Re/Upcycling Brown Paper Bags

I confessed a few posts ago that I am a certified TRASH LOVER. I keep toilet paper rolls, old newspapers,   shoe boxes, grocery cartons, paper bags, and all sorts of retaso aside thinking I will find a great use for them in the future. So far, they have been quite useful in most of our arts and crafts activities. Although my husband is not very fond of this, it seems to be growing in him already. Some days, I'd find him absentmindedly folding an empty Pan De Manila paper bag and hand them over to me to keep. Funny hubby.

Of late, the little miss's classmates have had back to back birthday party celebrations in school and at first I worried most about the presents (as I was never the planning kind and more of the cramming kind). To save my face from more wrinkles (I'm all for simple, useful stuff anyways), I decided to just stick to books to giveaway as presents. Adarna, Tahanan and Lampara has a lot of published books already I don't think we will ever run out of gifts to give (there's only 23 in class anyways). When I buy the gifts however, I always try to bring her with me because I prefer that she picks the presents herself rather than me choosing for her. Luckily, the birthday celebrations always fall after a weekend or a holiday so we have plenty of time to scour the bookstores. I limit the choices to 2 though so we won't spend the entire day looking.

We live in an area where plastic bags are not allowed in stores anymore. I always bring reusable bags with me but for small books and stationary supplies, I prefer to have them in brown paper bags. Coming home with one of the books in a paper bag one day, I realized the bags themselves can serve as gift wrappers already. What I did was have the little miss decorate them first by finger painting on them, putting glitter glue or stamping decos on them before putting the final touches of recycled ribbons and the like. It turned out to be one fun activity that the little miss is now always looking forward to doing everytime we come home with a present to give to a classmate. (don't you just love accidental discoveries?)

I wasn't able to take photos of the first 2 we did but here is the most recent brown paper bag wrapper we made:

had to take a photo of this because this was the first time she wrote on the gift tags neatly and correctly.
i just had to spell out the letters but this was written with no assistance from me :) 

It doesn't look fancy. Nothing Martha Stewart-ish. But these days, the only standards I'm really aiming to pass is those set by my little girl. This one passed with a big wide grin to boot. So when the little miss is happy, I am happy (100x more if you ask me).

Productive Weekend - Some Gardening and Arts-N-Crafts Time

It has been a very, very productive weekend for our little miss. I don't know if it's the days she missed in school that has gotten her extraordinarily energetic and receptive of every activity that I suggested for her to do this entire weekend but what I know for sure is that she enjoyed every bit of those activities.

Saturday, a village playmate dropped by early for a playdate session. The little miss was actually insisting to watch TV (because it's a weekend mommy) but since I'm still not fond of TV time I wanted to veer her attention away from it fast. And what immediately came to mind was this recent project that a fellow n@w Mec did with her boys. So I got some scrap manila paper, a used cardboard box and old magazines. With Ate Inday's help we cut out some leaves from the magazine paper and traced the two girls arms on the cardboard to resemble tree trunks and cut that as well.

Here's some photos I took to document the activity:

Then today, Sunday, Ate Inday got her involved in planting some of the vegetable seeds that Lola brought home last night from a trade fair at the World Trade Center in Pasay. I just proved that TV never stands a chance against any outdoor activity at any given day for this little nature-loving girl. Despite being a little neat-freak, she doesn't mind getting her hands dirty as long as it involves some planting/gardening.

I had been keeping these eggshells for future mosaic projects but they're starting to irritate Tibs already (having been sitting on our backyard for long and some of them turning moldy already) so Ate Inday thought might as well make use of them. Our plan is when the seedlings start to sprout, we will just break the eggs to transplant them directly unto the soil.

seeds galore!

making good use of our eggshells

our little patch of garden heaven. hoping to turn this into a patch of various vegetables soon!
(waiting for pechay and tomatoes to sprout from these eggshells soon)

Arts-N-Crafts: Paper Tube Flower Stamps

I got this idea from Pinterest and yesterday when what I thought was going to be something that would take us the afternoon to finish turned out to be something that the little miss could finish in a jiffy, I got the remaining paper tubes that I had out and started making these.

 

Can you see the two stamp patterns?

