Quick Mother's Day and Spring Crafts

There's nothing like a mother's love!  She births us into the world, feeds us on her bosom and showers us with love.  This Sunday is Mother's Day, so we thought we'd showcase two fast and fun crafts that your child can make to give to you, or to a grandmother!  Let's be honest, I'm a big procrastinator and have nothing prepped, so fast and easy is where it's at.  All you need are a few markers and coffee filters!

Materials for flower or butterfly:

• coffee filters (1 per flower or butterfly)
• washable markers
• spray bottle filled with water
• pipe cleaners or clothespins
• scrap paper

Method:

1. Lay a coffee filter on the scrap paper.
2. Let your little one colour to her heart's content using washable markers.  If you prefer a certain colour scheme, you can limit the marker colours you give your little ones.
   
3. Once you're finished colouring, you can let your little one use the spray bottle to spray the coffee filter.  The markers will start to blend and bleed, creating a watercolour effect.  Let the filter dry.
   
Tip!  You can lay your coffee filter on a plate or cookie sheet before you let your child spray it.


4. Once it's dry, you can cinch down the middle and clothespin it to make a butterfly or use a pipe cleaner to form the butterfly body.  To make a flower, pinch just the centre and attach it to a pipe cleaner.
   
   
   
   

And now the question...have you gotten something for your mom? Since you have all these coffee filters out, let's use them to make a cute coffee filter rose topiary!

Materials for rose topiary:

• coffee filters (I used 10)
• watercolor paints or washable markers
• hot glue gun and glue sticks
• scissors
• pencil
• styrofoam ball (optional)
• dowel
• mason jar or a cute pot of some sort

Method:

1. Take your favourite watercolour paint and paint a stack of coffee filters.  You can also dye them using your favourite natural dye, or use the marker and spray technique from above once your roses are done.
2. If you really want to, you can iron your coffee filters so they're absolutely flat.  The ones in the photo haven't been ironed, so you can see that some of the roses have petals that are a bit wavy.  But let's be honest, ain't nobody got time to iron coffee filters.  I barely iron shirts.
3. Stack two coffee filters on top of each other.
4. Use your pencil to sketch out a spiral on your coffee filters.
5. Use your scissors to cut along the line you just drew, so you have one long paper spiral.
   
6. This is where you can get your crafty on.  You're going to start at one end, and you're going to start to roll the coffee filter.  Pinch the bottom as you go to form the centre of the rose.
   
7. Add some hot glue periodically to make sure the petals continue to stick.
8. You can make different sizes of roses by cutting your spiral into different lengths.  I cut 2-3 spirals out of each coffee filter stack and I varied the lengths to make different size roses.
9. To form the ball, hot glue your roses onto a styrofoam ball.  If you choose not to use a ball, you can also glue the sides of the roses together to form a ball.  Start with the largest roses, and then fill in gaps with smaller ones.
10. To dye my topiary, I used a marker to colour just the edges of the petals.  Then I sprayed the flowers with some water to spread the colour. 
    
11. Glue the rose ball onto your dowel, and then place the dowel in a cute jar or container.  You can fill the container with some shredded filler, beads, etc. and tie a cute ribbon around it. 
    

Wouldn't these look cute as a centrepiece for a party, or even a wedding?  Crazy DIY wedding crafts, here we come!

Hope you all have a great Mother's Day weekend!  Let us know what you did to celebrate!

Easy Flower Headband

Time is a precious commodity when you have children, so today I'll be showing you how to make an incredibly fast and easy flower hairband.  It takes less than 15 minutes and requires no sewing.  And it is just so cute!  Admittedly, I wish I had made a bunch of these when my daughter was younger, because they're nice and soft in case you want to put them on your newborn (can you say, "newborn photoshoot"?).

Note: The number of cut out flowers you need will depend on the thickness of the knit fabric that you use.  The purple fabric you see in the photos is a thinner, slinkier jersey knit, while the dark gray is slightly thicker and stiffer.  I used 16 cut out flowers in the purple, and only 10 in the gray fabric.  You will also need fewer flowers if your finished flower size is smaller.

Tip!  Have a t-shirt you don't wear anymore?  Re-purpose it into this cute headband!

Materials

• knit fabric like a jersey - quantity will depend on how large you want your flower to be, and on how "stiff" your fabric is, but you won't need more than 40 cm x 40 cm or so
• hot glue gun, glue sticks for the gun
• felt (preferably the same colour as your fabric)
• scissors
• a few pins
• paper and pencil

Tip!  If you're going to get serious about crafting with fabric, consider reserving a special set of scissors just for fabric (and keep them away from paper, hair, and anything else your kids will try to use them on!).  This will keep them nice and sharp.

Method

1. Plug in your hot glue gun now, so you can let it get hot!  It's like preheating your oven, but for crafting! 
2. Draw out a flower onto a piece of paper, roughly the size you want your finished fabric flower to be.  Cut this flower template out.  You can draw 4 or 5 petals on your flower.  I did 5 petals, and the diameter of my flower was about 7cm across. 
3. Cut 10-16 squares of knit fabric to fit your flower.  (I may have cheated and cut a long strip of fabric about 7.5 cm wide, which I folded back and forth to layer the fabric and cut many flowers at once.)
4. Take a stack of 4-5 squares and pin your flower template to the top.  Take your scissors and cut around the flower.  It doesn't have to be neat, but try to use slow, long strokes to make the edges smooth.
   
5. Repeat until you've cut out all your fabric flowers.  Don't panic if your flowers are uneven or slight wonky. Everything will look amazing at the end, I promise! 
6. Fold each flower into quarters (into half, and then into half again). You can see what they look like in the photos below.
7. Cut 2 circles out of your felt, slightly smaller than the flower.
8. Squeeze a dot of glue into the centre of the felt.  Take each folded flower and glue the corner down.  Your first layer should have 4 flowers.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
9. Take another 4 flowers and glue the corners to the middle of the felt, but stagger this layer so that you're covering the cracks between the flowers in the first layer.  Mathematically speaking, it's a 45 degree rotation.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
10. I used my glue gun to squish the centre corners periodically, to make sure the flowers really adhered well.
    
11. Keep going until you have one or two flowers left.  Roll these flowers and attach them to the centre of your large flower.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
12. You can go back and fluff the flower, but voila, you have a gorgeous flower.  Aren't you a little bit impressed with your skills?
13. Cut a long piece of knit fabric for the headband.  You can wrap a long piece of fabric around your little one's head to figure out how long to make it.  Mine measured 37 cm long by 5 cm wide.
14. Run a line of glue along one end and attach the other end, overlapping the fabric by about 1 cm.
    
    
    
    
15. Glue your large flower right over this seam, and glue the other felt circle underneath, so the dried glue doesn't scratch your little one's head.
16. Give your hairband a tug to stretch the fabric.
    
    
    
    

Tip!  Glue a cute button or jewel in the centre of the flower to make it even fancier!

Tip!  Make the flower out of felt or chiffon for a different look.

I hope you have fun creating these headbands in lots of different colours for your little one!  Let us know how they turn out, or if you have any questions or suggestions for making these even easier!