Some schools are lucky enough to have broken up for Christmas already, if you find yourself with some excitable small people or even large people (maybe not even that excitable) and you don’t know what to do with yourself, I have a solution! Crafting of course!

 

First we’ll talk about the glue gun snowflakes. These are for bigger people who are less likely to burn themselves…

I read a how to and it gave mad advice, don’t put washing up liquid on the grease proof paper! Just lie some grease proof paper over your template on a tray and draw over it. Then you let it dry before you carefully remove it. It wont stick to glass by itself though, but if you remember to make yourself a loop they make fantastic hanging snowflakes!

It really is that easy…

Next we’ll talk about the more complex snowman out of cups!

Please note: Smaller cups will make a smaller snowman! This is probably preferable…

I wasn’t lead on this craft so I’m nit sure where the instructions came from – they also weren’t clear!

You will need:

White plastic cups
Stapler and staples
Gluegun and glue
black paint
Orange paper
Black card
Black paint
Scarf

To start you need to make a circle with plastic cups by stapling them together. Ours split around the staples so don’t worry if yours do too.The amount of cups it takes to get a ring will depend on the size of the cups. You don’t want it to be pulled too taught so make sure it sits ‘comfortably’.

When you add the second row, we tried to sit them in the gaps between the cups, but we might not have put enough into our first ring because they didn’t all sit there and in the end we were just stapling cups willy nilly. (Well SOME of us were doing it properly.) you need to staple the second row to the cup beneath as well as next to it. We started off doing every few to the row beneath, but quickly found that the stability from the few extra staples was more than worth it! Keep going until you have a dome.

Then do it again. Once you’ve got two domes it’s time to staple them together! Pay careful attention to where the join is or you will staple the wrong place and it won’t stay together…

And then you need to do it ALL over again to get a second one. I don’t have photos for this next bit because we were rushing then I wasn’t in the second session. but we’ll get through this together.

We couldn’t work out how to get them to stick together as the glue gun didn’t work so we made a hole in the top of one sphere and added cups to the other with some vague notion of making them slot together. Next we used the not-quite-dome shape that had been made by tipping the cups in less as the base of the snowman and we had our basic shape down!

Where the buttons and eyes were, the insides of the cups were painted black and a piece of orange paper or card was rolled up to make a carrot nose. Twigs were taped together for arms and an old scarf was added to hide any joins. Finally a hat was made using black card and tinsel!

This wasn’t as easy as I’d thought but then the final item was far more spectacular than I thought too!!!

Finally we’re going to talk about the paper snowflakes. These are probably my favourite of todays crafts! I found them quite relaxing.

For this you will need :

White paper
Scissors
Ruler
Pencil
tape
Stapler

 You will need 6 pieces of paper folded and cut into squares. Then you need to keep it folded on the diagonal and you need to fold it corner to corner again, with the ‘flappy bits’ at the top. Then, using a ruler draw 5 or six parallel lines to the long side of the paper. DO NOT DRAW ALL THE WAY TO THE END.

Cut along the lines and unfold the square. You should have this shape!

Now you need to fold the middle pieces in and stick them together. Next you need to turn it over and fold the next two pieces the OTHER way, like so:

Keep going with all the tabby bits and then you should have some kind of strange shape like this third picture here. I did 5 lines by it looks wonky to me so next time I’d do six…

Then you just have to do 5 more! You staple the points together then the meet points on the sides where you stuck them together to make a full snowflake.

so pretty!

I hope you are able to keep everyone happily entertained! What kid of crafty things do you recommend?