I am not a fan of public speaking!!! When I was asked to fill in and speak to our MOPS group about activities to do with your kids I decided to go ahead and give it a try. To my surprise it was not as scary as I thought it would be. After speaking one of my friends asked if she could e-mail my power point to some of her out of town friends. I told her that I could put it on my blog, sadly that was about 2 months ago. But better late then never right? I hope it encourages you to try a few new ideas with your kids.

I know I did not need to add this slide of my boys but I just love this picture. Its so hard to get a good picture of three little boys and they are just so darn cute here!

Here is a list of my must have craft supplies. There are so many different kinds of craft items (and I have bought a LOT of them) but these are our tried and true. Most of them are self explanatory but I will add a little more information about a few:

1. Tape: I would recommend buying the cheapest tape possible. I found a bunch at a garage sale once and it was one of my favorite finds. My boys love to tape everything.
2. Shaving cream: not general considered a craft supplies but its very versatile. Here is a link I just found for 20 activities to do with shaving cream.
3. Table cloth: I bought a thick vinyl table cloth that I always throw over the table when we are doing a messy craft. Its truly a life saver for me because I do not need to worry about what might happen to the top of our table.

On a side note I want to recommend not spending money on the color wonder products. The idea behind them is great but we have tried a few and my boys do not like them because there is such a delay in the art showing up on the paper.

If you are not using Pinterest you should! Even if all you do is pin fun ideas to do with your family its totally worth it. There are more ideas then you can imagine on Pinterest. Here is a link to what NurtureStore thinks is the top 10 pinterest board for parents. But watch out because it is addicting!

Letter of the Week! This is one of my boys favorite craft activities. We started following the amazing step by step instructions from notimeforflashcards.com. Now my five year old enjoys coming up with his own ideas for each letter.

Hand and Foot Print Art. I do not think there is anything sweeter then using your kids hand and foot prints to make gifts and cards for family. Plus my boys get a big kick out of painting their hands and feet.

Use what you have around the house. You do not need to buy lots of extra stuff for kids crafts. Let them use their imaginations!

1. My boys love to decorate houses for their toys by cutting pictures out of used magazines and gluing them to the inside of an old cardboard box.
2. When you have left over pasta throw it in a bag or box and let your kids use it to make their own pictures or draw a picture and have them over it with the noodles.
3. My son loves going through our recycling box and pulling out anything that catches his attention and making all sorts of amazing stuff. (This is where you want to have lots of cheap tape on hand).
4. Use items from around the house to paint with. Noodle painting, cars tire painting, bottom of a bottle painting, kitchen utensil painting, pasta stamping.
5. The snowman was made with a fun puffy paint made my mixing glue and shaving cream.
6. Paint with water. This sounds so simple and not super excited but my boys always love it. It works well on colored construction paper, chalk boards, a wood fence, driveways and sidewalks. Its also great when you have a little one who wants to paint but is not quite trustworthy enough to have paint.

What do you do with all the art you make? We like to hang it up in place of honor for a few days (like our masterpieces wall) and then throw it away. For my boys I think that the process of making the art is more important then the finished product. However, if you want to hold onto it for a while get some clean pizza boxes and slide them under your sofa. Then you can put their art in the box and when its full go though it and pick out your favorites to keep. I also love the idea of taking pictures of your kids art, and them uploading them to a digital picture frame so you can continue to appreciate the art without all the clutter. If you want to be creative with your kids art I found a site that has 30 ideas to Upcyle Toddler Art.

Its also important to remember that the craft does not need to end up looking like you envisioned it. I am a perfectionist so it was hard on me at first not to “help” things turn out like I wanted them too. But I have discovered that even though something might look “wrong” to me my boys normally have a good explanation as to why they did it the way they did.

Fun gift idea! Its always nice to give a loved one a hand made gift but sometimes you also want it to be something they are proud to hang on the wall. My boys loved helping me make this for a family friend for Christmas. I blogged about making it and linked to the tutorial here so you can check out directions if you want to give it a try.

Busy Bags! This is a great group project. A few of my friends and I decided that we wanted to make some busy bags for our kids. The first thing we did was pick a date to meet and what projects we were each going to do. We had eight kids between all of us so we each picked two different busy bags and made eight copies of them. Then the best part was we meet for a Mom’s night out and dessert one night and exchanged our bags. Now I am slowly bring out the activities when I need a few minuets of undisturbed time. For some busy bag ideas check here, here, and here.