What We Used:

 

 

• paper tubes
• heavy duty cutter
• paint (poster or watercolor, just as long as their colors would stand out)
• used microwable container covers
• imagination running wild

How We Did It:

 

1. Ask an adult to cut out the other end of the paper tube into even lines. I divided mine into 6-7 portions. 

2. Fold the cut portion and make sure they are of the same size each when pressed down.

3. Trim edges to your desired flower shapes (We had the plain elongated ones and the other one I cut the ends to resemble a triangle or maybe a pentagon)

4. Dip the paper tube stamps unto your paint and stamp on clean paper.

 

 

Tadah! Here's our finished artwork :) 

 

 

Arts-N-Crafts: Choo-Choo Train From Paper Tubes

I couldn't remember where I first saw this project but this has been in my to-do list for sometime now. Yesterday, I finally made the time to do it with Maia. It didn't turn out to be like the picture below but it was good enough for Maia to play with so it didn't really lose it's real purpose :)

Photo Source
The Project Was Supposed To Look like This

Materials We Used:

• paper tube 
• egg tray carton 
• poster paint
• paint brush
• glue
• cotton
• tape
• scissors
• cutter

Kalat starts ... NOW!

How We Did It:

1. Cut the egg tray carton in half (keep the other half for future projects)

2. Assemble your painting materials (I usually dilute the poster paints so I keep clean water on hand)

3. Turn egg tray upside down (bottom facing up) and paint that part with your desired colors. Set aside to dry when the tray is fully coated with paint. Do the same for the paper tube.

4. Ask an adult to cut two half an inch circles from your spare paper tubes. Form into smaller circles about 1.5 inches in diameter

5. Stick the wheels under the two opposite sides of hollowed part of the egg tray carton.

6. Using quick drying glue, stick the painted paper tube unto the egg tray carton. 

7. Stick some cotton on top of the paper tube to represent a smoke stack. 

Tadah! You're done. Enjoy. :)

Here's what our project turned out to be:

Arts-N-Crafts: Family Of Bunnies (Recycling Tissue Paper Tubes)

The day before we left for our Antique trip, Maia and I made a nice, easy project out of tissue paper rolls. I got the idea from (yes!) Pinterest and we just tweaked it to make use of the materials that we had on hand. The general idea was -- really -- to make use of the paper rolls that were already fast collecting dust in Maia's (future) bedroom-turned-storage-room. 

I showed Maia what our project was supposed to look a bit like and since she's had this thing for bunnies and rabbits for a few months now (she's been bugging us to get her a rabbit for a pet), she got really ecstatic about it. In fact, she got too excited she even took out all of the books she had about rabbits. I guess, she wanted to be more inspired so the more surrounded she is by bunny-related items, the better. 

I got about 5 tissue paper rolls from my stash. I surveyed my craft box for other stuff that we can use and eventually came out with this list:

- poster paint/tempera paint/watercolor

- pompoms

- used cardboard (this one was from a package of wooden clippies that Maia and I used for our picture hanger project)

- a pair of scissors

- white glue

- googly eyes (about 5 pairs)

- paint brush

- construction paper/scratch papers

- a few sheets of old newspaper 

- cotton balls

- felt fabric (for the nose)

First I asked the little girl how many bunnies she wanted us to make. She told me she wanted to make a family of bunnies. So I painted 2 brown, and cut about 2/3s of the other remaining two tubes and painted them orange and white. We set those aside to dry for about 10 mins.

Then I cut out ears from the scratch papers (2 pairs of big ones and 2 pairs of smaller ones). Then I also cut our 2 big pink noses and 2 small pink noses (heart-shaped). Maia also requested me to cut the remaining unused tubes into smaller pieces so she can paint them green to use them as grass. We also painted the last tube brown and I cut out a cloud shaped piece from the used cardboard to use as tree leaves. I painted it green and dotted it with yellow (according to Maia all trees have fruits so the yellow part represents the fruit). 

I'll just let the pictures speak after this. When we got back this afternoon, the entire thing is still intact so the little girl still intends to play with her bunny family tomorrow. 

lined the floor with used newspapers because i know it's going to get a little messy

majority of the materials we used

down on her knees. hard at work????

tadah! finished product :))

see we even made carrots for them to enjoy. and maia cut out these cardboards and stuck them on the paper herself.
they are apparently grass for the bunnies to roll and sleep on.