Kid Crafts

Over the summer I highly neglected not only this blog but my family blog as well. I am now back into the swing of things and hope to be on both a little bit more, always knowing that my family's needs do come first.
Joyschool has started back up and today I was the host. Our theme for the week is the beach. I made cute little lobsters for the kids last night. I found the idea in the Publix magazine that comes out every so often. I was hoping that the kids would be able to help me with it but the glue took so long to dry that I just did it for them and then we did another craft today. I think they turned out really cute. I am looking forward to Thursday's craft as well, a rock sea turtle, which I found in the Family Fun magazine. Hope it all goes well and I will post pictures when we are all done.



During summer break I did work on a few other things as well. Here they are....

A Lima bean wreath. I can not remember where I found this idea but I really liked it and wanted one for my own house.

I finally finished my last project display board. It has been put to great use.

With the help of my good friend and blog contributor Alison and my mom we made 60 warm fuzzy for our most recent Primary Activity.

When my sister and her kids were in town we wanted to do a kid friendly craft. We decided to make some cute necklaces. Here we are in the process of making them. We made one for each child.

Here is the finished product. Makayla actually made the darker one for me for Mother's Day.

Materials needed for this craft: A three inch wide by about 45 inches long strip of fabric, marbles, and beads.
What you do: Fold in half the fabric strip and sew together. Turn the fabric right side out. Fold one end in a little and sew it shut. Figure out where and how you want to marbles to be placed. Once you have that figured out the start with a bead and the marble and so on. When you have all the marbles and beads that you want you sew up the other end the way you did the first and you will have a finished necklace. So easy and with so many choices of fabric so cute. Enjoy.


More coming soon. Our craft group is meeting up again after the summer off. We are really excited and have some great things we plan on doing.

4th of July Dress and Easy Star Banner

I've had this awesome red, white, and blue flowered fabric lying around for awhile. My grandmother gave it to me with a ton of other goodies, and I knew I wanted to make a 4th of July dress out of it. Like the Easter dress, I just kinda made it up with a plan in my head of how I wanted it to turn out.



I used a red and white striped fabric (that my gram also gave me) for trim and a ruffle. I shirred the top using elastic thread in the bobbin of my machine. There are a ton of tutorials online about how to do this. It's really easy once you practice it a little bit.



I'm showing a close-up of the pocket above, even though I know it is terrible. The trim is uneven on the left and I had to do two lines of stitching across because it didn't catch the back on the first go. Chess really loves pockets, though. And it just goes to show it doesn't have to be perfect to be loved, and it's hard for most people to see the mistakes, usually.



There it is in action. I tied the straps in an X on her back instead of straight on the shoulders as an after-thought, so they wouldn't fall down. I should have planned ahead for that, though, because it makes a big gap in the back. Oh well.



And here is the easy star-banner! I had so much fun making this. Did you know you can cut a nearly-perfect star out of a piece of paper with only a few, easy folds? Learn how here. That was all the decorating I did this year, but I like it simple. You could use the stars for so many different crafts, all year long. Enjoy!