Paper crafting – freestyle

The past month has left me feeling stretched pretty thin because of obligations and responsibilities to my family and others.     Tackling domestic duties and  “home schooling” the girls while my non-stop motion toddler “explores” the house into a distaster zone has also been a challenge.  Crafting has been particularly tricky – Tum Tum either attempt to eat or destroy anything the girls are working on – and he’s especially good at climbing up on the kitchen table and flinging art supplies across the room in a lightning flash.

This day, he took a nice long nap after lunch, so as soon as he was sleeping,  I quickly whisked out some craft supplies for the girls to do a little fall paper crafting.  We didn’t have anything in mind  – I put out some supplies with a vaguely autumnal theme and let the girls’ creativity lead them.

We had a huge pad of fall-colored  scrap book paper (on clearance for $3 this past summer at Michaels),  paper scraps, some oatmeal and coffee tins, glitter glue, sequins, etc, chrysanthemum and maple leaf punches (I am addicted to the Martha Stewart craft punches – whenever they have one of those 50% off the sale price ” coupons and the Martha Stewart items are on sale, I snatch one up.).  After punching out some maple leaves for them, I went into the kitchen to make brownies, and let the girls explore on their own.

I love what they came up with – Little Hen’s (left) is a “treasure box” (it’s hard to see in this shot, but she wrote “treasures” on it) and Firecracker’s is a bank for “collecting coins for Heifer”.

We saved the last canister for Tum Tum, who was happy to turn it into a drum after he woke from his nap.  🙂

Note : I hope to get back to some more regular posting by the end of the week.  Life has been a bit overscheduled I just haven’t found the time to sit down at the computer much the past few weeks.  We have some family birthdays, out of town company, and a trip coming up, so I hope to squeeze in some blogging late at night!!