Fairy Dust

I looked up a recipe for homemade glitter at http://www.theideabox.com/Homemade_Glitter.html. It turns out you can add a few drops of food coloring to salt, and then bake at 350 degrees for about ten minutes. The glitter doesn't smell very good, but it is pretty (just not as shiny as real glitter). I gave each of my girls a small container of glitter and sent them outside to play with it like fairy dust. My three year old loved sprinkling it on grass, flower beds, trees, and even herself. She loved being a "fairy," and the older girls enjoyed it too. The salt dissolves, so it doesn't matter where it gets sprinkled. It also vaccuums up well, which we discovered after my three year old fairy used it to spruce up a bit of her room. :o) The world can never have too many little girls with fairy dust!

Spring Nest

Here's an idea that I got from Country Living Magazine. To make the nest, simply turn a bowl upside down and cover it with plastic wrap. Cover the bowl with shredded paper (a great way to reuse shredded documents)that has been dipped in paper mache paste. You can make the paste by mixing school glue with water, or you can mix flour and water (and you can throw in some glue for good measure with that mixture if you want to). You can look up exact measurements for the paste online, or you can do what I did, simply mix until you like the consistency. Allow the paper to dry overnight, then remove the nest and plastic wrap from the bowl. Carefully peel the plastic wrap away from the nest. Tadah! A homemade nest! My girls loved making these nests with me. They liked the squishy paste. You can put candy, plastic grass, plastic eggs, etc. in the nests. Emily came up with the idea to paint real egg shells for ours. She carefully cracked the shells at the top for our scrambled eggs. We then rinsed the shells, allowed them to dry, and painted them with acrylic paints. I positioned them upside down in my nest so they look whole, but you could also leave them with the cracked side up and make a little bird to put in it. There's lots of potential with this fun craft!

More Spring Crafts

I made these wall hangings by using a dry brush technique (putting a small amount of paint on your dry brush, then getting almost all of that paint off before painting your surface) on a piece of old cardboard. The creases in the cardboard make the board look old and worn, and the dry brush technique makes the cardboard look like a distressed piece of wood. I then put a variety of things in the center of my boards, and added stickers to spell Spring. I used wire coiled on the top for one hanger, and just used ribbon in the other three. You could glue a big flower in the center of one, real or dried. You could add anything springy that you have laying around your house! This is a simple "free" craft to make. Just use things lying around!

Spring Wreath

I've been in a crafting mood since last week, so I decided to make some simple and inexpensive crafts to celebrate SPRING!!! Today's craft--a super fun foam flower wreath. I bought the foam flowers at Dollar Tree. They had the same type of foam flowers at Micheal's for five or six dollars (there may have been more flowers in the pack, but not five times more!). I also bought the foam flower/leaf stickers at Dollar Tree. The foam letters were in my craft drawer, but I'm sure you can buy them at Dollar Tree as well. I simply folded a piece of paper and stapled it to hold the SPRING letters. I stapled the wreath together, put flower stickers over the staples, and then used school glue to put Spring on. It took about ten minutes to throw together, and it was super fun. This would be a great kid craft too. It's light enough to hang with wall tack or tape (you may notice my tacky tape job on my wreath, which I'll be hiding in the back of the wreath soon... What was I thinking?) Foamy and fun! Cheap to boot! I have some other fun spring crafts coming soon...

Toilet Paper Roll Wreaths

My sister-in-law sent me a link to the blog "Creative Jewish Mom" where a woman had posted an idea for making flower shapes out of slices of toilet paper rolls and then gluing them into a wreath http://www.creativejewishmom.com/2010/06/recycled-toilet-paper-roll-wall-decor.html. Some friends and I got together and made wreaths. My friend Kimberly's wreath is the wreath with the big, bright buttons on it. They all turned out super cute, and each one was different. We found that using 9 petals on the flowers made the wreaths sturdier than fewer petals. You can embellish the wreaths with paint, buttons, scrapbook paper, glitter, and even put glue on the edges of the flowers and dip them in seed beads to make the wreath look sparkly. All you need is scissors, hot glue, white glue, embellishments, and your imagination!

Christ-centered Christmas Tree

I was trying to think of a way to incorporate the true meaning of Christmas into our Christmas tree yesterday, and I made some little ornaments that were super easy, fast, and cheap. I went to the LDS bookstore and bought a variety of small pictures of Christ. They were $.25-$.50 each. I punched a hole at the top of each one and tied a loop of ribbon and a bow. I then looked up a scripture to go with each picture, typed them up, then cut them out. For FHE we took turns pulling a scripture out of a container, reading it, then picking the ornament that went with the scripture. Then we hung the ornaments on the tree. It was super fun, and I really like how the pictures of the Savior add to our tree. We put a larger picture of Baby Jesus ($2.00) near the center of our tree, and it is gorgeous! I think I'll add more scriptures and ornaments next year. I just wanted to pass the idea along in case anyone else wanted to try it!

Thanksgiving Worksheets

Here is a link to some fun worksheets for Thanksgiving! There are pages for all ages in elementary school. There are fractions, cursive, crosswords, coloring pages, color by number, etc. http://www.tlsbooks.com/holidaypages.htm This website has lots of fun worksheets, so you can browse around while you are there. Below the Thanksgiving worksheets are Christmas worksheets. Enjoy!