Free Tips To Make Crafts At Home With Your Children, Plus Free Cardboard Tube Animals Craft

Encouraging your child's creativity at home by creating imaginative crafts is very beneficial for their development. Children can explore many different textures, shapes and patterns, and discover how to put ideas into action by handling different materials, and sticking them together. Crafting is really great fun, and also a good way to spend some quality time with your children.

Buying craft items and supplies from a craft store can be expensive, so save money by starting your own junk/scraps box at home. All you need is a large box or storage bag that you keep in a cupboard ready to store your household packaging. It's easy to start collecting and is amazing how quickly your junk box or bag fills up with useful items. Each time you are in the kitchen preparing meals, keep all your empty boxes, tubs or cardboard tubes that you would normally throw in the bin or recycle, and add these to your craft box. Whenever you come across any interesting items, such as packaging and wrappers from birthday gifts or Christmas presents, you can put them in your box ready for when you want to make one of our crafts. Collecting lots of different items will ensure an endless source of creative crafts.

Craft shops stock a huge range of different craft materials. Why not visit your local store and buy a small selection of items to store in your box. Look out for cheaper end of lines, two for the price of one, bargain buckets, and reduced price crafts that have damaged packaging. If you look out for these cheap deals, or just buy one or two inexpensive items per week, you will quickly build up a good stock of craft materials for your home craft projects. A good choice would be feathers, pom poms, wiggly eyes, wool, material, tissue paper, coloured paper and glitter. Even at Christmas you could collect lots of shiny things to use, including small pieces of tinsel, wrapping paper, ribbons, gift tags, parcel twine, and shiny foil sweet wrappers.

While out on a shopping trip, check out fabric and material stores for fabric scraps, odd buttons, and for balls of cheap wool or yarn. Cookware and kitchen shops often sell cheap wooden spoons. You can make a whole family of spoon puppets just by sticking fabric and wool onto spoons and drawing on faces with felt-tipped pens.

Don't forget to always have lots of paint, coloured crayons, glue and sticky tape at home!

Here is a free craft to help you create some cardboard tube animals. This is an easy craft, and you can let your child create their own strange animal creatures if they choose to.

Cardboard Tube Animals

You will need:
Cardboard tubes,
Lolly sticks,
Fur and animal print paper,
Animal faces,
Glue,
Scissors,
Sticky tape.

To Make - Cover each tube in decorated paper or fake fur. You can make your own animal print paper by drawing some zebra stripes, leopard spots, tiger stripes etc. onto some paper and colouring it in. Draw an animal face onto a piece of coloured card, cut out and stick onto the end of the tube with sticky tape. Paint on tiger stripes, leopard spots, or wrap animal print paper around four lolly sticks to make legs.
Stick the lolly sticks onto the side of the tube using small pieces of sticky tape.

Tip - To make a giraffe, add on an empty smarty tube for the long neck.

This craft and a lot more are available, along with photographs, in full colour, in our free Messy Tots mini-craft book by instant download. See the author details below to get your free copy today.

M Newbold is a prolific writer on many subjects. For a free full colour mini-craft book, visit:
http://www.cotswoldfamilylife.co.uk
www.cotswoldfamilylife.co.uk