Crafty Vases

Here's the last craft that I forced my chillins to do. I realize that Valentine's day is past, but when you've gone to the work of getting a bunch of supplies together, well, you want to utilize those supplies. Therefore, we went through with this vase/paper flower craft.

The idea came, once again from the kid activities website, but the author didn't post a picture, so I wasn't sure how well these were going to turn out. Thankfully, a friend of mine brought her daughter over to be crafty with us today and helped me interpret the directions successfully. These are they:

They make a cutesy little centerpiece for our table. Here's how we made this activity kid-friendly. We let the kids pick up to 3 colors of cupcake liners. It took a little bit to model how to pinch the bottom of the cupcake liner to make it look like a flower, but after a few tries, the kids got it. If anyone ever attempts this craft, make sure you have plenty of cupcake liners on hand that you don't mind if the kids practice on and then throw away when the "flowers" don't turn out just right. Then the kids handed the flowers to us moms and we twisted green pipe cleaners around the pinched up parts. I don't think there's any way in heck that preschoolers could do this part by themselves. We tried to make it fun by having a variety of green pipe cleaners for them to choose from. Then we had the kids make a little ball of green playdough and squish it into the bottom of their baby food jar -- soon to be vase (said vah-z, naturally) -- and poke the stems down into the ball to make the flowers stand up. That's where the directions left us. My friend had the idea to cut out paper leaves, hole punch an end of them and let the kids string a leaf or two onto each pipe cleaner. That worked out pretty well and made the flowers look more real. I had the idea to try to hide the playdough lump in the bottom of the vase with grass, cut out of a strip of green paper. That idea did not work out as well. So our advice would be to use artificial grass, like the kind you would put in an easter basket.

All in all, very enjoyable. The kids forgot their hate of crafts for a few moments, either from the excitement of having a friend crafting right along side them, or because this craft was actually more fun. It seems that any time they are allowed to make a lot of choices (ie the color of the flowers, the color of the pipe cleaners, shape of leaves, number of leaves, size of playdough ball, etc.) they are much happier. And, when they are much happier, I am much happier. So this craft got a thumbs up from all of us.