We love this adorable 5ft yarn tree garland. Now available in our Etsy shop! It is time consuming to make but oh so worth it! I mean, how cute is that?!
This adorable Santa gnome garland is also available on our Etsy shop and made by our oldest daughter, Cam. SO cute and fun!
Last, but not least, in the Etsy shop is our wood nativity; a personal favorite!
We are looking forward to an amazing Christmas season and can’t wait to add more to our shop this season and the upcoming year! Stay tuned for big things to come, and as always, thank you for supporting our small business!
We LOVE fall in our household and we love crafts so the holiday season is by far a favorite time for us around here because there is plenty of opportunity for creativity and crafting. Here are two of the crafts we have done recently with more to follow in the next couples days.
Broccoli stamped trees! SO fun, SO easy and LOVE the way they turned out.
All you need is paper, a brown marker or colored pencil and yellow, red and orange paint. Brown paint would also be great to add in there but we didn’t have any on hand and we’re all about just working with what we’ve got 🙂 First thing you do is draw/color a trunk with branches on your paper…
…we then grabbed a paper plate and put red, orange and yellow paint close together so that the “stamp” had all three colors on it at once. We also had three smaller piles further apart from each other to fill in some areas that needed more of just one color.
That’s it! Start stamping and creating your beautiful tree!
This is a great activity for all ages. Even my husband came home and saw what we had done and said he wanted a turn.
Even the two year old got in on the action!
Next up was making turkey suckers that we delivered to some cousins and friends. Suckers of your choosing, googly eyes, orange and red felt, colored paper, burlap (you can also use brown or tan felt. I had burlap ribbon on hang that was the perfect size to cut into small squares), ribbon and hot glue gun.
Cut your burlap, or tan or brown felt, into squares large enough to cover your sucker to your desired amount. Cover your suckers and tie with a ribbon.
Plug in your hot glue gun and while you’re waiting for it to heat up begin cutting out orange beaks and red snoods (or gobbler thing as we call it in our house) and have the kids begin cutting out feathers or drawing them if that is your choice. We had leaves left over from another project of ours (post coming soon) and we used those as our feathers so Rylee just got busy cutting them out.
I didn’t feel comfortable allowing the kids to use the hot glue gun because of how small all the pieces are so they gathered and handed me each item while I did the actual gluing. We liked the look of one googly eye being smaller than the other and one raised slightly compared to the other but to each their own.
After the eyes were on I glued on the snood, followed by the beak and lastly the feathers on the backside facing the front
It would be super cute to tie little name tags onto each sucker and use as a name holder for the table setting at the kids table on Thanksgiving. Throw them in your kids lunch boxes for a fun surprise or you can deliver to friends, family or neighbors to spread some love and fun during Thanksgiving time!
If it’s too hot (or cold) outside for sidewalk chalk or if you just want to try something different but simple, this is the art project for you! All you really need is black paper and some chalk but there are a few variations you can do. You can use white chalk or colored (we went with colored this time) and you can draw anything you would like or you can trace any outline you would like, just make sure you use nice thick lines for the next part. We chose to print some animals and characters and cut them out to trace but you can easily just draw your own shape if you would like.
Then once you have nice thick lines you just use your finger to pull the chalk away from the center.
Keep going around the drawing and pull away the chalk. Sometimes we had to redo a line to make it thicker to get the look we wanted.
Once you are done it might look quite messy like Andi’s above. Wash your hands so they are nice and clean again and then carefully and lightly brush off the areas you want to stay black to clean up your lines.
That’s it! Super easy, super fun, minimal amount of prep work and minimal amount of clean up. Quick wipe down of the table and we were done! I’m sure we’ll be doing this again over the summer when it’s too hot to be out on the sidewalk here in AZ.
I love to do art with the kids around the holidays. We have some of our best conversations while we get creative with art because its one of the few ways I can get my kids to stay still for that long. 😆 For this craft we used water colors to make an image similar to a stain glass heart.
