Home Craft Designs | home art and craft

Encouraging your child’s creativity at home by creating craft items is very beneficial for their mental development. Children can explore different textures, shapes and patterns, and discover how to put ideas into action by handling different materials, and sticking and gluing them together. But lets not forget, it’s great fun and a good way to spend some quality time focusing your attention on your children.

Buying materials from a craft store can be expensive, so why not start a junk/scraps box. All you need is a box or a large storage bag that you keep in a cupboard ready to store your household junk. It’s easy to start collecting and is surprising how quickly your junk box or bag will fill up. Just remember that every time you are in the kitchen preparing meals, keep all the empty boxes, tubs or tubes you normally throw away, and add these to your craft box. Also, whenever you come across any interesting items, you can put them in your box ready for when you want to make one of our crafts. Collect lots of items, from different shaped boxes, cardboard tubes, shiny paper, drinking straws, plastic bottle tops, and clean ice-lolly sticks.


Craft shops stock an extensive range of craft materials. Why not visit your local store and buy a selection of items to store in your box. Look out for cheaper end of lines, bargain buckets, and reduced price crafts that have damaged packaging. If you look out for bargains, or just buy one or two inexpensive items per week, you will quickly build up a good stock of craft materials in your home craft box. Look out for feathers, pom poms, wiggly eyes, wool, material, tissue paper, colored paper and glitter. Even at Christmas you could collect lots of shiny things to use, including small bits of tinsel, wrapping paper, ribbons, gift tags, parcel twine, and shiny foil sweet wrappers.

While out shopping, check out material and fabric shops for fabric cut-offs and scraps, odd buttons, and for cheap balls of wool or yarn. Kitchen shops often sell cheap wooden spoons. You can make a whole family of spoon puppets just by sticking fabric and wool onto wooden spoons and drawing on faces with felt-tipped pens.


Don’t forget to always have lots of paint, colored crayons, glue and sticky tape at home!

Here is a recipe for home-made Colorful Rice. This is so simple to make you will wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself! Once made, colorful rice will keep well when stored in an airtight container, such as an empty plastic ice-cream tub.

Colorful Rice
You will need:
A large packet of long grain rice,
Food coloring,
A mixing bowl, or container with lid.

To Make - Pour the rice into the bowl or container. Add a few drops of food coloring to the rice, put the lid on the bowl making sure it’s tight, and shake until all the rice is covered.
Don’t add too much food coloring at once or the rice will clump together. Add a little at a time, shaking well until all the rice is colored and not patchy. Tip out onto kitchen paper and leave the rice to dry thoroughly.

Tip - Make a small bowl of each color then mix all the colored rice together in a large bowl, or use separate colors to decorate different parts of a picture or collage.

This craft and a lot more are available, along with photographs, in full color, in our free Messy Tots mini-craft book by instant download. See the author details below to get your free copy today.


M New bold is a prolific writer on many subjects. For a free full color mini-craft book, visit:
http://www.cotswoldfamilylife.co.uk
www.cotswoldfamilylife.co.uk

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