This post is sponsored by KiwiCo.

SPOILER ALERT: Discount offer below…but you have to keep reading!

How familiar does this sound…your kid’s birthday is approaching and you’ve planned the party, wrapped the gifts, but you haven’t bought any special decorations for the home celebration! The next few days are jam-packed with soccer games, zoom meetings, and dance classes, with no shopping time to spare. You are left with no choice…you have to raid their crafts supplies! 

Or, if your child likes to join in on their own decoration making (perhaps you wrangle the sibling to help), you have a win-win scenario of a bespoke DIY birthday craft plus a screen-free activity you can enjoy together! 

Now…what to make? Let’s be real…do not sweat over trying to draw their favorite cartoon character or attempt a life-size cut out of their Roblox avatar. Keep it simple and make it special with an easy-to-craft DIY birthday name garland that you can repurpose with a quick edit year after year. Use your kids’ favorite colors or swirl some together to make a marble look…experiment and play!

Kid and parent favorite, KiwiCo, has expanded beyond their amazing kit line to craft supplies for kids (and people that used to be kids) to explore freely. From air-dry clay to vibrant paint markers, their high quality materials are bound to encourage your kids’ creativity and innovation. They sent me a bunch of goodies to play with, and the quality is just what you’d expect from them.

So whether you are sneaking into the craft stash when your kids are asleep or you are bonding together in the fun, the opportunities that the KiwiCo line of crafts offers is endless!

And wait! Click this KiwiCo link and you will get 20% off your order of $50 or more, or enter PROJECTKID at checkout! Go stock up for the kids and get a few things for you too! We won’t tell!

What you’ll need:

KiwiCo Embroidery Floss Set

KiwiCo Wood Bead Set

KiwiCo Rainbow Air-Dry Clay

KiwiCo Letter and Number Cutter Set

Parchment paper

Sewing needle

Scissors

Make It:

1. Cover your work surface with parchment paper. 

2. Make a pancake with clay and flatten onto the parchment paper. 

3. Press letter or number cutter into the clay and wiggle to release. Set excess clay aside.

4. Grab a pinch of white clay and mix it into the original color (in this case, blue) to make a lighter shade. Adjust with white or blue clay as needed. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each letter. 

5. To make a striped letter or number, roll three to four pieces of clay into a stick and line them up. Press down, joining the colors, but not mixing them. Make a pancake and repeat step 3. 

6. Let clay dry overnight.

7. To make the garland, thread a needle and embroidery floss through the top of the letter—this air-dry clay dries with a spongy feel, so it’s easy to pierce. 

8. Thread wooden beads in between words and on either end to finish! Get a head start on next year by making the next number so you can swap out your child’s age!

Remember, get 20% with code PROJECTKID at checkout with carts over $50!

As with any gift-giving efforts, there’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to end-of-the-year teacher gifts. Some teachers like apples, some don’t. Some like pencil-patterned zipper pouches, most don’t. This year, Sommer and I are coming up with funny book titles for her favorite 4th grade teachers to make little notebooks.

What I love about this project is that it’s SO easy to draw a book spine! It’s just a rectangle with a curved top edge. Add some details to the spine and write the titles in playful handwriting styles! Plus you can draw these onto tote bags, notebooks, or even just make a cute thank-you card. This year was a real doozy for teachers and any nod of gratitude is going to go a long way!

Here are the materials and very basic steps:

• Notebook or journal with blank cover
• Paint markers
• Ruler and pencil

Draw your book spines using the ruler and pencil.

Color in the spines with paint pens. Let the paint dry.

Add little details to the spines like lines, swirls, or whirly-gigs.

Use a black permanent marker to write the titles.

As this school year comes to a close and the gratitude for these hardworking teachers swells around me, we have another practice of gratitude that you can try out: Thank with Google. I’m excited to be one of Google’s paid early testers for their Thank with Google pilot program. Thank with Google is a new experimental feature that you’ll see here on my website (see that little floating blue button below?). You can click on it and send me a little wink of encouragement via a virtual sticker.

This post is sponsored by our friends at Stonyfield.

Sometimes it can feel like “Flowers for Mom” is a little cliche as a Mother’s Day gift, but for me, a lover of all things nature and color, I simply will never tire of them. And when you are given flowers that will live forever, it seriously does not get any better than that.

These upcycled, DIY flowers are made from a plastic Stonyfield yogurt tub. Yes, you heard right…they are plastic! If you hate tossing these as much as I do, then this is the project for you and your littles. This a great project to make for mom, grandma, or another mother in your life, plus it reuses something that might otherwise end up in a landfill. They can live on your mantle all season long, and, bonus: they’ll never wilt. 

This post is sponsored by our friends at Stonyfield.

Please note: I use hot-glue in the video and photos, but these can also be made with tacky glue…perfectly safe for little hands!

WHAT YOU’LL NEED:

• Stonyfield yogurt quart
• White and colored acrylic paint
• Paintbrushes
• Scissors
• Green straws, skewers or floral wire
• Pom-poms
• Hot-glue gun or tacky glue

1. Paint Stonyfield yogurt quart white. Let dry.
2. Cut 4 petal shapes from the white-painted Stonyfield quart. They should be about 2 inches tall and about an inch wide. Cut long leaf shapes.
3. Glue pom-pom to the end of the straw. (If you don’t have straws, you can paint a skewer green or use floral wire.)
4. Glue 4 petals around the pom-pom; glue the leaf to the stem. Gluing the unpainted petals and leaves to the stem first make it easier to hold for painting.
5. Paint the petals in the color of your choice and the leaves green. Stand them up in a glass to dry.

