This week’s craft was simple fun inspired by this (click image for source):

Sadly, I don’t think I made a paper chain since I was a little girl and I wasn’t sure I remembered how. But I tried.

Ahem, I have an art minor from college can you tell? Yeah.

Once we cut them, they were even less recognizable. The first one fell apart and only a few chained.

But the next one was right.

And David enjoyed the process a lot.

Especially when he got to open them for the first time. So he didn’t care that I had no talent.

And remember the truck from last week? They all ended up in the trunk.

All in all, it was quick but really fun! We need to make more of these.

Since it was David’s birthday last weekend, I thought it would be fun to make him do his own thank-you cards.

We picked three different colored papers form my leftovers stash. Grabbed the Martha Stewart butterfly punch and punched a bunch of hearts out of each. I then cut some heavyweight 8.5×11 paper to create the cards.

I wrote the inside of the cards, thanking them for the specific gift. I kept it short since I knew David would take up a lot of room writing the names.

David then wrote the names of the kids on top.

And his name on the bottom of each card.

When he messed up, we just went with it. Then, we grabbed some stamp and ink:

And we stamped the front of the cards. Some crooked, some less.

He then put glue dots and put one of each color butterfly on the cover. And ruffled up the wings.

And here we are:

Very flawed but 100% authentic. Love them!

This week’s David decided we needed to do a treasure box. I had this old brownie box I’d been keeping so we decided to convert it.

We took a bunch of the excess paper I had from scrappy projects and tore it up to smaller pieces.

We then covered the box with glue and stuck the papers haphazardly so they covered the box. David did all the sticking with a little guidance from me. I then covered the whole thing with another layer of glue and we left it to dry.

We then did the sides and the other piece.

We cut off all the excess paper, glued down the stay bits and the next thing we knew, we had a fully covered box, waiting to hold some treasures. We might embellish it more but it looks pretty perfect as it is.

We kept the jello container from last week to do one of these.

The source link.

We used some red scrap extras to make the roof.

I attempted to draw some windows and doors on another scrappy extra.

David helped me glue them on.

Of course, no project is complete without stickles, so we used them to decorate.

And here’s our final product, left to dry overnight.

It was pretty dark by then which is why we have blurry-ish photos. I love the whole scene in the original post and we’ll have to add to it at some point. But this is a cute start.

What I didn’t realize until I sat down to do one of the crafts on our list was that most of these require materials we don’t seem to have at hand. (So while I am good at making lists of ideas, I neglected to make one for supplies. Good job, eh?) One of the only items on the list that had simple supplies was the paper-plate dogs.

The full tutorial from kids craft weekly.

Believe it or not, I didn’t have white paper plates, but I did have some heavy weight paper. So I drew the doggie. (yep, I made him too fat at first but it didn’t matter since we cut it out.)

After I cut it out, we turned it inside out so the drawing lines would not show. We taped the head and the tail. Then I drew an eye and a nose and David colored it in.

We then cut up a tiny bit of gray fabric to make his ears. He was already looking pretty good by then.

The tutorial then has some glue and dirt for the spots. But I had something easier, so I pulled my stickles and drew some circles for David to color in.

And here’s our final product, left to dry overnight.

Looks pretty cute if you ask me.

A few weeks ago, we went to David’s school for the bi-annual parent-teacher conference. One of the things the teacher said was that David is well-rounded in that he is interested in art as much as playing with trains and blocks. They thought it was wonderful that he enjoyed art and baking and I totally agree. So I decided that this year, I will take time (at least) once a week to sit with him and do some crafts.

Since I know from experience that it’s more likely to get done if I already have a list of ideas, I made an initial list of ideas. I might do all of these or none of these and I will likely add to it throughout the year. If you happen to know of fun craft ideas for kids (he’s going to be five years old in February), please please leave me a comment and I will add it to my list.

As we do them, I will post them here and change these links so you have both our creation and the original idea’s link.

I’ve also made a visual version of this on tumblr so we can quickly look at the photos and David can pick what he wants to do that week.

Here’s my initial list:

1. Cut-out stencil prints
2. Halloween bats
3. Halloween gourds
4. snowman doorstop
5. leaves art
6. make a kite
7. miraculous leaf rubbings
8. messy leaf prints
9. robots
10. Paper plate dinosaurs
11. Paper people chains
12. stencils
13. flowers
14. flower pot
15. xmas advent
16. xmas countdown advent
17. nature bracelets
18. origami tree
19. wrapping bottles
20. yarn pompom
21. felt xmas trees
22. fabric ornaments
23. hanukkah – city
24. cereal box houses
25. fun wreaths
26. leaf stenciling
27. popsicle pencil holder
28. paper heart
29. glue resist dinosaur
30. froggy jello
31. recycled milk carton truck
32. felt cuffs
33. bath ice cubes
34. sun prints
35. body flip book
36. bead bugs
37. ice cream sandwiches
38. juice box boats
39. ice cream cones
40. felt caterpillars
41. fairy wings
42. fall tree
43. felt shapes
44. fishing game
45. apple trees
46. apple cake
47. crow puppets
48. halloween mini pumpkins
49. halloween haunted house
50. spider cookies
51. gourd ghosts
52. halloween bat garland
53. halloween painted jar luminaries
54. 3-d tree with felt leaves
55. paper chains
56. yogurt cup houses
57. thanksgiving wreath
58. acorn painting
59. paper roll squirrels
60. gingerbread man puppets from felt

A wide range of ideas. Some easier and some more challenging. Here’s to a year of crafting with my (big) little one. As Nathaniel grows up, he might join us for a few of these, too.