Salaric

During their Christmas party I got the scouts to make Christmas cards – I just put the equipment out which included: ink pads in green, dark green, red, cherry red, orange, yellow, navy blue, purple, black, silver and gold (all bought from The Works in Stroud for £1.45 for three colours in one box); two lots of Christmas foam stamps from The Pound Shop which included bells, reindeers, snowflakes, Santas, candy canes, robins, holly, sleighs, gingerbread men and Christmas trees; foam Christmas shapes like baubles, reindeers, trees and holly; lolly sticks in red and green; lots of pom poms and pipe cleaners in festive colours; Christmas shapes punched out of last year’s wrapping paper such as snowmen, snowflakes and presents; PVA white craft glue; glitter; goggly eyes; safety scissors; stencils of a nativity scene; metallic gel pens; ordinary colouring pens and pencils; cotton wool and card of lots of different colours and textures that they could fold up to make Christmas cards with. Here is what they produced. (We also had quiet a few younger children there as it was a party).

I made this Christmas hat with my two year old for her Christmas party at nursery. It took two paper doilys, a pair of scissors, PVA craft glue, Christmas metallic shapes, one small white and silver pom pom and some clothes pegs.

I started by cutting a hole in the centre of one doily and then cutting out most of the solid white bit of the doily, so that it only left a 1-2mm thickness of white next to the lacy edging.

The second doily I cut a line into the centre of, and then slid one side of the cut over the other to create a cone shape. I then used PVA glue to fix the edges because it takes so long to dry that I had to use pegs to hold the shape until drying was completed.

Once dry, I cut through the lacy bit around the edge of the cone at about 1.5inch intervals; I then folded these flaps outwards.

I then put lots of glue onto the flaps and put the hat rim over the top and squidged it into place.

Once this was dry and I checked it still fitted onto my daughter’s head, I let her decorate it. I put a spiral of PVA white craft glue on the hat and gave her lots of Christmassy shapes like santa, cupids blowing trumpets, a bell and a deer. She even found a small silver and white pom pom, which she stuck on!

For the pom pom snowman I used PVA glue, two white pom poms (one slightly bigger than the other), two self-adhesive goggly eyes, two black pipe cleaners (one thin and one thick and extra fluffy), a piece of black foam sheet and some scissors.

First off I glued the two pom poms together to make the head and body of the snowman, then I cut a 5cm piece of the bigger fluffy-backed pipe cleaner off and wrapped it up into a tight coil to create a cylindrical shape. I then cut a circle out of the black foam and glued the spiral of pipe cleaner onto it to create a top hat. The foam circle obviously had to be slightly bigger that the pipe cleaner coil so that the hat had a brim.

I was initially going to have an orange foam carrot for the nose, but in fact I cut it out – a little orange isosceles triangle (two equally long sides and one short side – think: carrot) – and then rounded the corners off, but when I went to stick it on, it turned Mr Snowman into a chick. My two year old called it a quack-quack which I thought was conclusive evidence that the nose really wasn’t working and did indeed look far too much like a beak. So I scrapped the nose.

I then cut off about a cm of the thin black pipe cleaner and shaped it into a gentle curve which I stuck on as the snowman’s mouth. I, of course, was impatient and hadn’t waited for the glue to dry so managed to knock off the hat in sticking the mouth on!

I was trying to work out some easy Christmas craft things for my Scouts to make, having got hold of lots of pipe cleaners, coloured lolly sticks, and pom poms in assorted Christmas colours and sizes. I decided to make a pom pom Christmas tree.

First off I selected three green pom poms, each one slightly bigger than the last, some metallic/shiny pipe cleaners to be the tinsel and star on the top of the tree and selected christmas shapes – again metallic – and the sort you would find in table conffetti, a yellow lolly stick for the trunk and also to act as the strength in the structure. As this would be a project for children I used PVA glue.

I stuck the pom poms in size order onto the lolly stick, starting with the smallest right at the top of the stick, then the medium pom pom (making sure it also touched the small pom pom), then the large one. I put glue on the stick and between the pom poms. This gave the basic shape of the tree, complete with trunk.

Now you should definitely wait for the glue to completely dry before moving onto the next stage but I got impatient and so started attaching the pipe cleaners as tinsel, resulting in the pom poms sliding around in the glue. I got round this by using the pipe cleaners to ‘hug’ the pom pom to the stick. This would have been necessary anyway in order to get the pipe cleaners to sit in a realistic way on the tree.

I also cut the pipe cleaners in half to get a manageable length of ‘tinsel’ for the tree. I fashioned one of the spare pieces of gold pipe cleaner into the star for the top of the tree by folding it into thirds (making sure there was a bit spare at one end) and then folding each of those thirds in half again. I then stretched it out into a star shape, making sure the folds were ‘sharp’, so that the star had proper points. I was aiming for a five-point star so I overlapped two of the sections and twisted them together to make a continuous shape. The spare bit came down as the piece to attach to the tree.

I then glued lots of the table confetti shapes on to the tree to be the baubles and decorations, including the silver snow flakes.

I then attatched the star but found that I should have stuck it onto the lolly stick behind the smallest green pom pom. Fortunately I had been impatient so the glue was still wet and I could still insert the star.

It is not the best thing I’ve ever produced but when thinking things up for the kids I try not to be too careful as a sort of test to see if they’ll be able to produce the same thing. I think it works as a Christmas tree and that others could probably produce a more sophisticated version, using the same materials and this simple idea.