Ingredients: Milk Arrowroot Biscuits (or any oval shaped cookie), white icing, white marshmallows, pink sprinkles, lollies/candy and black writing icing. To make the ears, cut a marshmallow in half and dip the sticky centre into the pink sprinkles.
Ingredients: Milk Arrowroot Biscuits (or any oval shaped cookie), Sour Strap lollies, Mini M&Ms, icing tinted with food colouring.
More of my Easter crafts:
Easter Dipping Spoons
Plastic Bottle Basket
Easter Foam Eggs
Finally – we have a wobbly tooth! A good friend once gave me some wise advice about the first Tooth Fairy visit. When her daughter lost her first tooth, the enthusiastic Fairy left, not only coins, but a dazzling display of glitter trails, streamers and hand-cut paper flowers. Several teeth later it dawned on my friend that old TF may have peaked too soon and failed to take into account that children lose about 20 teeth in total. As my friend had twin girls she was naturally concerned that TF would struggle to continually meet the very high standard she had left on her first visit. (Personally I suspect TF may have had too much fairy chardonnay that night, but I digress.)
With this in mind, we decided to make it easier for the Tooth Fairy and create a little spot dedicated to tooth retrieval. I saw these cute mini doors here. I haven’t found anything locally so I thought I’d have a go at making our own.
For this project you will need a piece of regular box card – the type with corrugated fluting on the inside. The fluting is important as the door is hinged via a skewer threaded down the centre of the cardboard.
I liked the idea of an outside world inside the box, so we painted the interior with landscape colours. Then we made a little tree from ‘Make & Bake Clay’. In the tree is a tiny nest to place the tooth in. To strengthen the tree I first twisted a wire frame, then we wound the brown clay around it. I rolled out some green clay and cut leaf shapes with a craft knife.
Click here for full instructions (Pdf)
When it comes to Christmas dresses, I’ve found the choices to be rather slim – or brief, to be exact. Last year I needed something festive to wear to a children’s Christmas Party. The only festive outfits I could find were of the skimpy/after hours/in-private variety. Hardly appropriate! (“Mummy, why can I see Mrs Claus’ undies?”) SO, I found a second hand red dress, pictured on the left, and transformed it into the dress on the right:
It even lights up!
This is how I did it:
1. Stitched white fur trim to the collar, pockets and hemline.
2. Replaced the buttons with gold bells
3. Unpicked an opening in the hem and threaded plastic garden reticulation hose all the way around, inside the hem.
4. Decorated a pair of red shoes with bells and plastic holly.
5. Fortunately the dress had an extra lining skirt underneath. To this I safety pinned 5 novelty flashing Christmas necklaces.
And there you have it; a Christmas Dress that flashes in a child friendly/G-Rated kinda way…
More of my Christmas Crafts:
Santa Treat Bag
Santa Marionette
Christmas Cookies
Here is a simple and inexpensive homemade gift to add to a birthday or Christmas card. These bookmarks are small, flat and lightweight, making them perfect for posting with cards. As our school year is almost finished we will be making them for our teacher appreciation gifts.
To make a Beaded Bookmark you will need an assortment of decorative beads, ribbon, needle nosed pliers and wire. The wire needs to be thin enough to fit through the holes but thick enough to hold it’s shape. I used 0.7mm (0.26″). The thin end of the bookmark is designed to slip inside the spine of the book. For this section I used small, tubular beads. If you cannot find tubular beads, try using small round beads. This will produce a slightly bulkier bookmark. Click here for full instructions (Pdf)
Or words to that effect...
Decorated Jar
Decorated Jar
Decorated Jar
Paper plates are a staple in any craft kit. The plain cardboard generic brands work best as they are thin and have no plastic coating on them. Hopeless for putting food on but brilliant for drawing, gluing, cutting, stapling and painting. Decorating is purely optional. If you are making this for a boy and wish to ‘man it up’ a little, tie it around their waist for a bum bag. (US readers, I think you call them ‘Fanny Bags’, but we don’t here in Australia – I’ll spare you the explanation. Google it if you’re curious)
Paper Plate Handbags are easy to make, all you need is 2 plates, a stapler and some ribbon or string. Decorating is entirely up to you. The plates pictured below have a coat of acrylic applied first. For a quick and easy project, leave the plates plain then children can decorate the finished bags with stickers, markers, crayons etc.
