Kids' craft: Gnomes made out of sticks

I found this idea at one of my favourite crafts blogs. Gail of "That artist woman" explains how to make gnomes out of sticks. Each of our family members made a gnome of their own. We used colored paper for hats and shredded paper for beards.

Shana Tova! Handmade card for kids

"Shana Tova!" means "A Good Year!". It is a traditional greeting on Rosh Hashanah. I wrote about the greeting cards with paper quilling I made for Rosh Hashanah, but this card you can easily make with kids.

Rosh Hashanah cards: quilled fish, bee, apple, and pomegranate

Greeting cards with paper quilling for the Jewish New Year — the third and the last part. Previous parts: Rosh Hashanah cards with quilled pomegranates and greeting cards with quilled apples. Honey and apples to make the new year sweet, pomegranates and fish have several meanings in Judaism. I'm not going to tell you about symbolic foods, I just want to with you "Shana Tova Umetukah" — a good and sweet year!

More Rosh Hashanah greeting cards:

Make a bracelet from folded paper strips

Children love these bracelets made from paper strips. The idea isn't new, I made origami bracelets from candy wrappers when I was a child. I'm writing this tutorial for myself too, because I not always remember how to make these paper bracelets, although one day I had to make 35 of them. Well, let's start...

Lady in blue, 3D quilling doll

About a week ago I received the book Three-Dimensional Quilling: Making Characters from Amazon. And couldn't help making my first doll. Nothing special, exactly by the book.

For the dress I used hand-coloured with sparkling watercolour paper. The skirt requires three strips 1 cm wide, the top — two strips, the sleeves — one strip 0.5 cm wide for each sleeve. The rest is made of regular 3 mm strips I cut myself. The hair is made of narrow strips cut along in three, after gluing. That is, you get three hairs 1 mm wide out of a 3 mm strip. And finally, used fibre-tip pens to draw the facial features.

To whom it may concern

When looking for online resources about crafts, especially my favorite paper quilling, I often stumble upon images copied from my blog, many of them with the text removed, not to mention that no link to their source is given :( What for I've been placing the watermark at the corners, trying to make it as unobtrusive as possible?! I'm aware that nobody can guarantee that my photos will be always attributed to, me once I publish them to the Web, but what about common rules, ethics, and maybe the copyright law, too.

So, copy the images if you like them, but please, link to their source (that's easy, isn't it) and don't remove the text, that's very important to me. If you really need pictures of my artwork without a watermark for some reason, just contact me.

Rosh Hashanah cards: quilled pomegranates

Another two greeting cards for Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) with symbolic foods: pomegranates (on these cards), honey, apples and dates (on the previous ones).

More greeting cards with paper quilling: Rosh Hashana greeting cards continued.

Happy Birthday, Dad! Card with a quilled cactus

Cacti is one of my dad's hobbies. I thought it very appropriate to use the subject for his birthday card. It's Astrophitum asterias (Sea Urchin Cactus, Sand Dollar Cactus), I found how to make it in Helen Walter's "A Guide to Quilling Flowers".

Cards for Rosh Hashanah with quilled apples

I've been making cards for Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) for a couple months now. And of course with paper quilling :) Posting two of them. The items and symbolic foods for this holiday are shofar, dates, fish, pomegranates, honey, apples, challah bread.

More Rosh Hashana greeting cards: Shana Tova cards with quilled pomegranates.

Homemade rag/cloth doll

It was hard to resist the temptation to sew a rag doll (there are so many fabulous examples out there!). Especially when the younger daughter wants badly a doll she saw in her sister's kindergarten... She loves her new doll, fortunately.

I used fabric scraps, kitchen clothes and yellow yarn for hair. How to make it see this and this articles at eHow, for example. Google can be even better.

How to draw a cat

If you don't know about the Art Projects for Kids blog, go and visit it now. It's a must! Just look at these cat heads my daughter draw following the instruction in the Laurel Burch Cat Heads post.

Noah's Ark kids birthday cake

More on cakes, focusing on cake decoration. I made this one for my 5 year old daughter's last birthday. I must say it looked great and was pretty easy to make.

I cut two triangles from two sponge cakes, put them together to form a rhombus. Used the leftovers to built a hut on the deck. Coated it with chocolate cream. Made the roof, board and ladder from waffles. The animals and Noah's figure are "Little People" toys, they're not edible :)

Paper tops

An interesting use for paper quilling. Learn how to make these paper tops at Martha Stewart's site (I got there from the Folding Trees).

Painting on rock: A white rabbit

Everybody knows about painting on rocks. Animals are one of the most popular subjects. Kids have fun with this craft, starting with collecting the rocks and up to playing with animals you make. We made this simple rabbit for a start.

Card with a quilled butterfly and flowers

I had some leftovers from previous works, and recently decided to utilize all those leafs and petals. Here's the result. Used both coloured paper and old hand-coloured strips.

And two other views:

Sports games for kids using water bottles

Active games aren't exactly my "profile", nevertheless I'd like to post some ideas about how to vary the jumping and running games using large empty plastic bottles (like 2 litre/67.60 fl oz ones). Those bottles have two advantages as an "apparatus": 1) there's a good chance that you already have them, 2) they are safe to play with. In any case, adult supervision is required for active games!