I got all of our supplies on Amazon and we got a handful since we now do art more frequently since starting to homeschool our younger kids. I love how many color options we have with this set and I definitely think the watercolor pencils are a must. To be able to have any lines blurred definitely helps give you a true watercolor look. My only warning is that the brush that came with the pencils is not great. It shed like crazy but the paint sets also came with brushes and they worked plus I had some extras on hand so it wasn’t a problem for us. Just make sure you have some other brush options if you are getting the pencils. The colored pencils themselves are great though. Your last supply needed is of course watercolor paper which is a necessity. Standard paper will get too wet and break easily, especially if you have young kids painting, they tend to soak their papers. There is a difference between hot pressed and cold pressed paper but to be honest, I didn’t do much research on that because we’re not trying to be expert watercolor artists here, we just wanted to make something pretty and this paper worked great for us.
I didn’t get a picture of what we did first but you can kid of see if you zoom into the picture. First, we used a colored pencil to draw a heart….any size and anywhere on their paper they wanted. Then we drew lines all throughout the inside of the heart. Then we drew lines coming out of the heart to the edge of the paper. You are creating your “glass pieces” by doing all of this. We talked about it looking like you had a heart etched in a piece of glass and then you dropped it and it kind of shatters all throughout without breaking.
Then comes the best part….painting! Get your brush wet, take it to your paint color of choice and get the color nice and wet and then start painting. We talked about all the different techniques we were learning as we went. Having a lot of color on and then using extra water to spread it out, layering colors, keeping it muted etc. The only real “rule” with this piece is that whatever colors you use in the heart you can’t use around the perimeter and vice versa. We also learned that it looks best when after you color each individual section you then go back over with just some water on your brush and kind of blur the line between the pieces.
Our preschooler did her own spin on our project. Looking all cute and proud. 😍
Look how cute they all turned out! We are excited to keep playing with watercolors and improve our skills over time. The best part of all of this was the creativity going on, conversation flowing and laughter throughout. You’ll never regret spending time like this with kids, but it also doesn’t have to be a time consuming, expensive, day project either. It’s all about balance and everyone’s “balance” is different. So don’t compare, have fun and make memories!
One last thing to add actually. For a true stained glass look, add black lines where you blended your colors. We worked on the technique of blending more this go around but if you want that true stained glass look you need those black lines!
When we were reading the book, The Courage of Sarah Noble, we read a chapter that talked about the Native American children playing (I’ll leave it at that as to not spoil the book for anyone). As we were doing our discussion for that days reading we talked about what type of games the children may have been playing. Afterwards, we decided to learn a new game that perhaps they may have played. ** Now to be completely transparent this is a Native American themed game, I do not know if this is an authentic game they played. **
The first thing you will need to do is get 6 popsicle sticks. Distribute them to the kids. Have them color 1 side of each of the popsicle sticks they were given. I printed a paper that had a bunch of Native American hieroglyphics on them and what they mean, some kids chose to color their own designs and some chose to put little “stories” on their stick using the hieroglyphics. You will also need to have some sort of tokens to be playing for. We used beans, you could also use corn kernels, candy, pennies, whatever you want. How many you are playing with will also depend on how long you want the game to last. We did a pile of 20. Keep them off to the side as you start the game.
Now to play the game! Gather all the sticks from everyone. The child going first will drop all of them at once. Now you have to read the sticks….
If 3 of the colored sides are up and 3 are facing down, you get to pull ONE bean from the pile.
If all of the plain sides are showing/facing up you get TWO beans from the pile.
If all of the colored sides are facing up you get THREE beans from the pile.
Any other combination means you don’t get any beans and it moves to the next player. You keep taking turns until all the beans are distributed OR you can keep playing and start taking beans from another player once the jackpot pile is gone until 1 player has ALL of the beans.
This is also a great game if it’s a rainy day and you want the kids to take a break from technology but don’t want the mess of a board game.
As usual I’m going to keep this super simple. For art, we learned all about weaving. Where it originated, the different types of weaves, what you would use each weave for and more. Then we put it into practice and did a fun craft.
I’m not sure what it is about kids and paint but they are obsessed and I’m THE COOLEST mom when I let them do it. Maybe it’s just our kids and maybe because I don’t let them do it all that often 🤔
We use canvas boards frequently with out arts and crafts so I buy them in bundles on Amazon so we are always stocked. Since we always have a house project we are working on, we also always have painters tape on hand as well. Some kids used the painters tape as is, some tore it in half to have some thinner pieces and some chunkier. Some did letters and then lines all around and some kept it simple. That is part of the fun of this craft, so many different ways of doing it and its fun to see their creativity flow and individual personalities come out in their art.
