Spring has sprung! Well, sort of. Last month, when it was still technically winter, we had lovely weather and my five year old learned to make daisy chains on the grass outside school. Now though, despite the fact that it is officially spring, the rain is pouring down and all daisy chain making has been suspended. This is why we came up with a plan for daisy chains that you can make any time of year, rain or shine! It’s also a great project for preschoolers to practice some fine motor skills while having fun.

Supplies

The supplies you will need are some green pipe cleaners and some artificial flowers. We chose some cherry blossoms because they were on sale and the daisies weren’t! You’ll also need a hot glue gun. Lastly, you’ll need maybe five or six random beads.

Directions

First off we chopped all the pipe cleaners in half, then pulled all the blossoms off their branches. Make sure that when you are choosing flowers for this that you get the kind that has a hole on the back where they fit onto the stems!

To make the flower sections, just take one of your half length pipe cleaners, bend it in half and leaving an open gap, or loop at the bottom end, twist the two halves together. Dab a blob of hot glue onto the open hole part at the back of the flower and push the two twisted together ends of the pipe cleaner into the hole. The glue sticks really well to the fluff of the pipe cleaner, meaning these won’t fall apart easily when kids play with them, plus the sharp ends of the pipe cleaners are all tucked away into the flower head.

The way that the chains join together is using a hook that you start each chain with. I made the hooks in the same way that I made the flowers, but instead of gluing a flower onto the sharp ends of the pipe cleaner, I glued on a bead and then bent the pipe cleaner into the hook shape.

Here you can see how they thread together easily and how the hook works to close the chain.

From the materials we started out with, we were able to make approximately 80 flowers (half white and half pink), plus 12 hooks. It takes ten or eleven flowers to make a single headdress, so with this amount the kids can make several, or make necklaces and bracelets to go with them, or just make a massive chain that is a few meters long to decorate with.

The other nice thing about these is that they fit really neatly into a plastic Easter egg, so if you want to have a candy free egg hunt, some of these would work well for kids to find a collection that they can then build their own headdress or necklace from.

So, when the April showers hit and you’re done with stomping in puddles, just pull out a green blanket and your all weather daisy chain kit and pretend you’re in a sunny meadow. Ideal for an indoor picnic!

All you need to make a party hat for any occasion is a paper plate and a pair of scissors!

Really, that’s all you need, no glue or extra bits of anything. These simple little hats can be decorated by kids at a party, or used to play party games. The bigger the plate or the smaller the child’s head, the bigger the brim on your hat is going to be. Below is a picture showing how to make the cuts for the shamrock hat ready for St. Patrick’s Day. The first step here is the same for any of the hat designs. Just fold the plate in half and cut the hole for the head (remember to leave a little part where the center design is still attached to the brim.) It’s best to guess the hole size a little on the small side, because if it doesn’t fit then you can always trim the hole a bit bigger.

Once you have the first cut made, you can then decide what you want your hat decoration to be. In this case the shamrock is symmetrical, so keeping the plate folded in half makes it easy to cut the shamrock leaf symmetrically. Once you’re done, open it up and decorate it any way you like. At this point I like to hand the cut out plates over to my crack squad of paint and glitter commandos.

Next you can see the heart version of the hat. This one is even easier to cut out than the shamrock hat.

It works fine with just a colored paper plate.

Or if you have plain white plates you could paint them.

I really like the simple circle cut out on pastel colored plates and made to look like sweetheart candy with a marker pen. So quick to make, but very cute.

As you can see, these can be made to fit any head. Even my six month old can rock them!

There are an infinite number of ways you can customize the basic design, so I’ve included a few photos and a pdf design sheet that you can print out to use for ideas.

Here are the designs for the different hats.

Of course there’s the classic paper plate crown that can easily be used for birthdays, dress up play or mardi gras.

With a couple of extra folds and two staples you can make a spooky bat hat.

March Hare ears for Easter?

Fourth of July party hats with silver markers and stickers!

The options for these kinds of hats are only limited by your imagination and with kids in the home, there’s no shortage of that!

