Paper Paris Vacation Toys
Share : this great freebie! I have the ultimate toys for bad-weather days and dreaming with your kids of going on vacation in …. Paris!! These travel-sized paper landmark buildings allow you to enact the most wonderful vacation adventures in Paris. Free!! And you don’t even need to pack! The printable paper city play set [...]
Recycle Holiday Cards into Tags
Share Yes, the holidays are really over now that the three wise men are arriving (the 6th). So now is the perfect time to get the ship back into order and clear received holiday cards and gift packaging. Rather than tossing them away, reuse recycle as next year’s gift tags. Simple and fast. Get [...]
DIY ZhuZhu Pet Food
Share Pin It : What are Zhuzhu Pets? Do you know? Zhuzhu pets are delightful little furry animals, that can race around the floor, go in all directions, make funky sounds when they bump into something (like ‘ohoh’). In short, they are adorable. They started out as being just hamsters, but there are raccoons and [...]
Halloween Giant Cat Template
Share Hi all. Just came across one of our earliest posts, Fall & Halloween-themed Crafts (elementary school kids) , which has great 3 classroom decorating & craft ideas. To help teachers (or parents) make the Halloween Card project for kids, I designed a huge, mean black cat template which the kids can use to decorate [...]
Halloween Ghost Crafts
Share Pin It 7 projects. What’s Halloween without a spooky ghost? Must-have decorative Fall season displays have at least one or two ghosts hanging around, spooky or friendly. Kids consider both kind of ghosts to add to the family fun. Halloween Ghost Crafts to Entertain: These are all easy, fun & fast to [...]
Book Review: MicroCrafts Teaches Tiny Treasures
Share I It’s been a while since I’ve done a book review, but this one is interesting. It just came out last week: ‘Microcrafts’ by Margaret McGuire, Alicia Kachmar, Katie Hatz and Friends. It is published by a wonderful publisher, Quirk Books, who only seem to feature titles that I like, love or that at [...]
Witch TP Roll Craft
Share It’s hard to get into Halloween, with the sun beaming here in Italy like it’s mid-summer. But dates don’t lie: Fall is around the corner. At least at night there is a new freshness in the air, that tells me, Fall is indeed not that far away. Getting Ready for Halloween Over the last [...]
Abundance Seed Balls
Share Great decorating idea for thanksgiving is making these seed balls. An inexpensive craft project with the kids, or even just all by yourself, having fun being creative. image: bhg.com Symbolic Meaning Cornucopia, the overflowing horn, is an ancient symbol of abundance, and the seeds can represent both the seeds of [...]
Back-to-School Ideas
Share Back-to-School time is now! Would you believe that in Italy, kids have a FULL THREE MONTHS of summer vacation?!! They will only go back to school mid- September? For those of you, who are starting earlier than that, here’s an overview of our Back-to-School projects and tips to date. Back to School Sales [...]
Hip Zipper Butterfly
Share A fun project to do with kids: We recycled an old zipper into a darling butterfly brooch. Step by Step Instructions on How to Make a Zipper Butterfly 1. Sniff through old cloths or recycled textile supplies to find a 22 cm long zipper. Pick a color you want, or if [...]
Fabulous Glamorous Fabric Beads
Share Here’s the tutorial for this easy to make beads, these fabulous, glamorous beads are made with fabric strips wrapped around simple cotton balls. Stitch the fabric down and embellish with contrast-colored shiny glass seed beads in a free –form pattern. As simple as that. Don’t they look glorious? source photo & original design: Alma [...]
Beachy Bath Mittens
Share Another great contribution to your beach cottage: starfish, coral, seaweed and fish-shaped bath gloves. Aren’t they both lovely and fun? Depending on the colors in your bathroom, use either pastel or brightly-colored hand towels and the templates below. There’s a fish, starfish and a coral shape. My favorite bath mitten shape is the coral [...]
Succulents Shine in Recycled Shoe
Share Great summer craft for kids: make your own succulent garden in that worn pair of shoes that has been the favorite for soooo long and that is just still too ‘precious’ to throw away. Have a pair of those, with soles all worn out and/or now cramping your toes? Perfect. Let’s recycle (upcycle) it!! [...]
Fourth of July Clipart
Share Stars have to be the most versatile home decorating shape ever. All it takes is this printable Fourth of July clipart (star stencil) to make lots of stars for a fun & festive Fourth of July party. Fourth of July Clipart Star Stencil With this star stencil, you can add a star .. in [...]
Summer Crafts for Kids :: Best Books
Share Plan ahead for a summer filled with fun activity and learning. Here’s a fabulous list of Craft Books for Kids with summer crafts to learn, to craft, to enjoy. Craft techniques explained and many lessons gained while producing wonderful things for your home, to play with, to give away or to eat. Click link [...]
