Beat the Blahs with Fun Family Winter Craft Adventures
Winter comes with less daylight and foul weather. Add families and young, active children to the mix and everyday life becomes challenging. This year, tackle cabin fever and the winter blahs with fun and educational crafts projects. It's an ideal opportunity to share enjoyable activity and develop new skills. When you make learning fun, the time passes quickly and boosts everyone's mood during the darkest time of the year.
Learning Life Skills and Beating Cabin Fever
Planning and executing a project teaches valuable life skills and could even develop into lucrative cottage industries later on. Projects should be educational and contain an element of physical activity. Moving around is an important element of your overall physical and emotional wellbeing during winter. Being active releases endorphins that elevate your mood and help you feel good.
Doing crafts and small mechanical projects helps kids develop critical thinking, time management skills, and an enhanced appreciation for a job well done. Get them involved in every step of your projects--everything, from researching potential project ideas, to finding materials and tools. More than just something to teach the kids, look at this as a chance to learn something new yourself. Try these clever craft adventure project ideas this winter.
Nature Treasure Adventures
Try out hiking treasure hunts to create nature journals and scrapbooks. This project idea combines healthy exercise with childlike imagination. The best part--it's an adventure you can expand to encompass many craft activities. Work with your kids to stock adventure gear to search for treasures.
Put some color pencils, a charcoal pencil, a camera and a magnifying glass into your backpacks. Everyone can take photos, sketch wildlife pictures, and gather things from nature to do crafts with. Back home, their treasures will look wonderful inside decorative scrapbooks, lighted diorama boxes, or as framed art. It's easy to unleash the power of imagination and a great excuse for an educational winter day trip to nearby state parks, beaches and historic sites.
Driftwood Gathering Craft Adventures
Driftwood is a flexible material and lends itself easily to children's craft projects. Even on a blustery day, getting bundled up and walking along the lakeside or down the beach can become an exciting adventure. Bring along a small saw for mom or dad to cut pieces for everyone to bring home.
A short walk followed by sandwiches and hot cocoa gets everyone's blood pumping and imagination racing with project ideas. Kids and parents can use simple tools, glue and wire to make nearly anything they can dream up. Driftwood signs, small furniture items and personalized clocks are just a few potential projects. Older children can have a go at carving driftwood to make toys, candle holders or little elastic band powered cars and boats.
Driftwood projects ideas include:
• Coat racks and hat hangers
• Small tables
• Driftwood storage/treasure boxes
• Wind chimes
• Squirrel and bird feeders
• Carved driftwood flutes
Doll Quilts, Collages and Fabric Art
Fabric glue sticks just may become your best friend for tackling imaginative projects with your children. Now it's easy to try lots of fabric art projects without worrying about little hands or faces meeting sharp needles.
Start with a rummage through old clothes and worn out bedding to find colorful cloth to work with. Then, look at some crafty cloth ideas with the kids to decide what you are going to make. You can find lots of interesting ideas in magazines and on the Internet. Let your kids go crazy creating designs!
Kids and grownups both will enjoy cutting the fabric into interesting shaped pieces to make a picture, collage or small quilted cushion for a bed or chair. Drawing the picture on a sheet of posterboard is a good place to begin. Then, they can arrange fabric swatches in different combinations to get it perfect before glueing.
Join the pieces with fabric glue and a frame, or attach to a cushion or quilt backing as needed. For bigger quilting projects, using a soft blanket or flannel sheet will allow you to skip buying batting and doing needlework.
Now they can start glueing up their designs in 12-inch by 12-inch squares. After making the quilt design, it's easy to fasten the squares to your flannel sheet or blanket with permanent fabric glue. Fusible bonding web, like Stitch Witchery, is another simple, permanent way to bond fabrics using a steam iron. It's a good option for small patchwork wall quilt art.
Get Creative
These ideas are just the tip of the iceberg. Imagination powered projects can turn dreary winter afternoons or weekends into endless opportunities for fun filled and educational adventures. Look in your area for hiking venues, museums, and historic sites to explore. The key here is doing things with your family. Build a model airplane, make a basket or do something else totally off the wall.
You'll soon love discovering how much fun your kids' active imaginations, a camera or two, and a knapsack to fill with treasures can be.