Each year our family participates in the Kris Kringle at Christmas time and our kids buy or make a present for their cousins that costs between $5.00 – $10.00 per child. We love encouraging the Christmas spirit of giving and this year we have decided to make homemade playdough as our gift which has been so fun and a great learning activity for our children. Here’s how we made it:

What you need:
1. Plastic containers with a screw top – I bought mine from Kmart for $1 each.
2. Labels – again I bought these at Kmart in the home office section.
3. Playdough ingredients
4. Texta to write on the labels
5. Glitter if you wish to make sparkle dough.
6. Essence or essential oils if you wish to make “smelly” dough!

Playdough ingredients
• 2 cups Plain Flour
• ¾ – 1 cup salt
• 2 cups water
• 1 tablespoon of oil
• 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar
• food colouring
• glitter

Method
1. Place water in a saucepan
2. Add food colouring to desired colour and stir
3. Add flour, salt, oil and cream of tartar to the water solution
4. Continuously stir over a medium heat until it turns into play dough
5. Allow to cool.
6. Mix in glitter by hand if you are making glittery playdough or add your essence or oils. We made batch with vanilla essence and one with rosewater.
7. We then separated each batch of dough into ball shapes and I wrapped them in gladwrap just to ensure they stayed moist up until Christmas and added them to the containers.
8. Added the stickers and drew creative names on each container which was loads of fun.

We hope you enjoy making these as much as we did.

Nikki x

Last Christmas our family made these homemade personalised place settings and they were such a hit with all the guests I thought I would share them with you – our Sweet Creations followers – and hoping you like them too!

They are pretty simple to make and the kids can get involved too with the stickers, ribbons, chalk and of course eating the candy canes!

You will need:

Clean glass jars
Chalkboard paint or chalkboard paint labels
White chalk
Christmas ribbon or string
Cutlery
Candy canes

Here’s what to do:

Step one: Collect and clean glass jars. These can be any size – sauce bottles, vegemite jars, bolognaise jars – anything. In fact it looks fantastic on the Christmas table with jars of all different shapes and sizes. There’s loads of ways to easily remove the labels from glass jars – the method I use is to peel as much of the sticker off as possible, then pour a couple drops of oil onto a paper towel and rub at the remaining sticker residue from the label. Keep rubbing until it is all gone and then wash and dry your jar before the next step.
Note: Jars can also be bought cheaply at Kmart if you don’t have spare ones at home.

Step two: Add your chalkboard paint or labels. When I first made the settings I purchased chalkboard paint from Bunnings and painted each jar and this year (we have more guests so I am making a few more settings) I decided to take the easier option and bought the chalkboard labels from the home office section at Kmart for a few dollars.

Step three: Write the guests name on the label in white chalk.

Step four: Tie ribbon around the top or bottom of the jar. Some of the jars I tied the ribbon and curled them like a present and others I tied them in a bow. I liked making each place setting a little different from the next one.

Step five: Add utensils and candy cane.

Lastly: Use leftover jars as extra decorations. A nice idea is to fill them with Christmas coloured lollies for the kids after their meal.

I hope you enjoy making these decorations and if you have any other decorating ideas please share them as we love to see everybody’s gorgeous table setting ideas.

Nikki x

If you’ve ever tried to teach your kids the difference between colours, no doubt you’ve tried books or even a DVD to educate them. But there might just be a better way.

The beginnings of our idea all started on a 30-degree day in Perth. The weather was amazing so we naturally decided to head outside and enjoy the sunshine in our new paddle pool.

My son was asking me about colours and how he would make the colour orange, and what happens when you mix green and blue. So, I decided to teach him as well as have fun swimming.

We simply grabbed half a dozen plastic cups, added a variety of different food colours (just a drop in each cup with water) to each cups and then mixed a few together. My son learnt how to make a variety of colours and then for fun we added each cup into the pool and enjoyed a rainbow swim.

This activity is loads of fun plus an excellent way to teach children their primary and secondary colours and encourage sensory development. Best of all the colouring didn’t stain the kids and kept them entertained for ages.

Have you ever had an ingenious moment where you created a fun educational activity for the kids?

Halloween hits town this Friday we our house decided to get a little spooky this week. Here’s some of our DIY Halloween Crafts we made ready for our Halloween Party. It was SO fun and easy and I loved seeing my kids get so excited about transforming our backyard from fun to spooky.

I have chosen each craft for its simplicity – all products were from around the house, and both my 5 year old and 2 year old were able to make them with me.

Happy Halloween

SPOOKY CRAFT 1: Spooky Ghost

What an easy fun ghost to make and it really completed our spooky party decorations.

What you need:

White balloon
Two plastic bags (preferably white, but we only had grey and it worked)
Black texta or googly eyes
Scissors
Tape

What you need to do:

Cut the handles off your plastic bags and if there’s coloured print cut that out too.
To make the ghosts legs simply cut into the bag in strips with the seam intact at the bottom.
Blow up your balloon and use your tape to stick the bag in a circle a few centimetres from the bottom of the balloon. If you are hanging your ghost make sure the tied end is at the top so you can tie the string to the ghost.
Using your texta draw eyes and a mouth on your ghost. For fun we also made some with googly eyes.

SPOOKY CRAFT 2: Creepy Bats

Easy to make and fabulous to pin around the house for that extra bit of CREEP!

What you need:

Black paper – card is best
Pencil
Scissors
Peg
Glue
Googly Eyes or circles of coloured paper

What you need to do:

Draw your bats wings and body and then cut them out. We created our own template at the bottom of this post for you to use by printing it out on white paper and tracing onto our black card.
Glue your wings onto the peg.
Glue on the googly eyes or circles of coloured paper.
Clip the bats everywhere – we put them on our Umbrellas, Curtains, tablecloths, Flywire…everywhere!!!

SPOOKY CRAFT 3: Frankenstein Doorknob Hanger

This is a fabulous monster hanger for the front door – we loved making it. Young children can easily make this cut and paste craft, but even pre-teens through adults will enjoy creating this cute doorknob hanger.

There’s also a small hanger template for those who prefer a quicker craft – this won’t fit around a doorknob, but can hang on a drawer knob, closet knob, pushpin or the refrigerator.

What you need:

glue or scotch tape,
scissors,
printer,
paper,
Something to color with (if making the B&W paper version).

What you need to do:

Print out the template of choice and color if necessary.
Cut out the template pieces.
Glue the doorknob hanger together as follows:
Glue the arms on either side of the large body shape
Glue the face onto the body
Glue the shoes onto the body
Glue the belt onto the body
Glue the belt buckle onto the belt

Craft Templates:

To create a truly amazing creepy bat template here are some great templates to use:

Template 1 (colour) or (B&W)
Template 2 (colour) or (B&W)
Template 3 (colour) or (B&W)

To create the Frankenstein Doorknob Hangar, here is the template to use:

Small Hanger template (colour) or (B&W)

Please set the page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP or FILE, PRINTER SETUP in most browsers).