If you’re having a party, these hats can be used for a couple of interesting games.

Number shuffle.
Divide the kids into two teams (this works best if you have a minimum of five players in each team) Make the basic circle paper plate hats in advance and number them for however many people are in each team. Put the plate hats on the kid’s heads so that they cannot see their own number. Then it’s a race to see which team can line themselves up in numerical order, the only rule being that you can’t tell anyone what their number is, just whose number is greater or smaller than theirs.

Guess Who.
This game used to be with stickers on your forehead, but when you use these hats, you can not only write the name on the circle, but you can also stick a picture of the person on it for kids that cannot yet read. Each person wears a hat with the name and picture of a character/real person on the front that they cannot see. Everyone else can see who they are though. Each person gets to ask “yes/no answer” questions to the group to try and guess who they are, such as “Am I fictional?” or “Am I human?” etc. If the answer to your question is yes then you get to ask another question. If the answer to your question is no then it is the next person’s turn to start asking their questions. The winner is the first person to correctly guess their secret identity.

Hope you have fun coming up with new paper plate millinery. The quickest, easiest and most adaptable party hat for every event in 2012!

This craft is for kids that love to color-in and for parents that want a nice photo card for the mantle piece or for the grandparents this holiday. Best of all, it’s made using things you’ll likely have in your recycling bin. All you need are the two pages of printable templates, an empty cereal box and the plastic closure from the top of a packet of baby wipes. To assemble the card you will need some scissors, some hot glue, and a regular school glue stick. The finishing touch to this craft is a photo of your little artists to put inside the door.

Gingerbread House Template
Gingerbread House Stand, Door & Internal Greeting Message Template

Kids can get stuck right in coloring their print outs any way they want. If your kids aren’t into colouring-in, or you want to take a more freestyle approach to this craft then just let them draw their own houses on a blank sheet, but make sure that the door area is going to be the right size for the plastic closure from the baby wipes packet to work. The kids can then cut out and use the glue stick to glue their house parts to the cardboard from your empty cereal box. You can use any cardboard you have handy, but it just so happens that a cereal box is the ideal size for this. If you have younger kids then you might have to cut the shapes out of the cardboard for them, but I’ve used a smooth black outline on the drawing to make the shape reasonably easy for older kids to cut out themselves. The next steps are going to work best using hot glue, because you’ll be gluing pieces onto the plastic closure you pulled from a baby wipes packet, although, if you don’t have a hot glue gun, double sided sticky tape would be a reasonable substitute. Glue your photograph to the back of the plastic closure, so that it can be seen through the little window when it’s opened. Also glue the greetings message to the inside of the closure, opposite your photograph. Close it up and hot glue it carefully (adults, this one’s for you) onto the blank door area on the front of your gingerbread house template. Then glue the image of the door onto the front of the plastic closure to complete the working door. Finally, you will need to cut two slits on the outside edge of the big candy canes on either side of the gingerbread house door, about an inch in length, so that you can slot in the stands. Each stand is made by folding the circle stand templates in half, gluing them shut with a bit of hot glue and then cutting an inch long slit from the curved edge down to the middle as shown in the picture. Once you’ve got your stands slotted into place, your little gingerbread house should stand up well and be able to be displayed with either it’s door closed, or open to reveal the waving holiday well wishers inside! If you can’t find a plastic wipes closure to use, or you just want a more basic card for the kids to color, I’ve also made a half-size template of this design for you to print out, cut, fold and color, which doesn’t involve any extra card or gluing. Click here for the card template. Happy Holidays!

This little craft is a quick one to set up and will keep the kids busy at the Thanksgiving dinner table, as well as looking cute and providing a keepsake of your children’s artwork and thankful messages.

I’ve shown two methods for making the turkey body, because some people will like the idea of having sweetly scented pumpkin spice play dough at the table for the small children to play with, but I’m sure there will be others that have table cloths and carpets that they don’t want to run the risk of messing up with play dough, especially if you are visiting at a relative’s house for Thanksgiving, so the stuffed paper bag and cardboard body offers a decent alternative.

