Christmas Crafts: Make Your Own Snow Globes

As a child I collected snow globes and I was fascinated by them, shaking them and watching the snow or glitter fall. I’ve always fancied making my own. I’ve seen a million craft tutorials online about how to make your own snow globes, so I thought I’d give it a go. It was remarkably simple.

I’m keen to reuse and recycle our household waste as much as we can. For years all our jam jars have been washed out and used for a range of other uses, such as, storage jars, re-filling with homemade jams, chutneys and pickles and for various crafts. This time I put one of my empty jars to a more creative use. I made my own festive snow globe.

To make your own snow globes you will need…

1 clean jar with a metal lid
1 figure which will fit in the jar
Glitter
A few drops of glycerine
Superglue
Water

snow globes

To make your snow globe…

Using the superglue carefully glue the figurine to the inside of the lid (make sure the lid is clean and dry), leave this for several hours, or overnight if you can. Once it’s stuck firmly to the lid you can continue making your snow globe.

snow globes

Tip around half a teaspoon of glitter into your empty jar, top the jar up with water and add half a teaspoon of glycerine. The glycerine helps the “snow” fall more slowly in the globe.

Once you’re happy and the jar is as full as it can be, dot superglue around the inside rim of the lid and screw it on the jar tightly. Leave it to dry properly for a few hours and then shake it up and enjoy your snow globe.

snow globes

It really is that easy, it looks really effective too. I suspect that this is a festive craft we’ll be doing again and again.

Autumn Leaf Crafts and Activities

I hold my hands up, I’m not by any stretch of the imagination particularly good at crafting with my son. I’ll give it a go because it’s important for him to know that you don’t have to be any good at something to enjoy it. Having fun is the most important lesson, so this week we turned our hands to some autumn leaf crafts and had lots of fun.

One dry afternoon we went to our local park for a picnic, afterwards we had a little walk and collected a bag of leaves, pine cones, pine needles, bark, sycamore seeds and anything else we could find. This was itself a fun and learning activity, we talked about why leaves turn brown, the different colours and shapes, how leaves feel, what seeds and pine cones are and what happens to seeds when you plant them.

Autumn Leaf Crafts

We loved our trip to the park and it was the perfect excuse to warm up with a mug of hot chocolate when we got home. We left the leaves to dry for a bit and then got to work.

1. Put a nice veiny leaf under a piece of paper and rub over it with a crayon, this will give a relief of the leaf. Try it with different kinds of leaves.

2. We did some nice sticking and gluing. We glued some leaves to some paper and drew pictures around them. He liked this because he liked painting the glue on the leaves and being quite precise with it. This was great for his fine motor skills.

3. We held a leaf on a piece of paper and dabbed round it with some paint on a sponge. This is quite a pretty effect and it helped him think about the shape of the leaf and its outline.

4. The small boy had his cousin round to play, we decided to make a big tree. We taped a long roll of paper to the side of the kitchen cupboard (which meant it was easy to wipe drips where they’d missed the paper), we painted a large tree and some grass and we stuck a variety of leaves to the branches of the tree and also in the grass. This was a lovely activity, the boys got involved in some team work and alternated jobs.

easy autumn leaf crafts

We’ve had some messy-ish fun and we learnt a lot about autumn. We’ve had a great few days playing with and crafting with the bag of leaves we picked up from the park. It’s been pretty cheap entertainment too, for the small cost of some paper, paint and glue we’ve done a small stack of autumnal activities.

Painting Pots at Minikin Emporium

On Sunday we toddled off to Minikin Emporium in Sale, Greater Manchester to meet Katy and Laurence from Frank PR. We were there to find out more about Growing Up Milk Info and to have a go at painting a pot.

We’re no strangers to Minikin Emporium, we first visited about 2 years ago when the boy was but a baby. We had some hand prints done for grandparent presents and this lovely necklace for me; on the reverse is his little baby fingerprint, I treasure this necklace above anything else.

We started off by painting a mug, we had lots of colours to choose from and his creativity knew no bounds. He quickly painted the mug inside an out with swirls and curls in a rainbow of colours. He loved it and wouldn’t stop adding to his artwork.

Soon it was picnic time and he merrily munched his way through a plate of pitta, hummus, tomatoes and veggie snacks and drank several glasses of pink milk (strawberry milkshake). While we enjoyed our picnic, the lovely Claire who owns Minikin Emporium came rounds and wrote everyone’s names of their mugs.

We had a lovely, healthy, balanced picnic lunch and learned a little about the benefits of growing up milk, and how much growing tots need calcium and Vitamin D.

