We made pretty Asian style hand fans for the Lunar New Year a few months back. They were such a big hit and so much fun to make that we wanted to make more for the spring and summer. I love these fans. They are simple to make and the kids will enjoy decorating them with their own designs.
While everyone just finished welcoming in the New Year, my family and I are awaiting another New Year’s celebration. January 28th is the Chinese Lunar New Year and for my Vietnamese family it is Tết .
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I have been talking to my daughter about the upcoming holiday, so over the weekend, we made some crafts to help ring in the New Year. I can remember being a little girl and loving my mother’s beautiful hand fans. I thought that making some of our own would be a fun project that my 4 year old would enjoy.
My daughter loves to trace her hand prints and then cut them out. She will cut them out and draw little pictures on them and then use a hole punch to poke holes in them and string them up with yarn.
It seems as if the holidays fly by quicker & quicker each year. Next week is Christmas & then the following week we will be ringing in the new year. Not long after we clean up our New Year’s confetti, we will be celebrating another birthday for our little girl. She turns 4 in a few weeks & I cannot believe how quickly she has grown.
I would love to be able to keep her small forever. I know that this will not happen, but I can at least preserve some of her tiny cuteness while I still can. This is why I love hand & footprint crafts. It is fun to compare each new print with older ones just to see how much she has grown.
With 2016 fast approaching, I wanted to make a holiday keepsake to kick off the new year.
New Year’s Hand Print Craft
This was a simple and fun project.
Trace your child’s hand or have them trace their own.
Cut out a few different colored hands using the tracing.
Fan the hands out & glue them together. Cut out a handle for your hand clapper & glue underneath the hands.
Cut out confetti & streamers or let your child if they are able to use scissors. We have been working on our cutting skills a lot lately, so Mai couldn’t wait to help me cut the confetti.
Glue the confetti & streamers into place.
Don’t forget to label your clappers with your child’s name & the date.
Wishing you all the best for the New Year.
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A funny thing happened the other day. A group of my friends were talking about the winter & things to do with our kids. We began talking about cutting paper snowflakes. I had said that it had been so long since I had last made one that I was not quite sure if I even remembered how to. This conversation sparked us to all attempt to make snowflakes with some funny results. We were all out of practice & went through sheet after sheet of paper until we finally figured it out. This crafting adventure with the grown ups led to a couple of fun snowflake crafts at home.
I have been talking a lot about our move lately and the construction still going on at our new house. This has been the main focus of our life lately & it has our lives sort of in limbo. We have had most of our things packed for months & now with the colder weather here, I have found that most of our winter clothing is buried in storage. I have been searching for my daughters gloves, mittens, hats & scarves, but realized that they were not going to be found until we unpacked. I bought my daughter new winter gear & then I misplaced it again somewhere in the suitcases that we have been living out of. The loss of the winter gear had me & my daughter joking about the 3 little kittens that lost their mittens.
My daughter loves the movie ‘Inside Out’. She is particularly fond of Joy. Joy is her favorite character. She pretends to be her all of the time. Yesterday, she was asked what her name is. She told the person that her name was Joy. I just laughed. She gets so into character, that she even refuses to wear shoes because Joy does not wear shoes. I promised my little Joy that we would make an ‘Inside Out’ craft. We decided to make a hand print craft. I wanted to make an emotion character on each of Mai’s fingers & Riley on her palm.
We painted her palm in flesh tone. I painted each of her fingers in the character’s colors. For Anger, we painted the thumb in white & the tip in red. We painted the pointer finger light green & then the tip flesh toned for Joy. The middle finger was purple with a light purple tip for Fear. Disgust was green with a light green tip on her ring finger. Sadness finished off the cast of characters on the pinky. She was a very light blue with a slightly darker blue on the tip. We pressed it onto a piece of paper & let it dry.
I painted the hair on each character.
I painted in the eyes & mouths on each & added in the clothing accessories.
On the palm, I painted in the whites of the eyes & added the hair for Riley with magic marker & crayons.
I finished of our craft by adding the rest of Riley’s facial features.
Mai thought this was hilarious & wanted to make one of her own too.
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When you have a toddler, you really have to keep an eye on them at all times. Unfortunately, this is impossible. You turn your back for just one second & boom. It is inevitable.
I got a call from my daycare provider that my daughter hurt her arm. Mai told me that she was jumping on her mat during quiet time and fell and bent her arm. Yes, my child is the one who is jumping during quiet time instead of napping. We took her to the hospital & she needed to have x-rays to make sure that there was not a break. There were no breaks, but she did end up having a nasty sprain & was in a lot of pain for the last couple of days. She is doing much better today & back to her old playful self. We have been doing a lot of one handed playing today & we also did a quick craft inspired by her hospital visit.
For this craft we painted her hand & lower arm in gray.
We pressed it onto a piece of black construction paper & let it dry.
With a white piece of chalk, we drew in our little bones.
“Ewwww, that looks like a skeleton, mama.” Yes, it does. Hopefully we will not have to look at another x-ray for a long time.
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