Reindeer Paper Chains

I really love printable crafts! I’m a little late on my Christmas in July series, but here’s the next one up – printable Christmas paper chain templates! There’s a snowman, reindeer, angel and Christmas tree, along with easy directions on how to cut and fold the paper to make these paper chains. Tape several of them together to make cute paper garlands and decorate with glitter or paint!

Related Pages: Printable Santa Dolls, Printable Christmas Tags, Printable Christmas Bingo Game

Christmas Paper Chain Template

Be sure to check out all of the Woo! Jr. Network Christmas kids activities!

Download the Flaming Text font here.

Or turn these printable letters into fun printable crafts with these great Avery ink jet products:

• Printable Sticker Paper
• Printable Fabric
• Printable Iron-on Transfer Paper
• Printable Magnets
• Printable Window Decals

Flaming Letter Set	Flaming Letter A	Flaming Letter B	Flaming Letter C
Flaming Letter D	Flaming Letter E	Flaming Letter F	Flaming Letter G
Flaming Letter H	Flaming Letter I	Flaming Letter J	Flaming Letter K
Flaming Letter L	Flaming Letter M	Flaming Letter N	Flaming Letter O
Flaming Letter P	Flaming Letter Q	Flaming Letter R	Flaming Letter S
Flaming Letter T	Flaming Letter U	Flaming Letter V	Flaming Letter W
Flaming Letter X	Flaming Letter Y	Flaming Letter Z

Be sure to check out the many sets of printable letters from all Woo! Jr. Network sites!

I’ve always been fascinated with package design, so this little project is an exciting first step for me to start putting together some of my own box templates to print & download.

For the favor box pictured above, I printed out the box template onto double sided scrapbook lightweight cardstock. I actually intended for this side of the paper to be on the inside, but fed the paper into my printer wrong. ‘Doh! So I recommend doing a trial run to ensure you are getting what you want before you print out the box template onto your nice papers.

Printed onto a regular letter sized piece of paper at 8.5″ x 11″ inches, the box stands approximately 5 inches tall. If you have a printer or copier to print at larger sizes, you could turn this box template into a gorgeous gift box, or print it on plain paper and let the kids color and decorate it.

How to Put Together the Favor Box

Simple. Just print and then cut out the box template on the outside solid lines. Make folds on the gray dotted lines, and glue the one flap on the bottom end of the template to the opposite end of the box. Then fold the bottm box flaps as shown and tuck the last flap underneath the top flap.

Download and Print the Favor Box Template

Be sure to check out our printable letters, other paper crafts and the birthday party supplies and ideas from all Woo! Jr. Websites for Kids.

So, for all the missing mismatched socks we have in this house, I should have a sock puppet museum by now. Seriously. So to keep with our recycled crafts theme of the week for Earth Day, here’s a pretty darn cute animal sock puppet idea.

What You Need to Make this Giraffe Animal Sock Puppet

• An old sock – preferably tan and long-ish, like an adult size dress sock
• One brown pipe cleaner
• Two brown pom poms
• Two googly eyes
• Brown and black paint
• Paint brush
• Glue gun
• Wire clippers

Do all your prep work before you start painting, because you’ll be assembling most of this puppet while it is on your hand, which will make it a little tricky to do other things.

Step One: Cut the pipe cleaner into 4 pieces. 2 pieces are 1″ inch long, 2 pieces are 2″ inches long.

Bend the longer pieces in half to form the ears.

With the glue gun, glue one end of the shorter pieces into the center of the pom poms. These are the giraffe horns.

Step Two: Get your paint and brush ready, and make sure it is slightly watery like tempera or acrylic paint in the containers in the photo above. If you’re using thicker paints, it will be much harder to get it to sink into the sock fibers.

Step Three: Put the sock onto your hand, with your fingers going into the toe of the sock, and your thumb going into the heel like this:

Step Four: Paint spots on the sock. They should be random, mishapen spots like on a real giraffe. For a ‘realistic effect’ (ha!), you can make the spots smaller as they get closer to the head. Then paint two black spots on the nose as shown in the first photo for the nose holes.

