Homemade Grandparent Christmas Gift from Kids

We decided we wanted to make some homemade gifts for Grandparents this year for Christmas and came up with these darling little framed art pictures. We glued magnets on the back of them so they can hang on display on the refrigerator.

I love how the brightly colored frames make the artwork pop out. They are only about 4" x 4" so they are as cute as can be!

My three year old had mostly scribbles to add to her canvases, but they are beautiful and I know Grandparents will love them!

The secret to the fun frames is these Colored Craft Sticks from our friends at Craftprojectideas.com. They come in a pack of 150 sticks and are brightly colored red, green, blue and yellow. You can purchase them at your local Walmart in the arts and crafts section.

To make the frames I hot glued four of the craft sticks together in a square. (*This step needs to be done by an adult since the hot glue can burn children.) Then my kids had fun decorating their frames by gluing sequins all over them.

While the frames were drying, I cut out our canvases out of white cardstock paper. I made them 3 3/4" x 3 3/4" squares. My kids used colored pencils to draw and color to their heart's content and once the frames were dry, I hot glued the artwork to the back of the frame, making sure the picture showed through the front of the frame.

Then I glued a magnet on the back and voila! A beautiful masterpiece perfect for a Grandparent gift...AND perfect for a family on a Christmas budget too! :)  Do you enjoy making homemade gifts for Christmas?

**I received my Colored Craft Sticks for free from Craftprojectideas.com but all opinions expressed are 100% my own.

Grandparent's Day Craft

Since Grandparent's Day is this Sunday I thought I'd share what we created for the special Grandparents in our life. I was browsing for some ideas for simple crafts and came across this cute Grandparent Award Craft at Busy Bee Kids Crafts. I decided it was just perfect to let the Grandparent's know how special we think they are. Here is how they turned out:

I changed quite a few things on my rendition of the craft so I'll go ahead and tell you how I made mine. We started by painting the bottom of 2 small paper plates with gold paint (the side you don't eat on). Ours had to be mailed since we don't live near Grandparent's so I thought using the large paper plates were just too big to mail. I also wanted to mention that we used gold tempera paint but if I could rewind I would have used acrylic paint instead. The tempera paint has so much more water in it so it took like 3 good coats for it to be coated.

After the gold paint was dry, we used small letter stamps to stamp on "1 GRANDMA" on one of the plates. I didn't have a # stamp so I just hand wrote those on with a black marker. Then the kids had fun gluing on pretty jewels all over the award to give it some bling. Ha!

On the second plate we wrote a simple message and both the boys signed it. We also decided to add a magnet on the back of our medal so that our Grandparents could display them proudly on their fridge. I was very fortunate to receive a "Rainy Day Survival Kit" in the mail for free from Craftprojectideas.com which included a package of these magnetic buttons. LOVE these magnets and have even bigger plans to use the rest of them. You can purchase them at your local Wal-Mart.

Then I cut two strips of 1.5" blue paper to create the ribbon. We cut a triangle at the bottom to finish off the ribbon. We decided to use the same stapling technique that I used in my sea turtle craft by simply stapling the ribbons between the two plates and then adding a couple more staples around the plates to hold them together. This way, if they get a little bunched in the mail, you can simply put your finger in the hole on the edge and push the plate back to its proper form. (get it?)

They look pretty snazzy on the fridge! Now our Grandparents will know that we proudly think they are #1!

Happy Crafting!!

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