Crafting with the Toddler

I craft with the toddler often. She starts the mornings off with crayons and a coloring book or paints! Occasionally, she'll dig the jar of buttons off of the shelf and arrange them on the table to make a pretty picture. She is very creative! Well, I was sitting on the couch folding laundry the other day and realized that I don't have one single kid-made ornament on my tree! That is an outrage! I use to have tons of ornaments that my boys made in school and at home! I had so many that I would hang them from garland above the door. But, sadly they were lost in the great basement flood of 2006! It was such a sad day! You can't replace them and now that the boys are teens they are not a fan of recreating them! Double sad! I miss my babies!

I wanted to fix the fact that my tree was lacking character. So I decided to trade the toddlers crayons and paint in for scrap book paper one morning. At first she wasn't happy about it. She loves her crayons! But, once I started to trace her hand on the back of this pretty paper things started to look up!

So, just a quick how-to, since I didn't have my camera when I made these and don't have pictures to follow along with it.......On the back of a patterned piece of scrapbook paper (the back was a solid color otherwise you could glue your cut out onto a solid or print and then cut that out), I traced her hand using a pencil. That way I could erase any lines that might show.

Then, I brought out the glue and lord help me. I am still cleaning glue off of my chair! Originally, I thought I would just let her dip her finger in the glue and finger paint the hand print with the glue but she wasn't having any of that mess! So, I grabbed a cotton swab and let her dip it instead. On the hand print in the picture, I helped! So of course it's all nice and neat. But she used a more artful approach when left to her own devices and she pretty much covered the entire hand print with glue. I had to make sure she didn't take too long with the glue since I didn't want it to dry. I wanted the glitter to stick!

Once the GLITTER came out she was all in! Loving this project to pieces! Yes she was! I'll be cleaning glitter up for a very long time. I don't care! So, she has everything in the dining area coated with glitter. There's no more glitter and  that's her cue to shove off. Leave Mama to do the dirty work once again. I left everything to dry on the table while I vacuumed the rest and swiffered what I could up. I used a hole punch to punch a hole in the cut out once it was dry, for my ribbon. But, on some of them I used fishing line. I don't know why.......I just thought I'd try it out, save some ribbon. You could also use yarn! Or embroidery thread. Maybe string some beads through to make it extra fancy!  You could even trace their hands on a recent picture if you wanted to make it more personalized. The possibilities are endless. On the back of our hand prints I wrote her name and the year so we could keep track. We'll see what it looks like next year! :)