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Top Tips for Making Crafts At Home With Your Children, and Paper Free Mache Recipe

by

mmnewbold

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 focussing 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, coloured 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, coloured crayons, glue and sticky tape at home! Here is a recipe for home-made Paper Mache. This is so simple to make, but can be very messy indeed, so make sure you cover up with an apron, coverall, or wear some old clothes that you don’t mind getting messed up. Once made, paper mache does not keep very well, so only try to make as much as you think you will need for the day. Paper Mache You will need – Large bowl, Newspaper, Pva glue, Water, Brush, Balloon. To Make – Pour Pva glue into a bowl, add a small amount of water and mix. Cover your balloon with the glue and layers of newspaper, keep pasting on the glue with a brush. Tip – Prepare newspaper before you start to make the paste, tear up the newspaper into strips and leave in a pile ready. You can use wallpaper paste instead of PVA glue. Children must be supervised at all times. This craft and a lot more are available, along with photographs, in full colour, in our free Messy Tots mini-craft book by instant download. See the author details below to get your free copy today.

M Newbold is a prolific writer on many subjects. For a free full colour mini-craft book, visit:

http://www.cotswoldfamilylife.co.uk www.cotswoldfamilylife.co.uk

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