The First Ever Weekly Craft Giveaway!

Win the entire set of Finger Puppets in the previous post(including this bonus one)!   All you need to do is comment on the finger puppet post by March 10.  One name will be randomly chosen to be the winner!  Good luck!

Finger Puppets

Try making these finger puppets...they are pretty easy!  All you need is some felt, glue (fabric glue or a hot glue gun works best) and whatever other decorations you want to add.  Just remember not to use anything small if the puppets are for very young children.  Directions and patterns for all the animals shown (plus a chicken) can be found here.  And don't stop with these...start with the basic patterns and create you own designs: you could make a monkey, or a duck, or almost anything!  I'd love to see what you come up with!

Felted Egg Soaps

This is a craft we did as part of our Summer Reading Program last year, and it was a lot of fun.  Because the theme of the program was dinosaurs we called them dinosaur eggs, but you could make them for Easter too.  In fact, you can make them any shape (I've seen them made to look like rocks) or you can felt over the bar of soap without changing the shape of it at all.   Click here for printable instructions.  For more wool/yarn craft ideas check out the "Wooly Yarns" display in the Children's Room!

Cinnamon Dough Hearts

In Story Times this week we have been making Cinnamon Heart Decorations. We made cinnamon scented  dough ahead of time, and during Story Time kids rolled it out and used cookie cutters to to make heart decorations.  The recipe for the dough comes from "Mudworks" by MaryAnn Kohl.  It's full of every kind of clay and dough recipe you can think of, and it's one of my favorite craft books. You get a completely different result depending on whether you bake the clay or let it air dry: the heart on the left was air-dried, and the one on the left was baked. When I use this clay at home I bake it because the house smells so good! Click here to print the recipe.Note: this dough is not edible.

Waxed Paper and Crayon Hearts

These Valentine's Day decorations look great, and are surprisingly easy to make.  All you need is waxed paper, crayons, an old-fashioned hand held pencil sharpener, newspaper or craft paper and an iron. Basically, you use the iron to melt crayon shavings between sheets of waxed paper. The full instructions are on the Martha Stewart website, but here are a few tips:

• A few crayon shavings go a long way: if you use too much, when the crayon melts it makes a thick glob that's difficult to cut and the hearts won't be translucent.
• Always fold the edges of the wax paper twice: you don't want the melted crayon running out the sides onto your ironing surface!
• Change the newspaper/ craft paper protecting your iron and ironing surface often:  the waxed paper does leave a residue on those papers, and after a few uses they start to get messy.
• Preselect crayons of similar colors: there's no way to control how the colors will mix when the crayon is melted, so you want to avoid colors that will look ugly when melted together.
• Only adults should use the iron.

We made these as a Make-It and Take-It craft several years ago, and it was a great project for all ages. Kids used the pencil sharpener to scatter crayon shavings over the waxed paper, put another sheet of waxed paper on top and folded the edges over.  The librarian (or adult volunteer) ironed the sheets to melt the wax. Once the sheets were cool enough, kids cut hearts out to take home for decorations.  It might seem like a complicated craft, but it was actually pretty easy and even the really young kids can participate by spreading the crayon shavings on the paper.

One of the things I love about this craft is that you don't have to be limited by hearts or Valentine colors.  The decorations for the Summer Reading Program this coming summer are going to feature a lot of nocturnal animals, so I'm going to make this up in pale shades of yellow, blue and green, and then cut out stars to hang from the ceiling.  It would make great butterfly wings as well....

Have fun!

New and Improved Blog

Welcome to the new and improved  Rochester Public Library Children's Room Blog! 

We get a lot of questions about the crafts we do in Story Time, for Make -It and Take-It, or for our decorations, and we love hearing that you enjoy what we do!  So we were inspired to make this an "all craft" blog, where once a week we would post the instructions for a craft that is child-centric!  Some of these will be crafts we have used for Story Times or Make-It and Take-It.  Some will be projects that have too many steps for us to make in our programs, but are too cool not to pass along.  Some will be instructions for our more popular decorations.  And some may even be crafts that grown-ups can make to share with their children. 

Happy Crafting!