Click here for full instructions (Simple Bag)
Click here for full instructions (Pdf)
*Much cheaper than the real thing, AND you can barely tell the difference! Although, like the genuine article, try not to get it wet….
More of my paper plate crafts:
Easter Suncatcher
Paper Plate Basket
3D Opera House
I spend more time in $2/discount shops than I care to admit to. China may be belching out pollution at an astonishing rate, but by golly haven’t they given us a wonderful avalanche of cheap crap to rummage through? Some say these stores are (*gasp!*) full of junk. Not I, oh no, I’d much prefer wandering the aisles of ‘Dynamic Discounts’ than any Cartier or YSL. There’s a $2 dollar shop down the road from me, I’ve been there so many times the couple that own it treat me like their daughter.
This post is dedicated to all the things I’ve made from discount shop discoveries. Like the Sea Glass Lamp above. Technically the little lamp came from Ikea but it was very cheap so I think it counts. The glass stones were $2 a bag. It took 3 bags to cover the lamp. Below are some more of my crafts that began their life on the discount floor.
Paper Plate Baskets
Painted Foam Eggs
Play Kitchen
Wacky Wigs
Sequined Mirror
Mini Party Cups
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I found some rather uninspiring melamine bookshelves at Red Dot. (I think I keep that place in business!) The shelves may have been dreary but their low price was truly exhilarating. With the ‘help’ of my children, we transformed them from this:
To this:
To make the sink, I traced the outline of a plastic container onto the top of the shelf and cut it out with a jigsaw, then slipped the container into the space. The container had a lip to stop it from falling through.
To make the taps and faucet, I found some garden reticulation parts that vaguely resembled the bits I needed. I screwed the ‘taps’ in and attached the plastic white button thingos that conceal screws – not sure of the name, but I found them at the hardware.
The hotplates are simply 4 circles of black plastic with red craft foam circles in the centre. The knobs are milk bottle tops. Like the taps, I attached them with screws and stuck on white buttons to conceal the screw.
The doors are 3mm MDF. I chose this to keep the costs down, but if I had my time over I’d probably spend more to get the thicker board. The 3mm warped a little when we painted it. It was also difficult to attach the hinges to such a thin board. Rather than complicated latches, I used sticky-back velcro to keep the doors shut.
The 3 tier bookshelf became the fridge/freezer.
I found some carboard boxes that fit perfectly into the bottom shelves for storage. We painted the front of the box to match the doors.
I have 2 mini muffin trays. Goodness knows why. The chances of me baking even one mini muffin = zero. So I donated one to the play oven. I screwed 2 pieces of pine to the interior sides of the oven so the tray sits in the middle as a sliding shelf.
I made the kitchen to fit perfectly along one wall of our cubby house. The kids enjoy it immensly, hence it is already covered in sand, leaves and sticks – as it should be. It really wasn’t terribly difficult to make – and I’m certainly no woodworking expert. Altogether the whole kitchen cost me about $70 (including the shelves)
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An Easter Egg hunt is not complete without an Easter basket to store the eggs in. Try making this simple basket using plain paper plates.
You will need plain white paper plates, paint, scissors and a stapler. The eggs pictured above are my painted foam eggs.
Click here for “Paper Plate Basket” instructions
How to make a simple Valentines rose. All you need is coloured patty pans (or cake cases), green plastic drinking straws, pipe cleaners and scissors. The patty pans pictured are from IGA. I mention this as they have the ones which are coloured on both sides – sometimes hard to find. Here I have made a red rose, but you can make a variety of different flower types. See my video, below, for some other ideas.
Click here for full instructions (Pdf)
This Sunday (6th February) is New Zealand National Day, or ‘Waitangi Day’. It commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on February 6th, 1840. Waitangi Day is intended to celebrate the coming together of the indigenous Maori people and the European settlers of New Zealand.
The Poi is used in the traditional dances of the Maori people of New Zealand. Poi is the Maori word for ‘ball on a cord’. The cords are held in each hand and swung in rhythmic circular patterns while dancing. Red, white and black are traditional Maori colours. This project will show you how to make a standard Pom Pom, (and turn it into a Poi Poi if you wish).
The video below shows how traditional Maori dances are performed using the Poi.
Click here for full instructions on how to make a ‘Pom Pom Poi Poi’
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