Easy craft ideas, aimed at kids, but which can be enjoyed by all the family, from the youngest to the eldest!

This cute mobile was made a young kid (at six and a half years old) with the repositionable painting technique also called painting on glass).
First draw a design (e.g hearts,stars, apples, gifts) on a sheet of Rhodoid R or equivalent (thick, transparent plastic sheet) squeezing the outliner directly from the bottle nozzle
Once dried, paint the inside of the shapes, always using the nozzle of the bottle, taking care to paint right up to the outliner line.
When the paint has dried, cut out the shapes, leaving a space between the outliner and the cut.
To hang the shapes, make a small hole for a length of thin brass wire that is then twisted.
Attach to a wreath, (made out of rushes held together by gold-look wire) and you have an original mobile to hang from your lamps.

A Christmas wreath in salt dough...good enough to eat!
Check out the recipe for salt dough.
Make two long coils which are then twisted together. Make the wreath.
Roll the rest of the dough with a rolling pin. Cut off a little slab to cover the joins where the coils meet.
Using cutters, cut out shapes like stars and hearts from the rolled dough
Make a hole in the stars. Fix a little hook ( a wire in a u-shape) into the heart shapes.
Bake the wreath and other items (see baking salt dough).
The stars and hearts are spray-painted gold and silver. The wreath is simply varnished.
Use red (what else!) ribbons to attach the different items to the wreath and to hang the wreath itself.


...or how to create a decoration for windows without using colored transparent paper.
This is a great activity for younger kids, who get to make their own decoration - with an adult standing by as well, of course!
Cut out some tracing paper (big enough to cut a star shape from).
Ask the "little one" to color in the star using thick crayons, different colors and their imagination. All of the star must be colored in.
Place another, same-sized piece of tracing paper on top of the coloring.
Place a cloth on top before ironing at a low heat, using your normal iron : The colors should melt...Next draw a star shape (edges one third of an inch thick) on stiff black paper.Cut out two of these 'star-frames'.
Place this star frame onto the colored tracing paper and cut right the way round. Paste a star frame onto each side of the tracing paper.