Instructions:

To make the play dough body, just cook up a lovely smelling batch of pumpkin spice play dough. We like this recipe here, but used brown food coloring for the turkey’s body in this case. The volume in the dough recipe given is enough to make two turkey bodies the size shown.

To make the paper bag version of the body, you will need a brown paper lunch bag, a piece of corrugated cardboard scavenged from a box somewhere, some junk mail to stuff the body with, plus something to weight the body down a bit (I used a couple of small rocks from the back yard) and tape or glue to hold it all together.

First open up your lunch bag and stuff a few crumpled pieces of the junk mail into it along with whatever you are using to weight it down. Then scrunch over the open part of the bag and tape or glue it shut. Next, cut a circle out of the cardboard and cut off part of the circle so that it sits flat at the back of the turkey’s body, then glue it in place.

If you have a paper plate then you can add some nice details to your turkey body by cutting out wing shapes and a section to cover the corrugated cardboard. These were painted brown and had feather details drawn on with permanent marker.

Next you’ll need to print out the Turkey’s head and tail feathers.

Here’s the PDF printable you’ll need for the Turkey printout.

The seven feathers on the template are enough to make one full turkey tail. Just cut them out and tape a cocktail stick or toothpick  to the back of each one.

This craft is a very easy one to pack up as a little holiday gift, or to take along to relative’s houses if you are in charge of children’s entertainment for the holidays.

Put the feathers in a cup or jar on the table along with pens and crayons and they are now ready for your little guests to decorate by coloring in or writing their messages of thankfulness.

Have your turkey body at the center of the table on a plate for everyone to stick their finished feathers into. If you are using the play dough body then also tape a cocktail stick to the turkey’s head, so that it’ll stick in the dough. If you are using the paper bag version then tape or glue it onto the front of the bag.

The decorated feathers will be able to be pushed into the play dough or the corrugated interior part of the cardboard tail to be displayed and will come out again easily at the end of dinner if you want to put them away as a keepsake from your Holiday feast.

Happy Thanksgiving!

All the fun of playdough, but without that distressing salty taste you get when you can’t stop yourself from putting it in your mouth, plus some lovely colorful cookies without a load of drippy sticky frosting. Yay!

All you need for this is some plain old sugar cookie dough, some food coloring and some aluminum foil. We were cheaters “cheaters pumpkin eaters” and used store bought sugar cookie dough mix that we just had to add butter and a bit of water to, but in the past we’ve had success with using this recipe from Allrecipes.

We mixed up a batch of the dough, making sure that it was the right consistency for cookie cutter type cookies, rather than the sloppier consistency of the spoon dropped type. Then we broke it into sections and kneaded a different food coloring into each. We also kept one section plain with no coloring to use as a sort of off white.

Next we used pieces of aluminum foil to crunch up into the shape of the sculpture we wanted to make. My older daughter and myself had a go at making some skulls in the style of Día de los Muertos sugar skulls and my younger daughter made a monster that ended up looking a bit like Slimer from Ghostbusters.

Once we’d crunched up our foil into the shapes we wanted then we put another layer of foil over the top so that there were fewer crevices for the cookie dough to get lost in. That way it’s easier to crack off your baked cookie to eat it when you’re done.

Once you have the shape you want then you can have fun picking colors of dough to smoosh onto it. For the decorated sugar skull I squished on a layer of the uncolored dough before decorating it with little pieces of the colored dough. My daughter took a different approach of just squishing the colors she wanted on as she went and both ways worked out fine.

All you have to make sure of is that the layer of dough that you put on isn’t really thick in some places and really thin in others, or you’ll have an unevenly baked cookie when you’re done. You don’t have to be terribly precise, but about a quarter of an inch thickness works out well.

Once we’d made our sculptures, we used the rest of the dough to make flat cookie monsters, so you can see that even if you have younger kids that can’t manage the sculpture aspect of this project, just smooshing the dough flat onto a foil baking sheet works out fine. Also, if the kids are really little you probably wouldn’t want them to be pulling chunks of cookie off the crumpled up foil base of a cookie sculpture in case they took a bite out of the foil.

