Christmas Pom-Poms

Apologies to those who think it's too soon to be thinking about Christmas, but for those of us with festive craft fairs coming up we have to. But to be honest I probably would be getting excited already without the craft fair excuse.

My Mum recently went to Kirstie Allsopp's Handmade Craft Fair where she purchased a pom-pom maker. To try it out she made these guys.

I just happened to have the right sized mini red pom-poms to be the holly berries on this pom-pom Christmas pudding. I glued them to the top along with some holly leaves cut out of green felt.

The snowman is two white pom-poms attached to each other with little black beads for the eyes. My Mum even crocheted a tiny hat and scarf for him!

I attached some white thread coming out of the hat so this little guy can be hung on a Christmas tree.

Do you think he needs any other facial/snowman features, or are the eyes enough?

Easter Crafts

This Easter holidays I've been/will be delivering some kids art classes for the Letchworth Arts Centre.

They came up with the titles for each session and it was up to me to finalize the activity and make the examples. I'm a big believer in having examples as it's so much easier to show the children what you want them to make then try and describe it to them. 

In tomorrow's session we'll be making pom-pom chicks! I'll be encouraging the use of non-traditional colours for the chicks, mainly because I don't think we'll have enough yellow wool to go around.

I've cut out the cardboard rings already in two sizes, and then there'll be googly eyes and funky foam for the beaks and feet.

Last Friday was a session for toddlers (the other ones are for ages 5 -10) in which we made Easter masks. I pre-cut the holes in the paper plate and then encouraged the children to rip up tissue paper and glue it on.

One little boy wanted to make a dinosaur mask with sharp teeth.

I was all, 'The Easter dinosaur. That's a thing.'

Another session last week was making dream catchers. Which meant I had to first teach myself how to make a dream catcher, which I did with the help of a few tutorials on blogs. I let the younger ones just wrap the string any old way across the ring but I taught the older ones how to do the proper pattern. They did pretty good.

For each session I come prepared with Easter colouring sheets for the children that finish early. For the toddler class I drew patterned eggs on A3 paper for them to paint. They loved it even though some of my eggs looked more like stripy potatoes!

Aliens

If I'm going to be making planets, then I'll need some aliens to live on them.

Check out these little guys!

I got the idea from this website.

If you make the alien by wrapping the pipe cleaner around your finger then it doubles as a finger puppet.

I experimented with putting tissue paper over the string balloon which creates an interesting texture for this guys to hang out on.