Crafty Kids Gift Making Workshop

Last week I hosted a Gift Making Workshop for Camas MOMS Club. We had a great turn out of about 21 kids. With the holidays approaching, I wanted to encourage our kids to make gifts instead of buying them. We had 6 tables set up around the room with 5 different crafty gifts for the kids to make and give to family or friends for the Holidays. I made an effort to come up with crafts that were easy for the kids but even the Moms said they would want to give people. Projects included glass bead magnets, beaded hemp bookmarks or keyrings, chicken noodle soup in a jar, scented & colored bath salts, and glass ornaments with paint swirled on the inside. I also provided preprinted gift tags & little fabric bags the kids could decorate to take home wrapped gifts.

I spent a couple weeks running around to just about every store in town to find all the supplies as inexpensive as possible. I tried to keep all the projects at $1 or less for materials so they could pay $5 for all 5 projects. I lucked out and had most of the jars I needed for both the Soups & Salts donated by my neighbor. But gotta start saving now for next year! Everyone had a blast and said we should do it every year!

My Crocheted Hats...

I have been selling a lot of my crocheted hats to local friends for their kids this Christmas. If life ever settles down, I will finally list them on that Etsy store I have been wanting to start. But for now I am focusing on Christmas presents and then finishing the 3 or 4 baby blankets I have started for our Blanket Project.

I was asked to post some pictured of some of my crocheted hats, etc... Here are some from a recent "photo shoot" of Griffin and my friend Jen's kids in our backyard.

MEEEOOW!

Pirate kids!

Top Model working the runway.

Butterfly girl.

Crazy Crafty Week

Saturday Craft Fair at Cafe Sip'n'Play, local kid-friendly coffee shop. Used to do a lot of fairs, but this is my first in 3 years, since I moved to Washington.

Tuesday Charity Crochet Night, small group, but my most hesitant student finally learned to Single Crochet, yay!

Thursday Crafty Kids Gift Making Workshop for MOMS Club, 21kids, 5 crafts each, tons of fun. Hours and hours of prep time even with help from my friends. More on this when I get pics loaded up.

All Week Crocheting my Christmas Gifts in every free moment I can find, in the car, waiting for computer to boot up, in the dark movie theater watching Bond. LOL.

Another Weekend of Scrapbooking to look forward to. Need to finish first part of scrapbook for my son Griffin's preschool class this weekend. So, darn, I just HAVE to crop!

Maybe I'll have time to post more when I'm not doing so much crafting. Oh, and I have a cold this week, but I cannot be stopped! At least until I fall over...

G the Artiste

Little G LOVES to paint! I'm doing a whole 2 page spread of G's painting escapades in his scrapbook.

After much begging last night, I pulled out the easel, covered him up in Daddy's old shirt, and poured out three cups of paint, red, yellow and blue. I was working on dinner in the next room, checking on him now and then, as he swirled the colors into one solid bluish mass.

The next thing we knew, in came little G, dragging his newly painted paper, torn by the weight of the dripping paint! Poor kid just wanted to show us his work, and we jump all over him, yelling about the mess. Dad wiped up the trail of paint leading from the easel in the craftroom, through the laundry room and into the kitchen (we just discovered another blue doorknob tonight). I carefully stripped down a paint covered G. In the attempt to keep his completely blue hands off his clothes, he managed to wipe it all over his face and hair! I threw him in the bath, draining it twice before the water ran clear.

So much for unsupervised painting. Spent the rest of the evening on Amazon adding "No Mess" craft kits to his Christmas list. I love that he LOVES to make "artwork" of all sorts, but maybe we'll stick with "sticker artwork" and other paint-free activities!