HANDiwork

My mom and I have been making a lot of handprint crafts the past week or so, and I thought I'd show some of them off here.  Get it?  HANDiwork?  That's what they call a pun.

Anyway, I had a bunch of friends over on Saturday to take part in this workshop of handcrafts (another pun!).  Mom covered the dining room table with a disposable tablecloth and cups of scissors, ribbons, googly eyes, and pom-poms.  Everything was ready for my friends and I to get our craft on!  We toddlers are pretty smart: we let the grown-ups do the hard parts while we played!

L&J working with the salt dough

Three of our creations ready for the oven

Watching a little Elmo while the 'rents did the hard parts

Snack with BFF A and her mom

 We five toddlers (18 months to 2 years) had over two hours of play and snack time!  It was pretty fun.  And here's how our crafts turned out!

Handprint reindeer ornament (or gift tag)!

Salt dough handprint ornament (or wall decor)!

My mom found both handprint craft ideas on some website called Pinterest that she's way into.  She reposted the salt dough recipe here: http://hoardingrecipes.blogspot.com/2011/12/salt-dough.html

The handprint reindeer were really fun to make too!  Here's what we did:
1. We traced and cut out our hands on shimmery brown cardstock, with our fingers as reindeer feet and our thumbs as reindeer heads.
2. We hot-glued pom-pom noses, googly eyes, ribbon collars, and pipe cleaner antlers.
3. We colored hooves onto the feet using magic marker.
4. We punched a hole in the top for to add a ribbon hanger.
Voila!  I really liked having my hand traced on the paper.  Some of my friends were not such fans of this process.  But all of our reindeer turned out really cute!  Happy crafting!