Make this glitter house paper craft with your kids over the holidays. Check out my post for Alpha Mom, complete with printable templates and tutorial.
Holiday Countdown Calendars
Take a look at the easy printable holiday calendars I made over at Alpha Mom. One for Christmas and one for Hanukkah. This will help keep your kids busy when they’re out of school next week. Customize your calendar to celebrate whatever you’d like–how about Festivus?
Handmade Gift of the Week
Ready to do some holiday shopping? Boost the economy and support a crafter by buying handmade. It’s nice to know where your gifts come from and it feels better to give your money directly to the maker of an object. Last year I featured a handmade toy each week, but this year I will feature gifts from all categories.
This week’s featured gift is from Silhouettes by Carolin. Her hand-cut portraits are beautiful and reasonably priced. I think a hand-cut portrait would make a lovely gift, becoming a prized family heirloom. Carolin’s work ranges from traditional individual profiles to full-body portraits with background scenery. Not only does she create portraits of children, but her hand-cut portraits of couples would make a lovely wedding or anniversary gift. The photo below shows the intricacy of some of her work. Here’s a bit about Carolin, in her own words:
I was born and raised in southern Germany and moved to the US with my American husband in 2000. My sweetheart and I have two adorable girls (5 and 7) and enjoy being close to the coast here in South Carolina.
Starting as a very young girl I drew just about anything around me, mostly with soft pencils or graphite. That’s all I needed. I was never a “color person” (but I adore all those beautiful colorful things others make!) so the step towards black and white papercuts came natural. I always enjoyed arts and crafts and being around children so I had the idea of combining the two by starting my own silhouette business a few years ago, cutting silhouettes of children as keepsakes for their families. Since then I’ve cut probably hundreds of silhouettes. A lot of them are what I call the “classic silhouette profile” but I also did many full body silhouettes (of children and adults) and custom orders of just about any kind, like houses, landscapes, animals, scenes, logos and my newest addition bookmarks with custom designs on them.
Not until this summer did I join Etsy and it has truly been a wonderful experience, with all the orders (some of them rather challenging though) and great feedback. Hope you like my stuff and let me know if there is anything you would like to see cut.
Visit her shop on Etsy for more details.
Kid’s Artwork Stamps
I’m always doing projects with my kids’ artwork, so here’s one I’ve been meaning to try for over a year now. I finally bought Lena Corwin‘s beautiful book Printing by Hand, which has reignited my interest in printmaking. This is such a practical and handy book, by the way. I look forward to learning to screenprint. She doesn’t make her own stamps in the book, but here is a great tutorial from Geninne’s Art Blog.
With the right tools, making your own rubber stamps is a simple process. It took us just under an hour from start to finish. I had the kids draw with pencil directly on the rubber carving block and I used the super nifty carving tool from my printing kit to carve out the design (both the tool and a rubber block come in this kit along with other cool stuff). You can see that I need some practice with the carving tool, but I found it to be lots of fun. Once I had the stamps carved, I cut some balsa wood and used a glue gun to adhere the stamp to it. Seems to work fine since all you need is even pressure to make your stamp image. My older daughter drew the star, but when I was carving it she saw my lines and wanted to turn it into a shooting star. My younger one drew the flower and I added the lines around it to give it a little movement. And my kids had so much fun playing with the tiny little pieces cut from the carving block that they had pretty much lost interest in the stamps by the time I was finished carving!
Stay tuned for more stamping ideas in the coming week.
Baby Shower Printables
Throwing a baby shower? Go see my free printable invitations, cupcake toppers and bunting over at Alpha Mom.