Cheap and Easy Holiday Crafts

Here are three crafts simple enough for toddlers using materials you may already have around the house.  They are super fun and make minimal mess as there is no paint involved!

Here are the materials needed for each, the rest is obvious!

 

For the Santa:

paper plate, googly eyes, red construction paper cut in the shape of santa's hat, cotton balls, a red pompon for the nose, a brown marker to draw the mouth, white glue 

For the Snowman:

2 paper plates, googly eyes, blue construction paper cut in the shape of a hat (and scarf if you want), orange construction paper cut in the shape of a carrot nose, pompoms for buttons, pipe cleaners for twiggy arms, small circles for the mouth (we used the eyes that popped out of our gingerbread men but you could use a hole punch and some construction paper), a stapler and white glue 

For the Gingerbread Men:

foam gingerbread man shapes (or cut some from construction paper), Pom poms, glitter glue in squeeze tubes, border stickers or ribbon and glue 

Best Easter Ever!

What a fun and wonderful day it has been for my family.  The Easter Bunny visited our home this year for the first time, and P and D were thrilled.  He had made a path of chocolate eggs from their rooms all the way down the stairs toward their Easter baskets and hidden eggs.  P kept exclaiming "What a mess! Me and Darshy clean it up." and then piling eggs into her basket happily.  They both had a blast searching for eggs and squealed in delight each time they found a new hiding spot.  Easter took on a whole new fun meaning for Suneil and I this year.
Even better was the fact that we had so much family spend the day with us.  With my parents away we thought it would be just us four this year, but at the last minute my two brothers and my sister-in-law managed to get the day off/travel here and spend the whole day with us.  We had an amazing family time eating great food, playing board games (a family tradition for us) and enjoying the great weather.

Here were a few of the highlights:

Natural Egg Dyes

I wasn't going to dye eggs this year as I thought P and D were a little young to really enjoy it, but when I saw the video about natural dyes on HGTV handmade youtube channel (natural egg dyes), I was inspired to try it myself.  Since I had all of the things I needed in my home already, I decided to give it a try.  To my surprise, P was very interested and the whole process turned out to be a great teachable moment (as we refer to them in my profession, haha) on colours.  Since the eggs need to sit in the dye for several hours, I spent a lot of time for the rest of the day lifting her up to check on them every fifteen minutes and nodding yes as she repeatedly exclaimed "we make the eggs colours so they be pretty!".  I made 4 dyes.  I followed the video instructions for the yellow dye (carrots and turneric), blue dye (red cabbage) and purple dye (blueberries).  Then I found some (embarrassingly quite nasty and inedible) radishes in my fridge and thought "Hey, I wonder if I could make a pink colour with these".  So I followed the basic recipe and process using the radishes and was delighted with the result.  You can't have Easter Eggs without pink!! The whole process of boiling the eggs and making the dyes took me about an hour, and then the eggs sat in the dyes for the rest of the day.  The following day we decorated very simply with stickers and bands from a decorating kit, and here is the end result.

   

Egg Salad Sandwiches

Since I had no intention of wasting 8 perfectly good Omega-3 eggs, we had egg salad sandwiches for lunch.
Suneil called them the most homemade Egg Salad sandwiches ever because I had to make homemade mayonnaise (I discovered I was all out when I went to the fridge) and I made homemade baguette bread to serve it on.
Check out the recipe for  No Knead Bread

Easter Dinner

We had a delicious meal of stuffed pork loin roast, lemon roast potatoes, and roast carrots and parsnips.  Dessert was abundant chocolate eggs and bunnies.  Check out the recipes!
Happy Easter!!!

Easy Easter Craft for Toddlers: Egg Collage

This is a super fun and cute craft, we had a blast making it as a family this weekend!

What you'll need:
scissors
glue sticks
8 x 8 inch square of card stock in any colour
scraps of patterned paper in coordinating colours
ribbons, stickers, glitter glue, and other decorations of your choice (basically, whatever you have lying around the house)

Steps:
1. Prepare all of your materials.  First draw an egg shape on a sheet of card stock. Make it as large as you can fit on the card stock.  Then cut your scraps of paper into small pieces, about 1.5 square inches (but they don't need to be exact, uniform, or even square!). Cut enough to cover the entire square of card stock.  We each made one egg (four in total) so I made piles of coordinating paper - so that we would have one egg that was covered in different shades of pink paper, one in yellow/orange, one in blue and one in green.

2.  Place the side of the card stock with the egg drawn on it down against the table.  Help your child to apply glue to the back of the pieces of patterned paper and apply it to the card stock, covering the entire sheet and overlapping the paper when necessary.

3. Once the square is covered entirely, flip it over and cut out the egg shape so that you are left with an egg that is covered in a paper collage.

4.  Apply any decorations you like, but try to use strongly contrasting colours to the patterned paper.  For example, if your egg is covered in pink papers, use blue and green decorations.  Or if your egg is covered in pastel paper, use decorations in saturated colours.

And that's it, you have a beautiful homemade Easter decoration that you and your child can be proud to display in your home.  We always hang our seasonal crafting decorations in the window of our dining area.