Craft Project: DIY Nail Polish Wash Necklaces & Magnets

Have I mentioned that I am my younger daughter's Girl Scout troop leader this year? Well, actually one of four leaders. We are doing a co-op leader thing, which has been great! Every year, our service unit puts on a holiday boutique for the girls. Troops create something to "sell" at the boutique and each troop has a booth set up to sell their wares. Each girl brings an envelope with some amount of money up to $20 in it. The girls walk around to the different booths and buy different crafts to give other people for the holidays. When they spend their money, they are done shopping and they get to eat holiday cookies. :-) The money collected is donated to a charity of the hosting troop's choice. This year the 363 Day Program was chosen. And can you believe it, in just under 2 hours, our service unit collected $3,127 for this charity! 2 hours, people. That is just amazing to me!

We gave the girls four different options for craft projects to create for the holiday boutique. They chose to create washer necklaces and gem magnets. These were soooo easy to create! And at minimal cost too.

Washer Necklaces--
What you will need:
--different size washers (I even found a mixed-size container of washers at the Dollar Store! But they aren't as nice of quality as the washers I bought at Home Depot)
--colored nail polish (again, I found this at the Dollar Store! GREAT find!)
--glitter nail polish
--clear nail polish
--string, yarn, twine--something to string the washers on for necklaces


Step one:
You can either spray paint the washers ahead of time. We did this for the girl scouts, but not the necklaces I painted with my daughters. Either way works just fine. The sprayed painted necklaces have a nicer finish on the back side. So it just depends on how picky you are with the finished look.
Here is a great tutorial for spray painting them.

Step two:
If you haven't spray painted the washers, paint a nice thick base coat of one color on the washer. Or, start using multiple colors to create stripes or a design. Let dry several minutes (Usually 10 minutes max was good) and you can then paint other designs or layers over the base coat. Sometimes you may have to put on more than one coat.

Step three:
If you like, once your design dries, paint a layer of glitter polish over the top to give it some sparkle!

Step four:
Once all layers have dried, paint a nice thick coat of clear polish over the top to seal it all and give it a nice shine.

Step five:
Leave it overnight. The next day, hang them on a string or chain of some kind and you have a great necklace!

Here are all the AMAZING necklaces my girl scouts created! These are seven and eight year olds!

Variations:
--You can layer multiple sized washers to make your necklace more interesting
--You can add beads to the string if you like
--My daughters were intrigued when I showed them this post. They set out to use toothpicks to swirl the paint. And it turned out amazing! The problem with taking pictures and then posting later is that I cannot seem to find where the photos are that I took. I know I took close-up photos of this but can't find them now.
--You can use a hair dryer to dry the layers more quickly if you're in a hurry.

You can see the toothpick swirl technique used in these Mickey Mouse necklaces we created. (We found this idea for the Mickey necklaces here.)

For the swirl technique, we just painted on a base layer of white nail polish. We were liberal with the application, then add about 4 dots of color evenly around the washer (we just used red with these Mickey necklaces, but you can use multiple colors and swirl together). Add the dots of color immediately after you paint the base color. Use a toothpick to gently swirl the colored dots around the white. Sidenote: To finish the Mickey necklaces, I used wire from a picture hanging kit I bought at the Dollar Store.

You can also see how we displayed the necklaces both for the girl scout boutique and for holiday gifts for family. I just cut up thick scrapbook paper. Added 2 slits on the top. I twisted the excess necklace on the back and secured it with a piece of tape. For the gifts we gave to family, we added our "Created by" stamps.

My older daughter is currently in an "all things Minion" stage, so of course, we had to make a Minion necklace too! ;-)

And if the links above didn't satisfy you, here are two more for you to see: here and here.

Gem Magnets--
What you will need:
--clear glass gems (may be able to find at the Dollar Store, otherwise Michaels carries these)
--round magnets (Michaels sells two sizes, get the larger size. The smaller size will not hold much to a magnet board as the gem is too heavy)
--colored nail polish
--glitter nail polish
--clear nail polish
--E6000 glue

The gem magnets were even easier than the necklaces. Here's a link to a tutorial. All you have to do is paint a layer of glitter paint first. Let that dry for a few minutes. Then paint colored nail polish over the glitter layer. You can create patterns if you like. You may have to paint a few coats to get the polish thick enough to not be see-through. Once dry, you can seal with a coat of clear polish if you like. Let sit overnight. Once dry, use a small dab of E6000 glue to apply the magnet to the back.

Here are the girl scouts' creations:

I LOVED both the necklaces and the magnets! We created both for many people we gave Christmas gifts to, including teacher gifts along with a Starbucks gift card. We received wonderful feedback that everyone really liked them. I highly recommend this project for nearly all ages!

DIY Craft Project: Yes! You CAN make your own Valentines!

Okay, I get it. There are some people in the world who just aren't crafty (or THINK they aren't crafty). So they go to the store and buy character Valentines and send them to school with their kids. No problem! Not everyone has extra time to spend traipsing around buying craft supplies for Valentines. Some people would rather pull their hair out than supervise their children making handmade Valentines. I don't blame you sometimes! BUT. I am here to tell you, you really CAN make handmade Valentines! With minimal supplies too! And minimal cost! And if you have grade school age children, minimal help! Now, how does that sound?? Are you sold yet? Well, let me know show you what we did this year for our Valentines!

First of all, Pinterest is your friend! You can find a million EASY Valentines on Pinterest and most of them are just free printables, add the "treasure" (either candy or a pencil or whatever) and you're done! But I have crafty kids who wanted to take matters into their own hands! So off they went to search on the iPad.

