Unique and Easy Homemade Gifts for Father's Day

A personalized pillow case, designed and painted by your child, is a useful and very unique Father's Day gift. It's fairly inexpensive and can be extremely easy to make: purchase a linen pillow case in any solid color, and some fabric paint and markers.

Depending on the age of your child, the designs can be intricate or simple -- from baby footprints and handprints to meaningful messages.

The best method of controlling a movable surface like a pillowcase (or t-shirt for that matter) is to insert a piece of cardboard inside it -- the snugger the fit, the better the hold. No large pieces of cardboard lying around? Get a poster board and fold it up, or use a telephone book.

It's nice to have a matching set, of course . . .

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Hands On Crafts for Kids

At HandsOnCrafts, you'll find lots of projects -- many you've probably seen before, but it's a good place to click through for reminders.

For instance, I found this easy-to-do but very pretty Japanese wall hanging with a simple cherry blossom painted onto textured paper. What made this very interesting, though, was that the Japanese brush strokes for the words "cherry blossom" are shown in detail so that you can paint it onto the wall hanging. Very cool.

The brick bookends are pretty too.

What's nice about all the projects on this site is that detailed instructions are given, so that the older child can really perfect the craft, while the younger kids can still have lots of fun. So what if the wee ones don't want to use stencils and the butterflies come out looking like flying beach balls? It's all creative and learning and family fun.

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Kids - don't forget Mother's Day!

Sunday May 10th is Mother's Day, a custom of honoring mothers that goes back at least as far as 17th-century England, which still celebrates Mothering Sunday in March each year.

FactMonster has some ideas about what kids can do for moms on Mother's Day, like Gift Certificates:

• Choose different chores that you could help mom with (dishes, laundry, etc.)

• Make and decorate a card, with the tasks you've chosen written inside.
  

If you're in a rush or not the artistic type, don't worry. You can get your Coupons For Mom right here.

By the way, the official flower for Mother's Day is the carnation (which will look great in your own Fingerprint Flower Vase), but if you'd rather give mom a plant, you can make her a recycled flower pot that's a great memory-maker.

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Peanut Butter Jar Storage and Cereal Box Crafts

Megan, a SAHM in Chicago, has a wonderful blog called PlumPudding where she blogs about a variety of crafts for children (among other things).

If you're looking for fun crafts to do with your kids, which use both the recycle and useful themes that we all like to encourage! -- you can wash out your plastic peanut butter containers to use as storage boxes for little treasures like Polly Pockets, Leggos, tiny farm animals, etc., (keep the lids from being lost with this idea).

Cereal boxes are another item well-used by crafty moms (like using the inside as canvases for painting), and Megan shows you how to make bookmarks as well as postcards and envelopes. Remember to round off all corners as the cardboard used in cereal boxes can make them uncomfortably sharp! These are truly green crafting ideas at their best.

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Kids Celebrate Earth Day with Activities and Crafts

From Coffee Ground Fossils (a recycling craft) to 5 tips on how kids can help the planet, Funschool has come up with a nice selection of activities, crafts and games relating to Earth Day (April 22nd).

My kids were recently subjected to a guest lecture at their school that they interpreted to be full of blame, fear and hopelessness. That approach is obviously not helpful in addition to being extremely frightening--adults need to present Earth Day in positive terms of nurturing and caring for something that's very precious and irreplaceable. We need to give our children hope in concrete terms of things they can do to help, such as this partial list from PlanetPals:

Things to do with paper, gift wrap or cardboard:

• Use it to cover and protect your schoolbooks
• Make your own paper dolls be a fashion designer and design doll clothes
• Cover the walls in your dollhouse with gift wrap for wallpaper
• Use bags or newspaper particularly colorful comics, for gift wrap....
• Use old gift wrap, comics or wallpaper to cover boxes or cans
• Use the back side of bags or gift wrap as practice paper for painting or studying the alphabet
• Use your practice paintings as gift wrap--they can be colorful and special!
• Cut it in squares and use it to make origami
• Make a book, or album -- paper pages and cardboard cover -- use string or ribbon to tie it together
• Make homemade paper
• Make paper mache projects

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All About the Legends of St. Patrick's Day - and Some Crafts Too!

There's an ebook called About Saint Patrick and Saint Patrick's Day. It's free to download and print out (although you'll have to joint the site where the book is hosted (scridb.com), which is also free.

It's a nice review of the holiday, compiled from information found from all over, and put into one small package with longer historical text interspersed with kid-friendly snippets (like did you know there's a tradition that schoolmates pinch those who don't wear green to school on St. Paddy's day?). I won't tell my kids about that one!

After you read about the Blarney Stone, why not make one yourself? All you need is a stone and some paint, and you've got a paperweight memory of time well spent with your child.

If you're looking for more activities, Education World has lots of ideas, like making leprechaun traps (with paths of gold dust) and leprechaun planters with hair. You can also see how to easily make handprint rainbows from construction paper -- and this can be something for the whole family to do or just a bunch of wee friends.

I'm off to make green Jell-O now (we ate all the rainbow cups already)!

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