The cookie dough sculptures went into the oven on their aluminum foil forms until they were baked and the uncolored dough had a bit of a golden color to it.

We left them to completely cool before cracking our skull sculptures like eggs and eating the cookie pieces with a glass of milk. Very yum!

Of course you can use this method for making any kind of holiday-themed cookie. You could make orange pumpkins around balls of foil with jack-o-lantern faces on them, or come the winter you could try snowmen in the same way. Easter eggs in the spring? Or no theme at all, just some open ended cookie creations for baking fun one rainy day.

This is a great excuse to play with your food and also a great way to make just a little bit of cookie dough go a long way in terms of how long your kids will want to spend making them.

Yarrr! It be Talk Like A Pirate Day time of year again me hearties! Mark your calendars for Alphamom’s favorite holiday on September 19.

Last year we made newspaper swords and pirate girl bandana skirts. This year we are done with our pirate training and it’s time to find the treasure! Every good swashbuckling seadog needs a treasure map to kick off some serious pirating adventures!

All you need to make these are some permanent markers, some blue, green and tan acrylic craft paint, an old cotton pillow case and a bit of imagination.

I cut open the pillow case and the kids got one side each to make a map from. Cotton really takes the marker and paint well. A synthetic fiber would likely still work, but I’m not sure how well it would take to being laundered afterwards. If you launder the cotton maps then the colors still stay well, which is good if your kids are charging about the yard, digging in the mud with their maps.

I taped the material down on the kitchen table with some paper under it to protect the table. Taping things down helped to keep the material smooth and reasonably taught while the kids drew on it. I also searched online for a few sample pirate maps and printed them out to give the kids some ideas about what they could put on their own maps. Then they were able to just go to town with the markers.

There’s no need to color any large areas with the markers. Just add lots of details and land marks. I helped the kids to write the place names that they wanted on their maps, and my five year old asked that I draw her a few specific things that she was having trouble with as her arm is in a cast at the moment. One of the nicest things about this project is that it’s large enough that you can all get around the table and work on it together.

These are just a few of the sweet little drawings that the kids dotted around their maps.

Once you think you are done with all your map details, you can paint in the large areas of color. We just used three colors for our maps to keep it simple. Blue for the water and tan and green for the land areas.

Just a little squeeze of acrylic paint mixed in with a decent amount of water will be enough to stain the material but still allow your drawings to show through.

If there are areas that you want to remain lighter then wet them with water first and then when you paint around them, your colors will bleed slowly into the wet area making a nice gradient. You can see this where the name labels are on the maps.

The acrylic paint is water soluble until it’s dried out, so once your maps are dry the paint will not be able to be washed out, plus being made from material rather than paper, your child’s artwork will last for much longer while they use it to have all sorts of make believe adventures. It won’t get ruined when they scrunch it up and shove it in a backpack to go treasure hunting.

If you have a back garden, why not make a piratized map of that, with lots of exciting names for mundane places. My best friend had a shed in her garden that we used to call “the monastery” when we were kids because the previous owner had written that on the key for it. It doesn’t take much to re-name your shed, compost heap, recycling bins or a random tree, but your children’s imaginations will ensure they are remembered for years to come as magical landmarks in epic adventures.

One last tip: If you have new material to do this project with, it’s best to launder it beforehand to get rid of any factory chemical residue that might prevent the markers and paint from taking to it.

Whether ye be landlubbers or salty sea dogs we hope you have fun hunting for buried treasure with your maps. Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day!

We’re always looking for cheap or– better yet– free materials to craft with here, so we’ve played around with crafting all sorts of things out of those big plastic gallon milk jugs over the last couple of years. The type of plastic they are made from is pretty versatile as far as crafting goes. You can cut it easily with scissors, use hole punches on it, stick it with hot glue and best of all you can draw on it with permanent markers with great results due to it being semi-opaque and mildly textured on one side. We have two crafts here to show you. Before the kids got to doing these two crafts I had to prepare the plastic for them. All that was involved was washing out a couple of empty milk jugs like these:

Milk Jug Window Art

Then I used a sturdy pair of scissors to cut out any flat side panels from the milk jug plastic. I wasn’t careful about the shapes I was cutting out. I just wanted to get as much area out of each jug as I could for them to draw on. All the left over bits just went right back in the recycling bin where the jugs had come from in the first place.

