Valentine's Day Monster Card

Here a fun Valentine's Day craft that I did with the preschoolers on Tuesday. Using two different sized hearts in two different colours we made a monster.

2 mid-sized hearts, 4 small hearts, 4 strips crimped for limbs and 2 goggly eyes

 Glue the two mid-sized hearts together to form the body of your monster.

Monster body

Attached limbs with hands and feet. Glue on eyes. Draw on nose and mouth.

Monster in progress

I printed a smiple card on card stock paper. Folded in half with message on the inside. Glue monster to front of card.

Finished outside of card

When the preschoolers did the craft on Tuesday, many of them glued the monster together right on to the card.

Here is the inside of the card which the children were able to colour the lettering any way they would like.

Happy Valentine's Day!!

Owl Puppet

In addition to my beading I also love doing paper crafts. Remember last year's origami vase and flowers.

Many of my paper craft project are for children's programs at the library. Today for preschool we had an owl themed storytime. I found pictures of this craft idea on Pinterest but there was no link to specific instructions.

So here is how the preschoolers and I made this fun owl puppet.

My sample puppet

Supplies
Paper bag
2 Paper muffin tin liners
black paper - cut into a triangle and 2 circle, with a wedge cutout
brown paper - cut into 2 oval, one of which you cut in half
Crayons or markers
glue stick

Supplies

Instructions

Glue black circles into the muffin liners. 

Glue triangle and muffin liners to paper bag.

 
Glue oval to front of paper bag. Add feather markings to brown oval for the owl chest.

Glue 2 oval halves to back of paper bag so they stick out like wings.

Here is the parliament of owls created by some of the preschoolers at storytime today.

Happy Crafting!!

Silver Paper Vase

This is not a beading project, but it does go with my recent Iris Twist Vase. I just sent in my artisan statement and pictures for my Beadwork entry in the Creativ Festival's Designer Style Challenge. Now it is time to finish my project for my Paper Arts entry.

I decided to continue with my vase and iris theme, only now it will be with origami. I have finished the vase, which is made with a combination of triangles, hexagrams and connectors.

Vase Components

This design is a variation of a Regular Hexagonal Flat Unit in Tomoko Fuse's book Unit Polyhedron Origami. I inverted the top section to make the vase a short, shallow vessel. This type of origami is like flat pack furniture. You need to connect to component in the correct place and in the correct order. And the instructions include pictures.

Silver Paper Vase with purple accents

Looking to the vase

Now that the vase is done, I need to work on the origami iris flowers that I want to make and arrange in it. The ones I made last weekend did not come out as I had hoped. 

Going to try some different papers to see which creates the flowers that I want.