My 10 year old Minion-obsessed fourth grader found these!

Source

Isn't that cute! But, of course, she didn't want to just print these out. She wanted to draw it herself! So she drew her picture, we shrunk them down and printed four to a page. You can do this with ANY DRAWING! Even a toddler/preschooler can make a Valentine picture and you can turn it into a Valentine, just like that!

 Here's how she finished them:

All you need is your small printed drawings, some paper cut slightly bigger than the drawings (we used scrapbook paper, but you can use construction paper or anything really!), glue dots (or a glue stick, school glue, etc), and a paper cutter or scissors.

My daughter just put a glue dot in each corner of the drawing page.

She taped a pencil to the back (bought at the dollar area at Target for 50 or 75% off in the off season--8 pencils in a pack) and wrote her greeting.

Done and Done. Now, that was wasn't too hard, was it?? ;-) I hear all the time from people when they see some of our projects that they just aren't crafty and could never do what we do. Honestly, sometimes it's not difficult at all to do something handmade! And it always has such a great WOW factor when you give someone something you made yourself, versus something store-bought.

Okay, this next project maybe is for the bit more advanced crafter. But I have to brag. Ella made this ALL BY HERSELF! It's her valentine box to house her valentines at school. She saw something like it on Pinterest and created her own version. Isn't this the most adorable thing ever!!

I love all the details she put into it! The buttons glued on. The teeth taped in the mouth. The pipe cleaner hair. The three-dimensional quality of this is AMAZING! The only thing she had help with was cutting out the mouth because we had to use an Exacto knife.

Now, onto my 8 year old! She also created her own Valentines this year. She came up with this all on her own! I think she was inspired by this pin:

Source

But really her end product was all her own!

She used Fabri-tac to glue two foam hearts together (you can get these at Michael's or Target). Then she stuck the Smarties on with glue-dots.

Finished it off by making little heads out of puff balls, googly eyes, and pipe cleaners. She attached the puff ball to the tip of the Smarties with Fabri-tac--trying not to get the glue near the candy. ;-)

She wrote her greeting on the back. Pretty awesome that she did this without any supervision at all!

And finally, my son's preschool class is exchanging Valentines. I wanted to do something I could make quickly without a lot of effort. He isn't into crafting (yet) so I made these on my own. But you certainly could have your kids help you! I did find this on Pinterest here.

 All you need is some paper, bouncy balls, and favor bags.

 Cut out a heart shape, write, "You're out of this world" on it. I wrote my son's name on the back.

Because the bouncy balls are rubber, it is kind of difficult to actually attach them to the paper. So I put them in favor bags and it worked great. So easy! This took me maybe 30-45 minutes total to do.

Making your own Valentines definitely doesn't have to difficult! You just have to find an idea and run with it. Many of them aren't even time-consuming! Give it a try!

Summer Recap: Independent Craftiness

Okay, so I admit it. We kind of got away from our weekly artist lessons this summer. I'm sort of bummed about this because I really enjoy doing those projects with the girls. But, this summer just kind of got away from us! It flew right by and before I knew it, they were heading back to school.

We had a great and fun summer! But I guess we just focused on other things. The girls summer bridge work in the mornings, we had books to read for a book club we were in together, not to mention minutes to read for there summer reading log on top of all that. So I guess we focused more on academics this summer instead of planned art activities. But the girls still did art camps at Kidcreate. They created fun things like these candy beach scenes!

Ha ha! Do you see the marshmallow people in the chairs? See one of them is pink? That's because that one is sunburned! LOL!

I did ask them to create some LegoQuest projects. In this one, they were asked to create an outdoor scene. I told them it could be anything, a park, ocean, whatever they wanted!

My ten year old's Arboretum complete with bridge, stream, and "path with lights on the side".

 LOVE the "No Picking" sign with the park security guard there. :-)

My 8 year old's beach scene complete with sand castle and person laying in the sand by the water.

But, honestly, what I think is one of the neatest things about this summer is that our art room was used ALL the time! Just not for projects I was leading. The kids, all three of them, just went up there whenever they wanted and created things. They came up with their own projects, figured out what they needed for them, sat down, and produced some fun and amazing things!

My three year old just sat down one night (hence the yucky red light and terrible iphone photos!) and did his own thing. It was so fun to watch!

And this is what he created, his first artwork all on his own!

I think it should be entitled "Alien Spaceship". He couldn't verbalize to me exactly what he was making, but in watching him, it was very purposeful. And here is the aftermath of his creating. ;-)

My younger daughter crafted this owl pillow completely on her own:

Also, this beautiful chalk wall on the side of our garage:

A wrapping paper version of herself on her bedroom wall:

And a plan for a birdhouse (she is getting a kit to make one for her birthday in a few weeks):

My 10 year old daughter was also inspired this summer and created this winter fairy garden based on a project she found in our Jumbo Book of Outdoor Art book:

She also created this Minion ipod holder out of duct tape:

And just a couple other fun random creations from the summer:

Lily made a little fort/tent for her and Kellan to play under. It included a "tv" as well. She hung the iPad from the back of the couch. :-)

 And a wine cork person just for the fun of it.

I'm sort of proud that I have set the foundation for my children to find the supplies they need and just create to their heart's content. It makes me so happy to see them inspired by so many things and even though I missed doing our projects together, it was almost better to leave them be and see what they came up with on their own!