If you have really little kids then you could cut them simple shapes to scribble colors on like hearts or flowers or circles etc, or even the letters of their name. My two girls are five and six years old, so they were fine to draw their own pictures and cut out their own shapes. Just make sure that you draw on the mildly textured side of the plastic (the outer side of the milk jug) as this will hold the colors better than the smooth side. The other great thing about this plastic is that it is transparent enough that you can trace pictures through it, so my two had fun tracing their favorite cartoon characters from the fronts of their books.

My five year old did a lovely large wild flower panel on one of the irregular shaped large side pieces that I had cut from one of the milk jugs, and my six year old made a collection of candies and treats that reminded me a lot of the illustrations from “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. Once they had drawn the things they wanted, they cut them out using kid’s safety scissors and hole punched a little hole to hang them from.

We hung them in the window for the light to shine through like little stained glass decorations using teeny suction cups from the Dollar Tree.

My older daughter also used paper clips to make a long dangling display from her candy treat decorations, and I couldn’t resist making a couple myself too. Fun for all ages!

Milk Jug Butterflies

As well as our window decorations we also made some hanging butterflies with more of the milk jug plastic and some beads and pipe cleaners. These were to hang on a mobile for our baby that has since just arrived, but you could hang them anywhere.

Again, if you have younger kids, you could just cut out a butterfly shape and let them scribble their colors all over, or if you have older kids then they might prefer to draw their own butterflies or trace a more anatomically accurate butterfly to color.

I have included a pdf print out of three different anatomically correct butterflies that I drew a while back for a different art project, so anyone that wants to trace one can do so.

Here’s the PDF. Just click here and download and print.

I printed out these butterflies, cut them out and taped them to another piece of paper with a piece of milk jug plastic taped over the top, with the slightly textured side face up. I did this to make everything stay in place for the kids to color.

Then when they were done I drew the intricate black details with a fine line permanent marker for them. Older kids would be able to do this part themselves though. Then we pulled the colored butterflies off the paper they were taped to and cut them out with scissors. We also gave them a little fold in the middle to make the wings crease upwards a bit. All you need for the body are a few random beads and a pipe cleaner that has been bent in half.

Twist the bent end of the pipe cleaner and thread on a couple of the beads to one side to make the butterfly abdomen and thorax, then put your plastic milk jug wings in between the two bits of pipe cleaner and twist them together to keep the wings in place above the beaded body. Lastly you just need to thread both pipe cleaner ends through the bead that you have chosen for the head and then trim the ends to be the right length for antennae and curl them with your fingers.

Make as many as you like and use the bare length of pipe cleaner on the opposite side of the wings to the beaded body to tie some string and hang your butterflies.

Here are ours hanging from the mobile that we made for our latest little girly. I hope she likes them.

There are so many things you could use this type of plastic for. Hopefully these two projects will serve as inspiration for many more ideas and lots more decorative fun!

We’ve been admiring those Ukrainian dyed eggs, called Pysanky for quite some time. They are amazingly beautiful and delicate wax resist artworks, that look like they would be very fun for an adult to attempt or an older child, but probably utterly frustrating, too fiddly, or downright impossible for the younger kids, so I thought we’d try making a more simple craft that mimicked the technique, but with more simple tools and on a much larger scale.

All we used were food colorings, white card and some clear wax crayons. I’m pretty sure that you could use water color paints or white wax crayons or even draw the resist part with a white candle too depending on what you have handy. The card we used was actually watercolor paper, which is quite thick. I think you need something thick like that because you have to paint on several layers of color wash to make these eggs, so you don’t want the paper falling apart if it’s too thin.

I started out by drawing and cutting out a big Easter egg shape for us to use as a template. We drew around this template to make an egg shape on our pieces of card.

