Crazy peg faces

As they say in Cyprus: "Long time no see" :)  But it doesn't mean we were on holiday. Many new ideas for crafts just waiting to be written. Let me start from very simple craft for kids we made today.

 

I got some old pegs to throw away what I, of course, didn't do. Instead we came up with this craft idea to stick some crazy faces made from color card.

Simple and really fun. All you need is some color paper and glue and - as always - imagination! We made a whole family. You can use these fun pegs to separate your glass in a crowded birthday party or to put it on a flowerpot so your cactus wouldn't feel lonely :)

More flowers!

Recently my sister send me a picture of the brooch she made. It's really original. As you can see it's made from zip. Isn't that clever?! :) 

You can easily make one your self. The step by step instruction you can find here, it's in Lithuanian but with pictures so must be pretty clear.

Inspired by these zip flowers and up coming spring I started searching for some new flower making techniques. As I like saying, everything is already invented, just need to discover it again :) And discovered  an amazing art of traditional Japanese kanzashi flowers. 

Kanzashi are hair ornaments used in traditional Japanese hairstyles. The whole history of these traditional ornaments is really interesting and a bit complex, so I'll try to write more about that later. Anyway, nowadays

kanzashi is mostly applied to folded fabric-petals flowers. 

Here is my first attempt to make kanzashi style brooch. Not so impressive so far as you can find browsing, but at the moment I'm cutting old clothes and going to recycle them into kanzashi flower style accessories. Coming more really soon!

Recycling

Recycling with no doubts is a good thing and we all should contribute to environment protection. That's why I always try to use one paper twice and if it's possible even three times :) And I always try to use something what is at a hand for our arts & crafts. This time we were making some mobiles from plastic bottles.

 

I just cut the bottle in different sizes rain drops and hanged them in a circle. My friend Fredi as always tried to make this craft look as a real piece of art. 

I really like the colour of these plastic bottles, so I was trying to make a nice blue cell for traditional Japanese crane. One kid asked me if we going to learn this bird to speak or sing! :)

Using plastic bottles can be great fun, especially if you have different colours. But its better prepare the shapes for kids if you planing to make mobile as it takes some time and it's not really easy to cut plastic. With kids we were using pieces of colour straws to make our "rain mobiles" more colourful as there was a rainbow after nice summer rain. Experimenting is fun!