Preschool Art / Craft – Melted Bead Christmas Ornaments

A few weeks ago, in a preschool post, I mentioned some great little suncatcher kits from Makit Bakit.  I remember making these when I was a kid, and they were so much fun.  These come in both boy and girl themes, which makes my art-loving boy very happy. 

You fill the sections of a metal suncatcher frame with the beads (I have M pinch them to transfer them to the frame – great fine motor work), then pop the whole thing into the oven for 20 minutes and they melt.  The result is a stained-glass-look suncatcher.  I think this kind is much, much prettier than the kind you paint.

a racecar M made recently 
(the black beads are not transparent,
and make it look a bit splotchy;
most kits don’t have the black beads)

Each package has more than enough plastic beads for the suncatcher that comes with it.  I’d love it if they had just packs of the beads available, but as far as I know, they don’t offer them apart from the suncatcher frames.

You know I can’t throw those extra beads away. :)  So we used them with mini cookie cutters to make ornaments.

Our extra beads: 

Line a pan with aluminum foil and place the cookie cutters on it.  Then begin filling them up with beads.  You want to have a layer that completely covers the foil at the bottom of each cookie cutter, with a small mound in the center that thins out towards the edges:

Pop them into a 375 degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes. 

You have to be quick with this next part.  As soon as they are out of the oven, they begin to cool off and get hard.  To make the hole for ribbon, I used a 1/8” dowel, coated with non-stick spray.  Stick it into the area of each ornament where you want the hole to be.  The first couple were pretty easy, then as they started to harden, I had to really twist the dowel to get it out.  I ended up putting half of the ornaments back into the oven to melt a bit and then made holes in them.

Peel the foil off the back, and pop them out of the cookie cutters.

They turned out pretty cute!

Strung onto ribbon, they’ll look so pretty on the tree or even hanging in a window.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Preschool Art - Shiny Foil Christmas Collages

 
I’m always surprised at how inspiration can strike simply by going through what we already have. 

I mentioned in an earlier post that we’ve been cleaning out and organizing some of our space in the past month or so, and part of this included my craft storage area.  As we went through a huge bin of paper products, I found some pretty Christmas cards that I had saved, in the hopes that I’d come up with something to do with them.

Most of the cards had some sort of foil or glitter or something sparkly on them.  I cut out the pretty parts, and teamed them up with some glitter snowflake stickers, and sequins, and cut some glitter Christmas shapes from foam (stockings, candy canes, triangle “trees”, circle “ornaments”, stars). 

And what shines better than aluminum foil?  So I set everything out for M one morning.  I included some window markers too and glue of course:

This was definitely one of the biggest hits we’ve had lately.  M loved this little art project, and it was so much fun I even got in on the action a bit. :)  The white window marker shows up so nicely on foil and made the perfect snow:

Eventually we realized that our window markers are in pretty bad shape and drying out.  So I brought out the window crayons (which I normally loathe, because they are such a mess to clean off of windows).  The window crayons were perfect for this (permanent markers work well on foil too) and, while you do have to be careful at first since they will smear onto anything that touches them, they do dry and are then perfectly ok.  They went onto the foil so smoothly and have such bright colors, that I think these will be our “aluminum foil crayons” and window crayons no longer. No clean up for mom that way. ;)

Finished collages:
  

This was such a blast (for me too)!  If you are looking for a quick art project without so much prep, just peel off some aluminum foil, get out those window markers and crayons, and let the kids go to work! :)

Have a beautiful day! :)