crafting with children

Thanksgiving Nature Crafts

Holiday Crafts: Leaf-Carved Pumpkin

Fortunately, the kiddos were perfectly happy with my suggestion that we carve the pumpkins into something appropriate for Thanksgiving, not Halloween, and that’s how we ended up with our leaf-carved pumpkins. They’re festive without being spooky, use real leaves as stencils, and are, thankfully, just as fun to carve as Jack-o-lanterns are.

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Tutorial + How-to: Upcycled Glass Jar and Tissue Paper Luminaries

Gently glowing, flickering luminaries are a beautiful sight in the evening.

They’re also an excellent, easy kid’s craft. Using any old glass jar as a base, kids will LOVE pasting colorful tissue paper squares to make pretty pictures, and they’ll be thrilled to see how gorgeous their creations look that night, with a lit candle inside to start the magic.

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Upcycled Greeting Cards

Book Page Prints into Greeting Cards from Spooky and Bright

How to make your own greeting cards that aren’t super cutesy and twee?

Include something vintage!

I made these DIY greeting cards not with rubber stamps of teddy bears or foam stickers of ducks in bonnets, but with vintage book pages. Pages trimmed from a ratty, torn copy of The Turn of the Screw and an old dictionary, embellished with paint, compose the front images of a set of all-purpose blank cards, suitable for either the kids or the adults in the family to use.

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Crafty Book Review: Side by Side, by Tsia Carson

It’s no problem to find crafts for kids to do.

It’s no problem to find crafts to do for kids.

Crafts that you can do along with your kids, however? Collaborative crafts that work well even when one participant is young and one is old? Projects that an adult doesn’t have be bored by or bossy about, that a kid can contribute meaningfully to, that they’ll both enjoy just as well?

Yeah, those are a little harder to come by.

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How-to: Edible Bread Dough Sculptures

This bread dragon, served with a cashew and spinach spread, will grace the table at my kiddo’s dragon-themed ninth-birthday party, but our dinners are often served with bread turtles, bread snowmen, bread monsters, and more, all made by the kids just for fun and just as happily eaten–whole wheat bread, consumed without complaint!

Here’s how to make your own edible bread sculptures.

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How-to: DIY Dragon Gold or Pirate Treasure

Want to host an EPIC treasure hunt at your kiddo’s next birthday party? Do not waste your money on cheap plastic or nasty chocolate-filled gold coins; you’re just spending money on trash–literally, in fact, because you know the party kids’ parents are going to throw that junk out the second their kid goes to bed that night.

Instead, wow your kid’s friends with giant hunks of real gold treasure to hunt. The kids will love them, because they look way more awesome and like real loot than anything you can find in a big box party store. And if the kids do eventually get tired of playing with their gold nuggets, their parents can simply add them to their flower garden as decoration.

Because this gold treasure? It’s river rocks, y’all, painted gold.

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How-to: Upcycled Toy Charm Necklaces–They’re Toys You Can Wear!

These toy charms can be worn on a necklace or bracelet, one at a time or in a whole herd. They make fine jewelry on their own, but the secret trick to these little charms is the latch that allows you to release them from their jewelry status. In the blink of an eye, you’ve gone from having a necklace full of toy dinosaurs to a handful of toy dinosaurs, ready to make standing in line at the grocery store SO much more bearable.

Here’s how to make your own.

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Recycling Christmas Cards

Isn’t it hard to part with the beautiful Christmas cards that you receive from family and friends? Last year I made a New Years banner from Christmas cards and Becky has shared Seven Ways to Recycle Greeting Cards, but here are 5 more ways you can recycle all of those gorgeous cards!

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