Crafts with Your Children For St. Patty’s Day

Guest post by  Tara C.

Doing crafting projects to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day is an excellent way to spend quality time as a family. There is a wide variety of crafting projects that are suitable for all ages and creativity levels. The projects may be the primary focus of the day, or they can be used as enhancements to other fun activities. Many families choose to build up to St. Patrick’s Day by crafting decorations, games and treats for several weeks prior to the holiday.

Using Household Items

There are literally hundreds of crafting projects that require nothing more than a few inexpensive household items. The following items can be used for creating decorations, games, musical instruments, lapel pins, necklaces, and other hand-crafted works of art:

• Paper plates
• Styrofoam cups
• Coffee filters
• Cardboard tubes and boxes
• Empty plastic bottles, tin cans and other types of plastic or metal containers
• Scraps of cloth and other sewing materials
• Food items, such as pasta, rice, beans, and dried peas
• Pipe cleaners, toothpicks, paper clips, safety pins
• Magazines, newspapers
• Basic art supplies – Crayons, markers, pens, pencils, glue or paste, paints, paint brushes or stamp sponges, construction paper, transparent tape, and scissors

Sample Crafts

Here are some sample crafting projects and instructions on how to make them:

• Bean Bag Toss: Cut out two squares of equal size from a piece of material. Sew three of the sides of the square but leave one side open. Fill the square with uncooked rice or beans, then sew up the last side of the square. If sewing is a problem, a sock can be used instead of a sewn bag. Just fill the sock and wrap a rubber band tightly around the open end of the sock. Be sure to make at least one bean bag for each member of the family. Then decorate containers for tossing the bean bags into or play “hot potato” with the bean bags. The family can brainstorm the rules for each game.
• Rainmakers: Tightly seal one end of a long paper tube. This can be a wrapping paper tube or a paper towel tube. Saran wrap and rubber bands or construction paper and glue can be used for sealing the ends. Next, snip the ends off of toothpicks and poke them into all sides of the tube, spacing them about every 1½ inch. This gives the filler materials something to ricochet off of when they fall from one end to the other. Then partially fill the tube with uncooked rice, beans, dried peas, or small pebbles. The volume of the rainmaker increases as more rice, beans or small pebbles are added. When finished adding the desired amount of filling materials, tightly seal the other end. Use colored paper, markers, paint or crayons to decorate the rainmaker with St. Patrick’s Day symbols. To make sounds with the rainmaker, slowly flip the tube around, letting the filling materials fall from one end to the other, or gently shake the tube.
• Collage – Carefully cut pictures related to Irish and St. Patrick’s Day traditions from magazines and newspapers. Other items can also be used, such as clover leaves, drawings, scraps of cloth, or any other materials on hand. After amassing the desired collage content, cover the work area with an old sheet or vinyl table cloth and place a large poster board or large piece of cloth in the center. Then glue all of the pictures to a poster board or large piece of cloth in random order. Fasten the ends of a piece of long string or wire to the back of the collage. Place a heavy weight on top of the collage to help keep the collage flat and the pictures from falling off until all the glue dries. Then hang the collage up on a picture hook or small nail. The collage can also be fastened to the wall with thumb tacks, push pins or transparent tape instead using a string or wire attached to the back.

There are many more items lying around the house that can be utilized. The activities and crafting projects can easily be adapted to suit the age, gender, and personal preferences of each family member. When children are young, creative projects and fun ways to use resources can train children to use their creativity to meet needs. If you have a teen, your projects may be more about school projects and reducing teenager auto insurance, but young kids can utilize creativity in fun ways. Take advantage of this and let the only thing required for all projects be the willingness to have fun together.

Author Bio: Tara C. is a blogger and mom who likes to be creative. When not staying busy with her young daughter and son, she likes to help people save money by following steps to get the best auto insurance rates.