Newsprint Art
Share So totally up my alley, I could have made it. But I didn’t. Featuring the work here of Dom, from Sydney, Australia. Cool chick. Totally love it. Yes, this is easy. Actually, this is a project to file for when the kids are home, for weeks,, during the summer vacation. Let them help with [...]
Recycled Juice Box :: Tote Bag Pattern
Share Going green does not mean boring. It means Stylish! This Recycled Juice Box pattern is the ’living’ proof of how recycling has taken on a whimsical, upcycling, refashion-tangent and that there’s no going back! Great project to make this summer, but you got to start saving your used juice boxes now as you’ll need [...]
Build Your Own Birdhouse
Share This adorable birdhouse is the culmination of a few different craft techniques: creating floral wall art from toilet paper rolls, making a beaded accent charm, and painting, stenciling and decorating a birdhouse. What makes this wall decoration work is repetition of color, shape and pattern. The How-to How to Make [...]
Beach Cottage :: Craft, Diy, Home Decor :: Linky Party
Share Time to get ready for the beach, and to slowly start transforming our home into a lovely beach cottage…. I’ve starting early this year in getting my beach gear out. The weather simply has been so beautiful that I simply have to do so. Look where I was last week, on the Italian coast [...]
Crochet Beach Tote Bag :: Free Pattern
Share This adorable string bag is just a perfect project for crochet beginners: it looks really fun and is ultra easy to put together. There are 5 components to this bag: the base, the body, the top rim, the cord, and the flower embellishments. The bag has a diameter of 7“ (18 cm) and [...]
Butterfly Prints
Share Just added some great summer art prints to our Butterfly Crafts collection. This gorgeous vintage butterfly clip art originated from a 1880’s Natural History Butterfly print (four stages of butterfly transformation). Butterfly Craft Resources Collection How to Make a Simple Butterfly Mosaic (free tutorial) Butterfly Soap (for inspiration)
DIY CRAFT TUTORIAL Linky Party :: STAIRS
Share This idea of link lists instead of pages and pages of image is growing on me. Now I feel it’s time to start building some categories, so that it’s easy to find things and to borrow ideas from each other. So, as of today, we’re going to do things a bit differently, as follows: [...]
Spring DIY Home Decor Craft :: Linky Party
Share This idea of link lists instead of pages and pages of image is growing on me. Now I feel it’s time to start building some categories, so that it’s easy to find things and to borrow ideas from each other. So, as of today, we’re going to do things a bit differently, as follows: [...]
Craft for Earth Day
Share This year, 2011, as every year, Earth Day is April 22. Last year around this time, I made a huge effort to find 50+ environment-friendly craft and DIY projects. All these projects look stunningly great and are made of 100% recycled materials. If you are interested in featuring this list on your [...]
Crafty April Fools Day Prank
Share Create a coffee mess and get away with it. Only this one day…!!! This is an excellent video tutorial on how to be a Pro coffee-spill-trickster this April Fools day. You get to fool people the whole day, easily. Even if you are not so ‘into these things’, prepping for this one is kind [...]
Spring Craft: Butterfly Pop-up Card
Share First day of Spring, let’s do something happy. Make this Spring greeting card with a cute paper-cut butterfly, within minutes. So simple to make, so lovely to get. How-to Make this Pop-up Greeting Card Fold a regular sheet of craft paper in 2, and again in two. Fold it back open [...]
Shamrock Stamp: Make Your Own Luck
Share Typically, just how lucky are you???! Well, you’re in more luck now: Inspired by having loads of unfinished projects, I felt inspired to make something I could start and finish in one sitting and have ever lasting fun with…. What would that be? A Shamrock Stamp (btw. LaGraine makes some excellent [...]
Native American Kid Craft :: Story Necklace
Share One of the many rich crafts produced within the Native American culture is a "fetish," or story necklace. A story necklace designed to illustrate history, legends and moral stories with carved creatures representing elements of nature, animals, spirit protectors or ancestors. Each animal has a symbolic as well as a literal meaning. The characteristics [...]
How to Make Fruit Shaped Beads
Share Let’s Pretend it’s Spring….. Saturday I bought our first little strawberry seedling. Full of promise. Completely inspired, as we could not wait for it to bloom, we made these adorable strawberry earrings. How to Make Fruit Shaped Beaded Earrings Materials Needed Self-drying clay Round-nosed pliers Acrylic or kids paint (gloss medium [...]
Personal Valentine Gifts
Share Simple inspiring heart desk gift set. 100% Recycled. Sometimes simplest is best: this easy-to-make Valentine Gift is great. Paper Craft How-To (Step-by-step instructions) 1. The tall box: cut a rectangular cookie box at an angle, as in the picture. First cut the lowest side, then the diagonally-cut side, then the top [...]