We had a couple different brands of paint we used. In the future I would pull out my nicer paints or even my chalk paints. You don’t need anything expensive but some of the super cheap paint we had on hand was a little too watery and it bled under the tape. Luckily the kids were good sports about it.
Don’t they look great?! The kids did such a good job playing around with different ideas and not trying to follow what the person next to them was doing and it shows in their finished products. I didn’t give them very many colors to choose from this go around yet they all look so unique.
They had fun and we made memories. THAT’S why I love doing these crafts with our kids….it’s not because it’s my job to entertain them but because the memories we make while doing them will last a lifetime. I sure love spending time with these crazy rascals!
As you can see in the above picture, we already had used regular sidewalk chalk on our driveway but the puffy chalk paint is easy to make, so much fun and looks pretty dang cool.
All you need for this fun craft is shaving cream, flour, water and food coloring of your choice. When it comes to the food coloring, DON’T use the gel food coloring as it tends to stain more and you don’t want to risk it staining your sidewalk. If you keep scrolling, you’ll see how ours came off of our sidewalk.
Add 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of water and food coloring of your choice (again, I want to stress NOT gel food coloring) and mix really well. Try to get as many clumps out as possible.
Mix 1/2 cup of shaving cream into the flour/water mixture and mix until silky smooth just like in the above picture.
Using a funnel, pour the paint chalk into a squeezable bottle. (here are some squeezable bottles from Amazon if you’re in need)
Now the fun part, you get to start painting on your sidewalk! I just bought the pack I have linked to Amazon and am hoping they will work better then these ones I had on hand. They worked ok once we cut the tip off to make the opening a little bit bigger. Dollar store bottle fail but we made it work with some adjustments so that is another option if you are heading to the dollar store soon.
All of our kids, from our 12 year old down to our 4 year old loved this.
We’re super excited to get our bottles from Amazon so we can make more than just two colors and have even more fun with this. Especially now that I know it comes off ok 😆
All hosed off! When I was at the top of the driveway I could just hose it and it came off but I only had my short hose out front and so it couldn’t reach the bottom of the driveway. 🤦🏼♀️ The kids got some of our large sponges and wiped the chalk paint right off where I couldn’t reach with the hose. It actually ended up turning into another fun water activity so win/win! This was an overall success with the kids and we will definitely be doing it again!
What you need to make this fun Puffy Sidewalk Chalk Paint:
1 cup flour 1 cup water food coloring (any color you would like but don’t use the gel kind) 1/2 cup shaving cream squeeze bottles (you can buy a pack from Amazon here)
First put the flour, water and food coloring in a bowl and mix well (you can also do this in a gallon bag if you would like. This may be a better option if you don’t have a funnel).
Once you have as many clumps gone as possible, add the shaving cream and mix until silky smooth.
Use a funnel to pour into a squeezable bottle. If you were mixing in gallon bags make sure you still mix the water and flour first before adding the shaving cream to your bag. Once everything is mixed all the way just snip off the tip of a corner and squeeze into a squeezable bottle.
Our cute little first grader does a daily journal for school and now that she does it at home I wanted something I could easily print that helped guide her to color within a box and write in straight lines.
At the beginning of each week I print out 5 copies and write the topic for each day on a copy so they are ready to go for the week. Her teacher has given some of the following topics: Mon: I like spring because… Tues: My favorite thing to do outside is… Wednesday: A movie I can watch over and over is…. etc. Our older children saw Rylee working on these and decided they wanted in too. They have chosen to use the same topics that Rylee’s teacher has given her. 🖍
Below is a printable version if you would like to use this as well!
We decided to put up some motivational artwork in our front windows to hopefully spread some cheer to neighbors as they are out on walks.
I’ve had these motivational stencils for years and I’m finally putting them to good use! The kids each chose a quote (some chose 2) and then we traced, colored and hung them up!
We hope these pictures help spread some cheer! Hang in there everyone!
Homestead Creations 