I have forever been a fan of Pysanka, Ukrainian Easter eggs decorated with a wax-resist method. The intricate, delicate designs are so detailed, and for anyone that has attempted to turn an egg into artwork, you too will be amazed. Pysanka artists often use a tool called a lathe, which allows the artist to rotate the egg, keeping the egg level and off the surface of the table.

I was thinking of the lathe when I made these eggs, using a basic lazy susan.  Really the only similarity is the spinning action, and while these eggs are not at all intricate like Pysanka, they are super fun to make!

I used wooden eggs from Oriental Trading that had a flat bottom. If you use real, blown-out eggs, just rest the egg in a lifesaver candy, using glue dots to hold it in place.

Here’s how I made these:

1. Before you get started, mix a little water into your paint so that it’s about the consistency of a milkshake. If the paint is too thick, it won’t distribute around the egg evenly.
2. Paint the wooden egg. I painted mine white so that the stripes would be vibrant, but you can choose any color you’d like (or leave them natural).
3. Glue-dot the wooden egg to the center of the lazy susan and spin!
4. As it spins touch the side of the egg with a brush loaded with paint. Repeat with different colors to make as many stripes as you’d like. You want to keep you hand as steady as possible so that the line remains straight.
5. After they dry, you can add this optional touch! If you want a more mod design, take a black marker and move the marker around the surface of the egg as it spins. Experiment and try lots of things!

Here’s a before and after comparison of how these eggs looked with and without the black. I appreciate both versions!

Here’s something fun for you (and me)! We are one of Google’s paid early testers for their Thank with Google pilot program! Thank with Google is a new experimental feature that you’ll see on my website (see that little floating blue button down below?). You can click on it and send me a little high-five of encouragement.

I can’t speak for all content creators, but I share these ideas because (A) I love to craft and (B) I love to encourage folks to get creative with their kids. Sometimes I’m paid for the content that I make—maybe by a magazine or a brand that has sponsored the post, but so much that I share is just because I believe encouraging kids to take risks, experiment, and create is so vital to their futures as confident, self-directed humans.

By clicking the Thank with Google button, you can just send me a sticker as a sign of appreciation, and some of the stickers translate into direct revenue that support our work and allow us to serve up more clever craft ideas!

If you try it out, let us know what you think! Thanks, as always, for your support.

This post is sponsored by Stonyfield.

As we wrap up National Craft Month, we slide right into April, which puts Earth Day on the forefront of the brain. And while Earth Day and Craft Month don’t naturally correlate for everyone, they are like besties in the land of Project Kid! Rarely does a craft project leave this studio without at least one upcycled or reused material. And our mission is beautifully two-fold—we get to spare the landfills of more plastic waste while also showing kids that the materials they need to craft are right under their nose…or spoon in this case!

Once again, my friends at Stonyfield put our maker-brains to the test to come up with another craft reusing their yogurt tubs and containers. We wanted to bust out of the obvious container projects and really show you how creative you can get with some basic materials that you have around the house.

This cute DIY bird puppet uses one quart-size tub (plus the lid!), one individual yogurt cup, duct tape and cupcake liners! (You know you have extras of those laying around from birthday parties of the past.) This is a great craft for the springtime, and I challenge you to think of what other animals could work with this construction. I asked my 9 year-old daughter and she said that all she sees is a bear doing jumping jacks! Maybe that’ll be next.

Remember…don’t just toss those Stonyfield yogurt containers. Your kids will squeal with delight when they see how they can quite literally bring them to life.

Imaginations…get ready, get set, take flight!

What you’ll need:

• Stonyfield quart size containers
• Duct tape
• Scissors
• Cupcake liners
• Glue
• Black paper
• Hole punch
• 3 bendy straws
• Black cardstock
• 2-inch styrofoam ball
• Single-serve Stonyfield yogurt cup
  

MAKE IT:

Cover Stonyfield quart-size yogurt tub with duct tape. If you don’t have duct tape, there are many great substitutions! You can paint the tub or cover it with paper!)

Punch holes about 1 inch down from the top on either side of the covered container. The easiest way to accomplish this is with a long-reach hole puncher, but if you don’t have one, poke a hole with an Exacto knife, then use the end of a scissor to make it bigger. (This is definitely a job for an adult.) Also, make a hole in the center of the bottom of the container.

Set the yogurt container aside. Extend your three bendy straws and wrap a piece of tape around the flexible part. Insert the middle straw through the bottom hole and the two side straws through the side holes.

Cut the Stonyfield quart-size lid in half. Flatten cupcake liners and fold into quarters. Glue them on the lid halves as feathers. Make sure to overlap them to get a fluffy feather look! If you don’t have cupcake liners, you can use painted coffee filters, tissue paper, or actual craft feathers. Repeat to cover the second lid half.

Use a piece of duct tape on the back to attach the wings to the side straws.

Fold a few more cupcake liners and glue to the front of the Stonyfield yogurt tub as the chest.

Glue a small cardboard ball into the bottom of the single-serving yogurt cup. If you don’t have a styrofoam ball, you can create a ring of padding with newspaper. You just need to leave space in the middle for the straws to go through (see final step). 

Cover the small yogurt cup in duct tape. 

Punch two circles from black cardstock and glue them to the front as eyes. Cut a circle from the black paper and cut out a wedge. Roll the paper into a cone shape and glue together as a beak. Glue just below the eyes.

Fold more cupcake liners into fourths and eighths and glue them to the top back edge as the birds tk. Use scissors to cut fringe to create a more feathery look. 

Poke a hole in the styrofoam ball with a scissors and tape the end of the straws together. Glue the straws into the center of the ball. 

Push and pull the bottom straw to make the bird flap his wings and peak his head out!