Step Five: Use the hot glue gun to glue the googly eyes, pipe cleaner ears, and pom pom horns onto the head. This sounds like it might be tricky, but it isn’t. Just put a drop of the glue the size of a small pea where you want the parts, and stick them on. I glued the ears into the fold of the sock that you can see in the photo above, directly to the left of the paint brush at the back of the puppet mouth.

Step Six: Play with your sock puppet!

Animal Sock Puppet: Giraffe

For you animal lovers, be sure to check out Animal Jr., with tons of animal printables, animal coloring pages, and even a few giraffes hanging around.

As I ate lunch from the freezer last week, I was left with a little black plastic tray that I would normally toss in the trash. But I had a feeling I could turn it into something cool, so I washed it out and held onto it until inspiration hit me – and it did when I saw my grandmother’s pillbox hat:

Since it’s Earth Day this week, this is the first in a series of recycled crafts. Woot!

Check out all Woo! Jr. Network Earth Day crafts, printables and coloring pages here.

What You Need to Make this Pillbox Hat Recycled Craft

Here’s my rather simple materials list  (not everything is pictured above)

• A black single serving microwave dinner tray (washed!)
• Green ribbon (I bought this green ribbon from the scrap heap at my local craft store for less than $1). I prefer wired ribbon for this project so that the bow (pictured below) holds its shape.
• A 14″ inch square of black tulle (you could get uber-recyclely geeky and use the netting from a produce bag instead, but I didn’t have any in black)
• A thin and stretchy elastic hair headband (for the full head, not a pony tail holder)
• A safety pin
• Tissue paper and pipe cleaners to make your tissue paper flowers
• Wire cutters
• Glue gun

How to Make this Pillbox Hat Recycled Craft

First you need to make your flowers (tissue paper flowers instructions here). I made mostly small flowers with some larger flowers as accent pieces. As pictured in the materials section, I made:

• 8 mini pink flowers from 1 inch squares of tissue paper
• 7 small yellow flowers from 1 1/2 inch squares of tissue paper
• 3 small accent flowers from darker colored multi-colored tissue paper (and the brown pipe cleaner centers on these made them look really striking!)
• 2 medium multi-colored flowers using yellow and white tissue paper, varying from 1 inch to three inches
• 1 large ‘centerpiece’ flower using 4 inch pieces of tissue paper. I spent a bit more time and creativity on this flower, using extra ribbon as additional leaves and cutting more intricate petals out of the tissue paper

Your microwave dinner tray may vary in size from mine, so you may need more or less flowers than this.

Also, make your accent bow with about 15 inches of ribbon and one of the small accent flowers. Simply tie the bow like you would tie your shoes, make it symmetrical and pretty, and then snip off the ends with a diagonal cut. Then I just used the pipe cleaner end of the flower to wrap it around the center of the bow and secure it into place.

Make the Hat Veil 2

Make the Hat Veil 3

Tissue Paper Flower Arrangement

To make the veil, grab the left corner of the square of tulle and bring it up to the top corner. Do the same with the right corner, and then you’ll have two ‘flaps’ (seen on the far left of the first photo) sticking out. Bring those two flaps in to the top corner so that all the visible corners of the tulle square are together (see picture two). Safety pin the corners together. Now, cut off the last corner in a rounded fashion like in the last photo.

At this point I highly recommend doing a ‘trial run’ and arranging your flowers on top of the hat to determine where you want them before you glue them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done some craft ‘on the fly’ and then wished I hadn’t glued everything in place.

Once you know where you want your flowers, you can rev up your glue gun and start gluing! Glue down a layer of ribbon to act as a base for the flowers. It looks prettier and helps to add interest while covering up the top of the plastic tray.

Add your flowers to the outside rim first, then add the second inner circle of flowers next. Try to strategically cover up the pipe cleaner stems as you glue down the second circle.

Leave the center open so that we can add the veil and the centerpiece flower.

In the center spot, glue the veil in place. Make sure that it covers the part that you want to be the front of the hat. Now glue your large centerpiece flower on top of the veil to cover up the rest of the open space and top of the veil.