Then we drew some lines/patterns/scribbles with the white wax crayon and washed over the whole egg shape with watered down yellow food coloring. This gave a nice wax resist effect rather like batik does on cloth.

You could just leave your papers to dry and go do something else, but the kids just wanted to do the next color straight away, so I got out the hair dryer and we dried the yellow wash within a minute with that. Once it was dry we drew more patterns with the white crayon onto our eggs. Anything you draw on now will remain yellow when you paint on the red and green colorings.

Another round with the hair dryer and another layer of drawing with the crayon before the final wash of black food coloring. Anything that you want to remain red or green you have to draw over with the crayon this time. You don’t have to use the same colors that we used of course. Any colors you have that can layer up well will work fine, but the black really does give a dramatic effect as the final wash and the colors we used were traditional ones for pysanky.

When we’d dried off the black wash, I put a sheet of kitchen towel over the eggs and ironed them so that any lumpy bits of wax from the crayon would melt and we traced around the egg template again with a pencil so that we could see where exactly to cut out the egg shape.

The wax resist effect with the color washes gives a really interesting texture that looks almost like a chalkboard effect. Very pretty!

My six year old had a go with the red and green washes, but my five year old decided to keep it simple with just the red wash on hers.

They make quite beautiful and durable Easter decorations hung up on our door.

We like making Mardi Gras masks around here, because it gives you the chance to use up all the rogue odds and ends of craft supplies that you have lurking about from other projects throughout the year. Left over valentine heart stickers, a few feathers and pipe cleaners, random pom poms and sequins, not to mention unusual left overs like zip ties. It’s also a good chance to dig in the pile of recycling to pull out cardboard and plastic items that can be re-purposed.

I pulled together all the random bits and bobs we have to decorate with and loaded them up on the kitchen table, along with a couple of low temperature hot glue guns for the kids to stick things on with. We gave up with white glue for this sort of crafting ages ago, because the kids just find it frustrating that things don’t adhere immediately and the time waiting for stuff to dry is unbearable! So if you’re not comfortable with using hot glue guns with your kids then I’d use double sided tape rather than white glue or glue sticks. I rifled through the recycling to see what we had that could be used as the base for the masks and found a nice bit of clear plastic packaging that we could cut a base template out of. Here’s a Mardi Gras mask template for you. You could use anything for the base, cereal box cardboard would work just as well, but of course the clear plastic that we found does have the advantage that you don’t need to cut the eye holes out to see!

I hole punched a bunch of holes around the mask shapes so that the kids could twist pipe cleaners or put zip ties or feathers through them and then turned them over to the kids.

While the kids were gluing and decorating I also cut out some shapes from an old gallon plastic milk jug for them to use. Milk jug plastic is good for this because it is white and slightly textured, so it’s easy to draw on and color with permanent markers.

The other recycled item that we played with was an old soda bottle that I cut the top off with scissors and then cut the length of the bottle into spikes (with rounded ends for safety).

I folded the spikes back on themselves and used electrical tape to hold the folds in place. This gave us the base to make a Mardi Gras crown.

My older daughter chose to make the left over heart stickers from Valentines Day into four leaf clovers to go on the crown, so I guess it turned into a Mardi Gras St Patrick’s Day crown?! My younger daughter had fun drawing happy faces on the hearts on the masks.

These are the works of art that we ended up with. The colorful spikes on the mask with the pink feathers were made from cutting up an old piece of plastic packaging from a set of paint brushes and coloring it with sharpie markers. I really advocate going through your recycling bin and seeing what’s in there for this kind of craft. There are a lot of possibilities! If you decide to use mostly cardboard rather than plastic like we have done then you will be able to use regular paint and pens, rather than having to use permanent markers to color.

I’ll be putting ours up on the wall somewhere after Mardi Gras, because they are so colorful and extravagant that I’d be quite happy to look at them all year round!

This tutorial is a quick and easy way to make hand drawn, unique decals that can be ironed onto a felt backing and either sewn onto things or used as is to make a badge/button for Valentine’s Day.