Minkin is a lovely, relaxed place to hang out and paint a pot, I very much doubt it’s the last time we’ll visit. We can’t wait to see his finished mug once it’s been fired.

Disclaimer: We were invited guests of Frank PR on behalf of Growing Up Milk Info and we have not been financially compensated for this post.

Mother’s Day Toddler Crafts

Like most toddlers our little one lives for a bit of gluing and sticking. If he’s given a piece of paper he’ll draw and colour, or cut it into shapes. Toddlers love all that stuff, and if you sprinkle it liberally with glitter then so much the better.

As Mother’s Day approaches we decided it’d be a nice thing for him to create a mini masterpiece for his Nan. We’d recently taken delivery of a fab activity pack from DoCrafts. The activity packs are brilliant, value for money selections of craft items. We got a general activity pack, but they also do seasonal ones for Christmas and Easter which are a really great idea, especially if you do a lot of toddler crafts.

We sat down and together we unpacked our activity pack. It was heaving with products to choose from and there’s a real variety of craft items, it costs £9.95 and the products inside are worth about double that.

We chose the coloured feathers, foam letters and the chunky pipe cleaners. From our own collection I grabbed a piece of green paper, some glitter and some pva glue. What you have there is the ultimate recipe for toddler joy.

We set to work, because this was a special picture for his Nan I did give him some artistic direction, mainly in the placing of the foam letters in the right order and the twisting of the pipe cleaner into a heart shape. Everything else was his own, pretty impressive work. I loved how he just tipped the glitter into the heart shape without prompting or suggestion. He chose the colour of the feathers and glued them on himself. In fact he glued everything on himself.

He was so proud of his little picture. I have tended to shy away from crafts at home because I don’t like the mess, but this has really encouraged me to do more with him, especially now I’ve seen how proficient he’s become with the paintbrush and glue as well as how much he really loved doing it.

I think we’ll have regular crafting sessions at home now, it’s fun, the look on his face and us working together on something was just joyful, and it’s not actually as messy as I thought.

Disclaimer: We were sent the activity pack free of charge by DoCrafts for review purposes, but it’s a cracking little bag of goodies, and these are our honest opinions.

Crafts: Glass Painting for the unartistic

Three million years ago I went to art college. People think this makes me some kind of Mancunian Monet but alas no, I studied journalism and thankfully never picked up a paintbrush other than to redecorate my flat.

Besides being able to draw a bit I genuinely have very little artistic talent. This doesn’t stop me from trying. I’m a firm believer in doing things you enjoy that you might not necessarily excel at. If you’re going to have a hobby it needs to be fun and enjoyable.

I like crafts. I enjoy drawing with my son and making things with him. I went through a cross stitch phase a few years ago which I loved, and last year I tried and failed to teach myself crochet. I was browsing the DoCrafts website and I happened upon the Aquaglass Glass Painting Starter Kit, I’ve always wanted to give glass painting a try so I ordered it.

It’s a cracking little kit which will go quite a lot way I think. It has a tube of black relief outliner and four little pots of coloured glass paint (red, yellow, green and blue) as well as a little paintbrush. It doesn’t come with an instruction sheet but it was easy to figure out.

Use the black outliner to create your design, once that’s dry then paint with the coloured paints. As it was my first go I chose a nice jar to paint. I thought I’d go with a really simple design and just paint coloured panels around the jar. This was quite easy to do, though my brushwork with the black paint was a bit splodgy.

My first attempt was not beautiful, but I’m quite pleased with it. I’m looking forward to trying my hand at glass painting a few other things, I reckon I’ll ruin a few more jam jars first until I get the hang of it properly. I’ve got some lovely plain candle holders which I plan to decorate.

I enjoyed doing it, it was nice to focus solely on a task and to not think about the million other things you have running round your head if you’re a parent. It was a lovely piece of me time and a hobby I reckon I could get into fairly easily and cheaply.

Disclaimer: I was sent the Aquaglass Glass Painting Starter Kit for free for review purposes. These are my honest opinions and I really enjoyed playing about with it.

Crafts: Making Valentine’s Day cards with toddlers

This week I volunteered to run the crafts table at playgroup. It’s not something I’ve done before because the room is full of people much more creative than I could ever be. I figured we could make Valentine’s Day cards and that wouldn’t be too difficult.

I got my husband, who has a printers and stationers in Didsbury to cut and score some blank cards for us, and I cut out several hundred red and pink hearts. Throw in some glitter pens and some PVA glue and you have the ingredients for toddler fun.

Crafts: Making Valentine's Day cards with toddlers — Setting up – hearts and glue

I really enjoyed making these Valentine’s Day cards with the children. I think they enjoyed it too, it’s always good to share the love, whatever age you are.