How to make a Snowman Banner

This is a cute project I'm doing with Kindergarten right now.

Snowman Banners.

Here in Calgary we just received a good dump of snow and now it's warming up (above 0 degrees celsius).....perfect snowman weather!

We wanted a cute and easy project that incorporated textiles.





















MATERIALS REQUIRED:

- fabric or burlap 
- sewing machine or glue gun (adult use only)
- white felt/material
- masking tape
- sponges or foam
- white acrylic paint
- wax paper
- tacky glue
- black felt
- red felt or fleece
- 2 black buttons
- 3 assorted buttons
- small scrap of orange material
- black dimensional fabric paint
- brown yarn
- fabric snowflakes
- dowel, stick, bamboo garden stake
- yarn


PROCEDURE:

Take an art board or piece of cardboard and tape on some wax paper.

The paint will seep thru the fabric.

Take the fabric or burlap and cut a rectangle.  Sew a channel at the top.  If you don't sew you can use a glue gun.


Tape the banner to the wax paper.  This will stop it from moving around.

Take the white fabric or felt and cut some snow for the bottom.

With Kindergarten I had this pre-cut for them.

Glue on to the bottom of the banner with the tacky glue.

Take your sponges or foam and cut a large circle, a medium circle, and a small circle.

Put some white acrylic paint on a plate.  Place the large sponge into the paint, swirl it a bit getting it loaded with enough paint.

Place in the centre of the banner touching the white fabric at the bottom.  Press down.  Continue with the medium sponge and the finish with the small one.

Cut a hat out of the black felt.  You could also make a toque with some brightly coloured felt or fleece and add a pom pom.

Glue into place.

Add a scarf out of felt or fabric.  2 black button eyes and 3 assorted buttons.

With some dimensional fabric paint add a smile.

Cut a little triangle out of orange fabric or felt and glue into place.

Cut some lengths of brown yarn and glue on for arms.

I found some nice fabric snowflakes at the dollar store so we added them to our background.

Add a dowel, I use natural bamboo stakes from the garden centre, trimmed down to size.

Add some yarn and your banner is ready to hang.

The grade 1 just finished this paper snowman so I thought I would show you.


Very easy to do if you are looking for a quick snowman project.

So if you are knee deep in snow like we are why not give these projects a try.


See you soon.

Felt Joy Banner

We had our 6th annual Christmas Craft Day at school on Friday,  150 kids, 12 crafts, one morning!  A big thanks to all the volunteers who helped with prep and running the craft stations on the day.

That was why the blog was quiet last week.  I was knee deep in all the preparations!

I have had a few inquiries as to how this all comes about.  Basically Grade 1,2 and 3 rotate thru 12 craft stations in one morning. They can make all 12 or spend more time perfecting only a few.


Now that it is over I thought I would show you all the crafts from this year over the next few days.  First up is the Felt Joy Banner. 

MATERIALS REQUIRED:

- red, green , and white felt

- tacky glue

- glue gun or sewing machine

- scissors

- embellishments

- small bell

- dowel

- pruning shears

- craft wire

PROCEDURE:

Cut a rectangle of felt in either red or green.  The dimensions we used was 10" x 5".

You need to make a pocket to hold the dowel.  Now you can sew it or glue it.  With 150 of these to be prepped we hot glued them all.

Fold over an inch and secure in place.

Now I have the pocket for my dowel.  I used natural bamboo garden stakes that were cut into 6 inch long lengths.  Cut with pruning shears.

Out of white felt cut a letter "J" and a "Y".  Make an "O" out of red or green.  I used a letter stencil to make a template or pattern.  I cut the template out of recycled cardboard (a cereal box).

Lay your template backwards on your felt and trace around with a fine black sharpie.  Cut with small sharp scissors.  Ones with a pointy tip work the best.  When clipping out the letter try to clip away the sharpie line.  Because we traced it backwards any remaining sharpie will be on the
back side.  Use tacky glue and glue into place on your banner.

Add some embellishments.  I scouted thru the Dollar store and found these shiny fabric Holly leaves.

We clipped them apart and added them to our "O".

I also found these glitter balls which worked great as Holly berries.  You could also cut the leaves out of felt and use red buttons for the berries.

I bought bells at the Dollar store as well.  Make a little hole in the felt at the bottom of your banner.

Push the loop of the string thru the hole, pass the bell thru the loop and your bell is now securely fastened.

Take a 12 inch piece of craft wire.  Twist onto one end of the dowel and then on the other.  This is the hanger.

That's it.



3 years ago we made this JOY sign but I didn't have enough cardboard this year for 150 signs so we went with felt instead.

You can find the tutorial for this sign HERE.  I tend to only repeat crafts every 3 years so the individual student doesn't get any repeats during their 3 years participating.

 Some other crafts we revisited this year was the Little Snowman.

We also did these paper trees.














I'll be back next time with more Christmas Craft Day activities.

"We Three Kings" Banner

This is Grade 5's Christmas project.  A now retired teacher at my school, Mrs. D, would do this every year with her class. 

We have brought it back and will continue the tradition.  Incidentally  Mrs. D is where I got my trade name from.  When I first started working at the school she couldn't remember my name so I was always  "that artist woman"!


This one is for you Mrs. D.















MATERIALS REQUIRED:

- burlap
- coloured felt
- bamboo stakes
- glue gun or a sewing machine
- scissors
- tacky glue
- wax paper
- ribbon, rick rack
- googly eyes
- little gems, sequins, any other embellishments you have on hand
- glitter glue

PROCEDURE:

Cut out a nice rectangle from the burlap.  For the Grade 5's I have assorted colours. 

Fray the edges.  Burlap has an uneven weave, that is part of it's rustic charm. But that means it's difficult to get a nice fringe just by pulling threads.  One end will always be longer, you can fix this by just giving them a trim with your scissors so the fringe is even.

You now need to make a pocket at the top to hold the stick/dowel we will use for hanging.

If you have access to a sewing machine you can whip that off straight away.

If not just run a little tacky glue or hot glue from the glue gun to secure in place.

Taking 3 different colours of felt cut 3 long triangles of 3 different heights.





Take a round object, trace around it with a sharpie on 3 different flesh toned pieces of felt.

If you don't have 3 different colours it's no big deal it will still look fantastic.

Cut out clipping away that sharpie line.

Before we start gluing the banner you need 2 important things.

Tacky glue works so well on this project.  I find regular white glue just gets sucked up by the felt and then doesn't stick.

The second important thing is a piece of wax paper to go under your burlap banner.  The loose weave of the burlap causes the glue to seep thru.

Lay out your triangles and heads on the banner.  You could go tallest to smallest but I like to mix it up a bit so I put the smallest in the center.

Glue into place.

Cut a nice large star out of felt.  You can also cut out a crown or two.

Add some trim to the front of the triangles.  You can use ribbon or rick rack.

You can add some hair with yarn.




A snowflake cut in half makes a good crown.





You can add curly hair and a beard.

Glue on some eyes.  I just happened to have 3 sizes.



Add little pompoms for a nose, you could also use a small piece of felt , a button, or bead.

Add some felt strips for arms.

Using little trims or buttons add the gifts for each King.



Continue embellishing with sequins, gems, whatever you have on hand.



Add some glitter glue to the large felt star,  use it to make other small stars in the sky.

Finally add a bamboo stick or dowel for hanging with some string or ribbon attached.


I buy these natural bamboo garden stakes and then just cut them down to size.  They only cost about $2.00 a pkg.

That's it. 

Make it as elaborate as you want.

I can't wait to see how Grade 5 does with these next week.  I'll try to post a photo.






See you next week.