and dab it onto the cheeks for blush.

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Collections of Beautiful Kids' Handprint Crafts for Summer

Make some handprint crafts this summer! They make fabulous canvas art for kids room too!














Fun Craft Idea for Kids: Sharpie Dyed Coasters

Here is another fun and pretty easy little children’s craft project. This is a very inexpensive craft and I think the results are both pretty and functional. You can use Sharpies to create beautiful designs on coasters or trivets in whatever color scheme you like. This is one of those easy rainy day projects to file away as a possible gift idea for the Grandparents! ever free coloring

To get started you want to pick up some tiles from your local home improvement store.  You can choose small tiles (4×4) to use as coasters or slightly larger tiles (6×6) which make lovely trivets.  I would get the shiny tiles- ours were about $.50 each.


Here are the other supplies:
- Assorted Sharpies in the colors of your choice
- Rubbing Alcohol
- Eye dropper

This craft was originally posted on the Sharpie blog so I followed the instructions they offered.  I will tell you that our results were not the same as the Sharpie blog and some of the instructions weren’t 100% clear to me.  I think think these turned out really cute though so I am not at all disappointed in the project.  And really the kids absolutely loved this project and my husband said “Hey those look really cool!” so a win all the way around. Moana coloring pages

To start with let the kiddos loose with Sharpies on the tiles.  Do not worry at all about mistakes- we found the Sharpie came off really easily with water so you can just wash away any mistakes and start fresh. We used the standard Sharpies you can see below- not fine point markers.

Initially we tried for lots of pretty colors- this was our first set of tiles:

So we were really excited about the rainbow coaster on the top left in particular- once we started adding the rubbing alcohol it looked awesome:

We thought these looked pretty cool but once they dried they looked terrible.  All the blended colors looked grey and swampy and we would up washing all of them except one to start fresh.

So you might consider sticking with 2-3 colors at most and use colors that will blend together nicely such as yellow and red.  (Your colors might wind up either brown or grey otherwise.)

Note my 5 year old left a lot of white and made very thin little designs on her coasters and my 7 year old made thicker designs and colored the coasters in completely.  Both strategies worked fine in creating little masterpieces.

Here was another one that we did just so you can see you don’t need any special pattern to your design.  Just have fun and color it in however you like.

Once you are done coloring the tiles you can either let them dry or you can just move on to step 2 right away.  Step 2 is to fill an eye dropper with rubbing alcohol.  If you don’t have one, you can try using a spritzer bottle or a straw to slowly drop dots of alcohol on the coaster.  It will spread and create cool patterns on your tile.

Here is what ours looked like:

What we found is that it is best to only drizzle on a little of the rubbing alcohol and let it spread.  Then once that dries a bit, you can come back and do a little more… and so on until you get the design you like. You can add a little more Sharpie once it dries if you find too much got washed away from the alcohol.

Once it is dry you might take a look at the edges of the tile and see if you want to color those or leave them alone.  I colored some of them and left some of them alone just depending on the tile and the colors we used.

When you are happy with your design, you can take a spray fixative and lightly spray over to seal in the colors.  I wasn’t sure what Sharpie meant by “fixative” so at first I used a spray glue I had on hand.  Mistake.  That gave the tile a texture that I didn’t like at all so I wouldn’t recommend that.

I combed the aisles of the craft stores to find “spray fixative” and came up empty handed.  I finally settled on a spray Mod Podge that was $5.99 with a coupon at Hobby Lobby ($9.99 regular price).   Oh and I also tried to use the regular Mod Podge I had on hand to just brush it on.  That didn’t work either as it smeared the Sharpie into lines and ruined the design. So the spray Mod Podge might be the best road to take.

Go ahead and spray that on and let it dry. Last but not least you can add a varnish at this point and add felt to the bottom.  I did not varnish our tiles and mine have held up fine.  If this is a gift for someone or you think you might be washing this frequently, it might be worth the extra step to find a varnish to really protect the color.  I tried setting a drink on our unvarnished tile that was icy cold and sweating water onto the tile and I found the colors did not smear off- so success with just the Mod Podge for me!

The tile bottom is textured and will easily scratch up a table so you can get simple pieces of felt and cut to the size of your tile and glue that on the bottom.  For a more finished look, you can actually buy little felt circles that will stick to the bottom of the coaster to protect surfaces.  I found these with the ironing and curtain supplies at Joann’s for something like $2.00.

And your finished tiles should look pretty cool:

I have one of these on my desk with a candle on top and my little girl has one on her craft table with a jar of markers on top. The other two are in the kitchen to use as trivets.

So give these a whirl and see what you think!  The price for everything was about $.50 per tile, about $3 for rubbing alcohol, $6 for Mod Podge and $2 for the felt pieces.

Valentine Craft for Kids: Watercolor Heart

We love crafting in our house and ever since we discovered watercolor prints with tissue paper we’ve been obsessed! We’ve made a robin’s nest garland, American flag and evergreen tree garland using this technique. It’s only fitting we made this watercolor heart kid’s craft for Valentine’s Day. Though I must admit I’m considering keeping these pink and gold hearts up all year long in our daughter’s room. Today I’m sharing with you this simple to craft to make with your children (or even as an adult!). ever free coloring

A fun and simple kid's craft to make watercolor hearts. Use tissue paper to create a beautiful watercolor heart design. You can use the hearts as Valentine's Day decorations or all year long as kid's bedroom decor!


First gather your supplies. Here is what you will need for the watercolor heart craft:
- Watercolor paper
- Bleeding tissue paper
- Spray bottle
- Scissors
- Pencil
- Heart shape
- Spritz gold pens (optional)
- Glitter glue (optional)
- Chalk markers (optional)

WATERCOLOR HEART KID’S CRAFT

After you gather your supplies spray the watercolor paper. Make sure it is covered completely with a light layer of water. If it isn’t covered completely you may end up with some white spots without ink. I kind of like it as an artistic touch, but if you want it full of color, spray and rub the water completely over the watercolor paper. Then add tissue paper. Medium to dark colors work best. hearts coloring pages

After you cover the watercolor paper with tissue paper, spray the entire paper again. Then let it dry for 2 hours (or longer if it is still damp).

After it is completely dried, remove the tissue paper and admire your work of art! Next, trace heart shapes on the back of your paper. Our hearts were approximately 4 inches wide.

After you cut out your hearts you can decide how you want to decorate them. We added doodles and swirls with chalk markers and the Spritz pen from Target. My daughter also wanted to use her glitter glue on a few of the hearts. Decorate as you wish! We decided to add our decorated hearts to garland we found in the Target dollar bins, but you can also use yarn or baker’s twine. I also think they would look adorable as Valentines with handwritten messages on the back or glued on to white stock card.

Have you ever made watercolor art with tissue paper before? I hope you enjoy this craft with your children.