Simple Toddler Craft

 Sydney is really into making crafts lately and she insisted on doing some crafting the other day so I decided to go the simple route and have her make this cute little tree.

 I grabbed a few supplies...scissors, 2 punch out shapes (flower & leaf), a pencil, a glue stick and some construction paper.

 I started by cutting out the tree shape and she helped me punch out the leaves and flowers from orange and red construction paper.

 She then began to glue the leaves and flowers to the tree while I cut out the tree trunk.

 We finished by gluing the tree to the trunk and adding a little owl hole. 

Simple, easy and she loved the punching and gluing.

DIY: Montessori Pink Tower Ornament

The Montessori Method holds a special place in my heart and I truly believe it is the most amazing education that I can (thankfully) provide for my daughter. She currently attends Montessori school in the Toddler classroom and I also am lucky enough to work at the same school. I like to actually make something for her teachers that she can also have a hand in creating so this year we decided to construct little Pink Tower ornaments. To me, the Pink Tower is kind of like the Montessori mascot. 

The one I kept for myself. 

First, I picked up some pink craft paint, 3 different sizes of wooden blocks, and some twine. I got all of these supplies from Michaels. 

Sydney then painted each block pink. I think we put two coats on each block. 

The final blocks; I made 5 ornaments total. After all of the blocks were dry, I glued them together with tacky glue and then hot glued the piece of twine to the top. I wrote 'Made by Sydney 2011' on the bottom of each one. 

The finished product on our tree. This is an easy project if you have any 'Montessorians' in your life. Her teachers and my boss LOVED them. 

Thanksgiving Crafting

We have a tradition of doing a Christmas craft on Thanksgiving morning while we munch on sausage balls and sip our coffee. This year we did a project from the new magazine called, Stitch Craft Create. This magazine has page after page of super cute ideas so I really hope it sticks around.

We decided on the cute little trees that adorned the cover.

Fabric stitched and ready to be sewn on.

The end results.

I decided against using the sticks/wire for the bottom since they seemed a lot sturdier without it. Plus, I figured when you packed them up, they would get bent out of shape.

Sydney made some cute little snowmen while we worked on our trees.

Ta-Da!

Have you made any Christmas crafts lately? I always love a good project!

Crafting: Owl Wreath

A friend and I made these wreaths yesterday for a couple of hours. It's based off of a kit from Paper Source but we changed up the colors a bit. I think they turned out really cute but during the process, I lost feeling in one finger tip and the skin off of my middle knuckle! So worth it.

You could easily make this without the kit templates. (We only had one kit and then we made up another one using the enclosed templates as a base.) All you need is to cut out a large and small flower and a leaf shape to use as templates. The exhaustive part is cutting out all of the flowers, there are 4 large and 4 small stacked on top of one another in EACH flower on the wreath. So you need to cut out about roughly 100 flowers. You only need to cut out 12 leaves. Once you get all the flowers cut out, you use a bone folder to curl up the edges of each petal and then we used a dot roller to stick each flower together. You then attach each flower to the wreath form and then attach the leaves. (We used double sided tape.) Then you cut out the owl and his parts for the center and affix it to the back of the wreath form. (We used a stiff cardboard wreath form.)

Mr. Owl

Flower details

Gettin our Craft on....

If you are not aware, sometimes it can be difficult to craft with a toddler. There's the impending mess, possible meltdowns and short attention spans to account for. But a wonderful thing that toddlers love and has zero mess are stickers! I wanted to make a fall wreath for Sydney's door so I pulled out a bunch of felt leaf stickers I had and cut a circle out of a heavy piece of scrapbook paper. I let her affix all of the stickers wherever she wanted. She kept saying, "I did it", every time she put one on. (I LOVE it when she says that, it's so cute!)

I then helped her glue on some shiny leaves and some random buttons we had on hand. For the finishing touch, I traced her hand on a piece of apple print scrapbook paper and cut it out to hang in the center. Simple, cute and easy! She loved doing it and now I have a keepsake for years to come. What fall crafts have you been doing with your kiddos?