You don’t need any special iron on transfer paper or a printer to do this. All you need are some plastic shopping bags, some permanent markers and some parchment paper (known as greaseproof paper for baking in the UK), plus the felt to iron them onto and unsurprisingly, an iron.

I have a stash of used plastic shopping bags kept in an old shoe box that we use for this, because we make many things other than just valentine’s patches with this technique. I keep a selection of plain white and any patterned or colored plastic bags that I find.

With younger kids you will have to cut the initial shape out for them, because cutting an even shape from thin plastic bags can be a little fiddly. I folded a section of plastic bag in half in order to cut out many symmetrical heart shapes for the kids to decorate. Make sure that the shape you cut out is smaller than your iron’s surface, because otherwise any protruding edges will shrivel up when you try to iron it on later.

Now the kids can just go to town with the Sharpie pens, decorating the hearts any way they choose. I had a few fine line permanent pens handy for them to write little messages, as well as the larger ones for coloring. I did this project with kids that were four, five and six years old and they all did a great job, despite the rather small canvases they were working on. This will likely appeal to older children too I’m sure, because I couldn’t help joining in and decorating a few myself.

Here are three of the hearts decorated up before they were ironed onto the felt.

The next step is to iron the decals onto the felt base. I’ve ironed these directly onto clothing before now, but when trying this for the first time, felt is the easiest thing to make them adhere well to because it isn’t very textured and it doesn’t have any stretch to it. I just used a roll of cheap white synthetic felt that I picked up from Daiso. Make sure that your iron is set to cotton and NO STEAM and that you have a solid surface to iron on (I ironed with the felt directly on our tiled kitchen table). Then just place a single heart right side up onto the felt and put a small piece of parchment paper over it, so that the melting plastic bag doesn’t stick to your iron. Note: Parchment paper (used in baking), NOT wax paper.

Basically all you are doing is melting the plastic very quickly and evenly into the surface of the felt, so that when it cools it will not come off. You need to put the iron down firmly and evenly right onto the decal, covering the whole thing. Hold it with pressure for a few seconds without moving the iron. This will ensure that the plastic doesn’t shrivel up from the heat before it sticks to the felt. Once you have done that, you can move the iron around, making sure the edges of the decal are well adhered. Let it cool for a few seconds before peeling the parchment paper off. This guarantees that the plastic has set. It’s very very quick and easy to do, and we were able to set up a nice little production line with the kids decorating and me ironing and cutting. Here are the decals ironed onto the felt before being cut out.

When ironing plastic bags in this way, it is usually recommended to do it in a well ventilated space, so we opened the kitchen windows. Usually when people suggest this, they are talking about ironing together large sheets of plastic bags to make a tyvek type material, rather than just tiny pieces like we were, but to be on the cautious side we made sure the space was well ventilated.

In a very short amount of time you can create many of these cute little patches.

We left a little white felt border on our patches because I planned to sew them onto apparel such as coats, hats and backpacks etc, but you can just as easily cut them out without that extra border and hot glue a little extra felt on the back with a safety pin to make buttons/badges like this. We made valentine’s badges in this way for classroom gifts last year.

My girls wanted their patches sewn on their coats, so I used some embroidery floss and blanket stitched the patches down one arm.

Obviously you don’t have to limit yourself to a valentine’s theme with this technique. It’s a great way for my girls to make quick and easy personalized birthday badges for their friends, or make patches to sew onto tea towels or aprons or totes for grandparents. It’s nice to be able to get the children’s artwork onto items without having to use scanners, cameras, printers and expensive transfer paper! And each item is unique because it’s hand drawn.

The girls also wanted to sew one of the hearts onto a onesie for their little sister, even though she won’t get here for a few more months yet.

These patches will happily survive laundering in a cool wash if they have been adhered well in the ironing process, but a hot cycle in a tumble dryer is likely to damage them or cause them to start peeling off. Occasionally in the past I have found that some of the permanent pen colors may change with the heat of the iron, but happily none of ours did while we were doing this project.

Give it a try and before you know it, you’ll be hoarding plastic bags like we are!