Fuzzy Critter Craft

My girls love to craft!  I try to do some kind of craft with them even if it's just coloring in their coloring books, at least once a week.  This week, we made fuzzy critters with pom poms and pipe cleaners.  It's easy, affordable, and a ton of fun!  Here's how we did it in case you want to do it yourself.

Here are the ones I made that I'll use as examples.  I made a Teddy Bear, a dragonfly, and a birdie.

For the bear you need 1 large pom pom, 1 medium pom pom, 4 small pom poms, 3 a little smaller pom poms and one tiny pom pom.  And of course googly eyes are always fun!

I used my hot glue gun because I have no patience, but the girls used Aleene's Tacky Glue for their projects.

The next one is probably one of my favorites.  I love cute little bugs! 

First we wrapped a pipe cleaner around a wooden dowel.  A pencil would work well for this as well.  Then glue on a small pom pom.  Cut one 2 inches off of one pipe cleaner for legs and use the remaining por

Another fun critter to make is a birdie.  For this I used one large and one medium pom pom, a set of googly eyes, and 3 pipe cleaners.  Cut off 1 inch for a tail from one of the pipe cleaners and then cut that one in half for the wings.  For the beak, cut off 1 inch and use the remaining for the legs.

Wrap the longest pipe cleaner around a dowel or pencil.  Glue one end to the largest pom pom and the other end to the small pom pom for the head.  Glue on eyes, beak, tail, wings, and legs.

These were so easy to make.  After we made a few of the critters from my head, the girls decided to come up with a few of their own.  I'll let you guess which is which, but we now have a snake, a caterpillar, a couple of snowmen, and a lion in our critter collection.

Now head to the  craft store, get some pipe cleaners pom poms and googly eyes and get ready for some fun with your kids!

Recycled Crayons

It is inevitable.  If you have children, you have broken crayons.  Today we solved our problem.  I had the girls help me remove the paper (I did most of it).  Then I had them divide the colors into color families.  I had read that silicone muffin cups work well.  So I pulled out the snow flake ones I bought at the Target dollar spot a couple of years ago.  They didn't work for muffins so this was their chance to redeem themselves.  Once we had the colors divided, I put them in a 250 degree oven for about 20 minutes.  I let them cool for 30 minutes and now my darling daughters are enjoying their new crayons.  Zion even asked if we could do this to our unbroken crayons so they won't be so boring.   Hopefully she won't break them on purpose, but this was so easy, we will have to do it when the inevitable takes over the crayon box once again.