Cheerio Towers. Who know that little boys would spend hours playing with play doh, cheerios, and spaghetti noodle? If you want to know more check out my previous blog post about cheerio towers.

Some of the hardest time with little ones is when you are stuck inside the house. I have found its always good to some activities set aside for when cabin fever sets in.

1. I love this “laser beam challenge” that was part of a super spy training birthday party created by chicken babies.
2. Marshmallows and toothpicks! I never would have thought of this but my boys loved it (but expect a lot of the marshmallows to magically disappear into your little ones tummy’s)
3. Balloon ping pong from The weekend homemaker.
4. Something as simple as a flashlight can keep kids entertained for hours. My boys love to “look in dark places” around our house.
5. A straw and a feather. Have some races to see who can blow the feather from one spot to another first.
6. Have a letter or color scavenger hunt.
7. Play hot lava with all of the cushions and pillows in your house.

Chances are if you are stuck inside your house will be a mess. I recently found a quote that I love (and plan to put up in my house soon):

Please excuse the mess. The children are making memories.

Bath time is not just for getting clean. On a really bad day I find the best thing to do is throw my kids in the bathtub. My boys favorite thing to do in the tub is glow sticks. Everyone that I know that has tried using glow sticks in the tub say their kids have to be pulled out of the tub after an hour of playing. My boys also enjoy painting in the tub. And you can add some food coloring ice cubes for color fun in the tub.

I personally do not like painting with sidewalk paint but my boys beg for me to make it. When you start painting the color is a little dull but it brightens up after a few minuets. The first time my boys tried the sidewalk paint I was surprised how easily they cleaned up afterward with a wet wipe. However, the last time they did it my littlest spent more time painting his hair then the sidewalk, so they had to take a bath when they were done.

My boys love going on walks and having scavenger hunts. An easy one to do is take an old egg carton and color each of the holes a different color with marker. Then have them try to find something that matches each color (I do not advise doing this on a windy day because things will blow away). We also did the brown paper bag scavenger hunts and that was a little better because they did not lose their “treasures” to the wind.

1. Fun sidewalk activities
2. Freeze toys in large ice blocks for the kids to play with outside on a hot sunny day.
3. Making your deck into a game board.
4. Here is a link to 75 great activities to do with your kids. I really love this list and can not wait to try out some of the ones we have not done yet.

Sometimes I think its important to take a day and make it memorable. My boys love theme days! We have only done a few but they can’t stop talking about them. Our big day was a Pirate day and we spend the whole day being pirates and doing pirate activities. (I hope to blog about it someday but have not had time too). We also did a smaller theme day and acted out The very hungry caterpillar by Eric Carle. The boys made caterpillars out of pipe cleaners, puff balls and googly eyes. Then we went outside and read the book. After that the boys ran around the yard “feeding” their caterpillars.

Crafting is something I enjoy and therefore enjoy doing it with my boys. I know that not everyone feels the same way, but I think its important to figure out how you can take what you love and do it with your children. If you love it chances are they will too.

I am very excited that I have a new neighbor that loves to do crafts. We got together this week while the boys were napping and made string Easter eggs. I think they are so cute and they were simple to make, although a little time consuming (which is find when you are getting to know a new neighbor). I found the idea on Pinterest (of course) and it linked back to this site with all the instructions. But I did have a few things to add after making them:

-You must have strong lungs to be able to make these. Blowing up the water balloons had to be the hardest part of the whole thing. Maybe it was just the balloons we had (since they did not break last year when we threw them and they were full of water), but it was no easy task.

-I think next time I do it I am going to try not to add the flour to the fabric starch because they did not mix well. All the flour seemed to be either on the bottom of my bowl or clumped on my string when it dried. I have found similar projects done just using the fabric starch.

-I also want to note that it is important to carefully unwind all of the string into the bowl and not just dump it in. I started out following the instructions, but decided that it seemed unnecessary so I tried to just place one of the skein in all together. It really seemed like it would work, but it definitely got knotted very quickly. Just goes to show I should learn not try to take the easy way out.

-Also try to wipe all the excess liquid off of your string as you wrap it around the balloon. I did not do that every well and it took over 15 hours for my egg to dry and there are lots of clumps on the string that I am not fond of.