At this point you can attach the accent bow to the back of the hat (seen peeking out above). And lastly, put a big glob of glue on the center of the inside tray and attach elastic headband. It’s done! My daughter went *crazy* over it! Especially because she isn’t allowed to touch my grandmother’s hat, much to her dismay. Now she has one of her own.

Now that’s both creative crafting and smart parenting, eh??

If you liked this craft, you might also like this tissue paper flower topiary, too!

Admittedly I’m more interested in garden crafts than I am with gardening… but I might plant something this year just so I can use these plant markers! I have to say I think this is one of my favorite projects I’ve ever come up with!

I sat today and tried to think of every vegetable that I might possibly plant in my garden, and drew them up for this craft pattern download. I believe I only scratched the surface of what vegetables are actually out there though:

Tomatoes, carrots, pumpkins, broccoli, potatoes, corn, lettuce, peas, onions, orange peppers, green peppers, cucumbers, beets (or radishes, I suppose), watermelon, beans, red peppers, yellow peppers and squash.

Download the printable plant marker artwork

So suffice it to say that if you see some fruits or vegetables that I’ve missed, please leave them in a comment and I’ll create a plant markers garden craft “version 2.0″ in the next few days.

What you Need to Make these Plant Markers Garden Craft

Plant Markers Materials

• Download and print the fruit and vegetable illustrations on a color printer
  (You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader)
• Sticks from your yard, cut to about 6″ – 8″ inches tall
• Raffia
• Rubber cement or glass glue
• Small clear glass aquarium pebbles, the approximately 3/4 inch size. As tempting as it is, avoid the larger glass pebbles that are over an inch in diameter. They seem like they will work, but the way they are made, they always have wrinkles in the glass on the flat part, which makes it very hard to see the pictures beneath the glass

How to Make these Plant Markers Garden Craft

Glue the paper between the glass pebbles

Carefully cut out the circles of the plant markers you plan on using. I used a 3/4″ hole punch at first, but it was a little too big and I had to trim them down.

When I made these recently I used rubber cement, but in the past I have used this awesome glass glue called Eclectic Adhesive E6000 that I think actually worked better. It’s thicker and left less bubbles between the paper and the glass, and is totally weather proof. Glue the paper veggie circles between two glass pebbles and let dry.

Attach the glued pebbles to the top of the sticks

If you’re using that E6000 glue, you can use it for this next step, too. Otherwise grab a hot glue gun, and attach the two glued together pebbles to the top of the stick. If you’re really picky about what works best, I would use the E6000 for the first step and the glue gun for this step and the next one.

Wrap the raffia around the base

After the glue is dry/cooled off, wrap a 6″ – 8″ inch piece of raffia over the glued area to cover it up. Wrap it in a few layers so that the top layers hold the starting end in place. Then grab that glue gun again and put a dab of it on the back side of the raffia to secure the finishing end in place. This may sound tricky or hard, but it isn’t. It’s super-easy. Trim the ends of the raffia that are still sticking out.

Waterproof the crevice between the pebbles

Now you’re almost done, but you still have paper in between two pebbles that could possibly get wet when it rains. So you need to put a thin layer of glue in the crevice between the two pebbles to seal out the water. You can do this with the rubber cement brush (or more easily with a smaller pain brush), or use your fingers to spread the E6000 glue. It’s ok if it turns out just a little sloppy, because it’s really hard to see anyway.

Now comes the hard part – you can’t use them until you plant your garden!

Here’s an entire bubble letter printable alphabet A to Z, including a smaller set on one page. Also, because so many people asked for them, here’s a new set of lowercase bubble letters, too!

Bubble Letters Set	Bubble Letter A	Bubble Letter B	Bubble Letter C
Bubble Letter D	Bubble Letter E	Bubble Letter F	Bubble Letter G
Bubble Letter H	Bubble Letter I	Bubble Letter J	Bubble Letter K
Bubble Letter L	Bubble Letter M	Bubble Letter N	Bubble Letter O
Bubble Letter P	Bubble Letter Q	Bubble Letter R	Bubble Letter S
Bubble Letter T	Bubble Letter U	Bubble Letter V	Bubble Letter W
Bubble Letter X	Bubble Letter Y	Bubble Letter Z