School’s Out! Get into Craft with the kids!

Schools Out! Get into craft with the kids

School’s out! I know the feeling from both sides! As a teacher, I look forward to my breaks away from the intensity of school and as a mom I know I would love to just have a break but I am also glad to know that at least I’m only responsible for my own kids! Yay!

Sometimes I almost think I hear parents unanimously moaning and groaning at the prospect of having to ‘babysit’ their own children! Really!! And moaning too that teachers have too much time off. Trust me! We don’t!

Don’t fear! Help is here!

What you do is to come up with something of a schedule which you must sell to the kids in as attractive a way as possible. That’s what I do. Don’t wait for them to say ‘mom what are we going to do today?’ In fact, prior to the holiday period, we decide how we will fill each day. Give the kids a chance to have an input (dependent on their age and level of maturity of course). Allow them personal time, a chance to meet up with friends, time for group activities, outdoor fun and our favourite – craft! That way, they get to do what they want to, with a little guidance from you!

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In our family, we like to do a lot of different craft. Did you see my recent post about button art? If you have unused buttons, it’s an impressive but simple way to use them up. You can also check out this post showing some cushions made by 11-year-olds. In this article, I will be sharing with you some craft ideas of what we have done in recent time to amuse ourselves.

Bottle craft

In our municipality, we are given various receptacles to use for recycling household waste. I do recycle and to be honest my receptacles are not usually full like the others in our neighborhood. That is because we actually follow the mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle.

I like to save as much as I can for our craft projects. 

We have recently looked at bottle craft. There are lots of images on the internet including on Pinterest. There are a number of things you can do with clean glass bottles in terms of decorating and repurposing them.

 

For the bottle craft we did, you will need:

Clean glass bottles or just wash any glass bottles you have

White primer

Paint Brushes

Acrylic paint

Spray varnish

First, paint the cleaned bottles with the primer and allow that to dry.

Next use an acrylic paint of your choosing to paint the bottles. For this particular set, we chose blue. (The bottles were originally green)

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During the drying process, we thought of ideas for designs for the bottle. We decided on a type of Japanese art we had seen on Pinterest.

After that coat is dry, we then painted the design with black, pink, yellow and white.

The final part of the project is to add the spray varnish. Ensure this is done in a well-ventilated area, preferably outside. The varnish adds a sheen to the finished project and also seals it. Simple, but effective. What do you think?

  

Decoupage Furniture

Deco what? Decoupage! That is the French art of decorating with paper. We have recently discovered and started this type of craft too and then even more recently branched out to doing decoupage to furniture. My suggestion, straight off the bat, is that you should try a simple project first because a large piece of furniture might make you disillusioned with decoupage.

Well, the colour scheme in our kitchen is black and white. Years ago I had bought a black and white window blind which was too long so I had cut it myself. I didn’t have any plan for the piece I cut off but I still stored it away.

  

Come seven years later, I went and got it to decoupage a kitchen stool. Now, this is an old wooden stool that we inherited when we purchased another house. It just needed some loving to put some life back into it and to make it part of the scheme in the kitchen.

You can see the picture of the stool below.

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For this project you will need:

Mod podge

Spray varnish

Chalk paint

Fabric/paper with designs on/wallpaper

A small item of furniture

Fabric scissors and  paper scissors

How we did it

To decoupage it we first cleaned it with soapy water.

Whilst it was being dried, we cut some designs out of the fabric from the kitchen blinds.

We then used the white primer to paint the stool both on the top and the bottom, waiting first for each section to dry.

After the primer, we applied the white chalk paint to the stool and allowed it to dry. That did not take too long, but we still left it a day.

Next day we played around with how the design should look and then photographed what we thought was the best looking one so we would remember when decoupaging.

With Mod podge, we then applied the design to the stool.

   

After that process, the glue was left to set.

After drying, the stool is placed outside where it is well ventilated and sprayed with the varnish, which gives it a gloss finish as well as seals it.

We are very proud of those two projects we worked on during the break from school and hope you enjoy learning about them too and are willing to try them out when next the kids get a break from school.

Let us know what you think in the comment box below.