All and all it was a fun project and I think they look very festive sitting on my table. (I just wish I had the perfect size glass  jar to hold them.)

Ok, so yarn wrapped wreaths can be pretty addicting to make. Its a simple project that can make a huge difference to the front of your house. My new wreath makes me smile every time I drive up to the house. I bought a 16 inch straw wreath with a plastic cover. I read on another blog not to take the plastic off and I am so glad, because it made the wreath much easier to wrap without getting caught on the straw. When I finished wrapping the wreath in the yarn I was just a little short so I would recommend a 14 inch wreath or two bags/skeins of yarn.

I was really excited when I was shopping because I came across Doodle Yarn on sale for 50% and thought it would make the wrapping easier because its so thick. I was able to get the whole wreath wrapped in about 10 minutes (which is much better then the hour my first one took me).

I used hot glue to hold the beginning of the yarn in place on the back of the wreath. Then as you are wrapping you will need to go back and fill in a gap from time to time. Just put a little hot glue on the back where you finished and move across the back of the wreath put a little more hot glue to start where you need to fill in the gaps. Then repeat to get back to where you left off. Hold the end of the yarn in place with a little more hot glue.

For the flowers I bought one foot of three different fabrics. There are lots of different very similar tutorials to make hand twisted fabric flowers but I used this one. I used different lengths and widths to make the different sized flower. The first few flowers that I did I spent a lot of time on them trying to make them like I wanted but I found that the faster I did it the more I liked the out come. I attached them to the wreath with hot glue.

On his way to work Josh used to drive past this old apple barn that had been demolished. Every time he went by he thought about all the “treasures” he might be able to find in the heap of old wood.

One day when he drove by there was a group of men working on the old barn site so he stopped and got permission from the job foreman to take anything he wanted. Sadly, he decided that most of the wood was not useable, but he did find 48 wooden dowels from an old conveyor belt (like this one).

Then the dowels sat in our garage for the next two and a half years. I was so happy when we were able to add a guest room/office in our basement, because we really needed the space and we finally had a use the for dowels. It was my husbands idea to cut the dowels down and make the feature wall. I have to admit I was a little skeptical at first, and even more skeptical while we spent hours cutting, sanding, staining and mounting the disks.

The 48 dowels were cut down into 1020 disks using a miter saw. The dowels ended up being made of three different types of wood: oak, poplar and pine. We cut them down into four different sizes and used three different types of stains on them. It took many, many, many hours to cut them, roughly sand them, and individually dip them in the stain. I even had our four year old helping me sand and stain one day.

Then it was time to figure out how to attach them to the wall. We decided to use hot glue.  It held the disks on tightly, but they can also be easily removed with a quick hard tug. Which was good because we ended up trying them in three different configurations before we decided on the final arrangement.

We had a garage full of dust, a room that took a while to air out the smell of stain and hands covered in hundreds of stings from the hot glue, but we are very happy with the unique outcome of our accent wall.

I was very excited to hang a wreath on my door for the first time this Christmas season. I am even more excited because I made it and I love how it turned out.

I bought a styrofoam ring and then wrapped it in yarn. It did take a little longer then I thought it would but did it while hanging out with some great friends so it was more fun then work. Next time I will definitely use a straw wreath though because the yarn kept sticking the the styrofoam. Then I made the felt flowers using the tutorials on this blog, they too take a little time but are fairly easy to make. I am also really happy with how much I spend on it. I was able to get the styrofoam ring, yarn, and white berries 50% off so all together the wreath only cost me $9. Can’t complain about that!

I am not sure what I was thinking but last year I decided that I wanted to make our family new Christmas stockings. It was not the decision to make the stockings, but the timing. I started them the first week of December, gave birth to our sweet third child on December 16th and then finished them on Christmas Eve eve. It may have been crazy but I love them!

When I started planning them I thought I would be able to use hot glue, but I found out that glue showed through the white. I think that I am happy that I ended up sewing them because it gave them a more finished look.

I also really love the “mantel” that we made for them. We had no where in our house to hang up our stockings. We found this piece of wood in my Dad’s junk pile and did a light white wash on it. I added a few fresh cut evergreens and pin cones and it turned into a beautify place to hang out stockings. Now I am really sad when its time to put way the stockings and “mantel”.