As you will know from my previous posts – I absolutely LOVE being creative with my eldest daughter (who is 4 in June). Now that I have two children, I find that craft is a great way to engage with her and keep her entertained when we have days at home with the newborn. On the run up to Christmas, we are making a variety of Christmas crafts, and so far have made Easy paper Christmas Trees, potato print baubles and now, a Reindeer Handprint T Shirt. Not only were all of these crafts realllllly easy to do, but look fantastic! They are lots of fun to create.
Here’s Erin in her finished Christmas Reindeer Handprint T-shirt design – she has her preschool Christmas party in mid December, and this is what she plans to wear! 🙂
To create your own you will need:
A plain white tshirt (we bought a pack of 3 for ÂŁ6)
Fabric Paints in Red, Brown and Black (we bought tubes for ÂŁ2 each from Hobbycraft)
A potato
A sponge or brush to apply the paint (optional)
Here’s how to make your own:
Lay your t-shirt flat on a table or mat.
Using the brown fabric paint, cover your child’s left hand using the sponge or brush until palm is completely covered.
Stamp onto the left hand side of the t shirt. Be careful to try and keep the hand as still as possible, and remove from the tee in one swift motion. This ensures a nice clean print.
Repeat the process on right hand side using your child’s right hand.
Cut a potato in half to create a round circle stamp. Cover in red fabric paint and stamp into the centre of the tee to create a nose.
Finally using your child’s (or your) finger, dab two finger prints above the nose to create two eyes.
Allow to dry.
Depending on the individual fabric paints you may need to iron. In our case, the tshirt is simply ok to wear and wash after 72 hours.
It really is as simple as that! My advice is to wash your hands as quickly as possible after the tshirt is complete as the fabric paints tend to get a bit cloggy on the hands and can take a while to clean up! 🙂
This approach can be used with lots of other designs using a potato as a stamp. We are going to experiment over the next few weeks! 🙂
Erin is getting super excited for Christmas now, and on the days when I have both children, I like to entertain Erin by getting out the craft box. On the run up to Christmas, a lot of our creations will be festive in nature!
Today’s creations are these beautiful Christmas trees! They are really easy to make and Erin had lots of fun decorating them.
To make these you will need:-
A4 green card
Scissors
Glue
Decorations – this can be pretty much ANYTHING- e.g sweet wrappers, glitter glue, tissue, ribbon, coloured paper, sequins etc. Anything colourful will do!
To make these simply:
1) Fold the corner of the green card up to make a square – trim the side off using scissors.
2) Cut strips into the folded square towards the centre
3) Add glue to the ends of each strip and curl into the centre on both sides, sticking into place
4) Fold up bottom so it has a flat edge to sit on – you can add a tree trunk if you wish
5) Decorate!!
Here is our vid to see the steps in action! 🙂
We hope you enjoyed our craft! Why not subscribe to our You Tube channel as we will be sharing more how to vlogs on the run up to Christmas.
Bring on the Easter Craft! As our regular readers will know – we love a bit of crafting and Easter is the perfect excuse for getting out the paint and having a bit of messy play with your little ones! Despite our daughter being only 9 months old, we have already got into the habit of regularly making things with her – something to keep for when she is older. I can’t wait till she is old enough to be a little more involved with the finishing touches!!!
In the first of our Easter Craft Specials, we made a Photo Easter Bunny – the finished design of which you can see here:
To create your own Easter Craft Photo Bunny you will need:
Some newspaper (to cover the carpet!)
Some baby wipes (for getting paint off feet quickly!!)
Selection of coloured card – (approx £4 for a bumper selection at Hobbycraft)
Some scissors (or a paper knife if using out of reach of the kids!)
Glue (preferably like the stuff we used to have at school!)
Water based paint in the colour of your choice or to make life easier, a giant paint pad
Cotton Wool (around 12 balls worth maximum)
A close up photograph of your child’s face.
A black fineliner or sharpie marker.
Step 1
First you will need to take two footprints from your child – one of each foot. To do this, we recommend that you put newspaper down to protect the carpet – particularly if like Erin, your children are on the move or don’t like to sit still!!!  We used a sponge brush to apply pink water based paint to Erins feet, and then stamped onto a blue coloured cardboard. You can use the paint and card colours of your choice. Once dry, cut around the prints, to create two feet.
Step 2
Cut the photograph to make a small border around your childs face (enough so that the cotton wool will hide the rest of the photo.
Step 3
Mock up the bunny design and stick the photograph in place on to the base cardboard as follows. Using a pen or pencil, sketch the rest of the bunny design so you know where to apply the cotton wool.
Like us, you may wish to have a small interval here, particularly if you have a child that likes to look at photographs of herself!!!!
Step 4
To ensure we didn’t waste any cotton wool, we then “mocked up” the amount needed to cover the design, tearing the buds into smaller pieces ready to glue into place.
Step 5
Using the glue, stick footprints into place, and using a generous amount of glue, stick the cotton wool into place to surround the photograph and create the overall bunny design. Once you have finished, it should look a little like this!
Step 6
Once the glue has dried, (which may take some time!) you can highlight around the edges of the design and add bunny arms using a black fine liner or sharpie marker.
And there you have it! A cute little Easter Craft Photo Bunny. The best part for us has to be that Erin giggles every time she sees it, climbing across everything and anything in her way so she can get to it and take a closer look! The grandparents would love this as an Easter card, and its so so easy to do!
Don’t forget to check back for more Easter Craft inspiration coming soon! A great way to keep the kids occupied during the school holidays.
Hi, I’m Lucy, a thirty something mum of two from Birmingham. A memory maker, tradition keeper, stationery addict and Mr Men fanatic. HR Advisor by day and sleep deprived Mama by night!
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