"Stained Glass" Votive Holder

These votive candle holders are really easy and fun to make and really cheap, too. I like cheap. Plus, they can be as simple or as intense as you want to design them. With a 4 year old and a 2 year old we went simple. Just torn up scraps of tissue paper mod podged on. We even made our own mod podge. That too is cheap and easy. Nice.


What You Need:

• one Recipe Mod Podge (recipe at the end)
• one small, cleanjar (We used artichoke heart jars that are 6.5 oz)
• small (like 1-2"sq) torn pieces of tissue papers in various colors

Here's What You Do:

• Brush a bit of the mod podge onto the outside of the jar then put a piece of tissue on it. Smooth out the tissue with more mod podge. Thin layers is best.
  
• Do this all around.
• Let dry.
• Voila!
• Now put a votive candle or tea light in it and put it on display or gift.

***

Mod Podge Recipe:

• 1/4 cup Elmer's Glue
• 1/4 water

Stir together in jar until well mixed. For what it's worth, we also used an artichoke heart jar to mix and keep our mod podge in.

"Stained Glass" Leaves

It's fall! The season for beautiful colors and leaf piles for jumping, apples and pumpkins and that fresh cool air that is just perfect for sleep. This week, the kids and I made pretty nifty (if I do say so myself) "stained glass" leaves for the windows out of some construction paper and tissue paper. Tissue paper is really pretty awesome when you shine some light through it and it's cheap and easy to work with. Plus, I don't know about you, but I always seems to have some kicking around.

What You Need:

• Tissue Paper in fall colors- red, yellow, orange, etc.
• a piece of black construction paper (though it really could be whatever color, the black just looks nice!)
• scissors
• glue, in paste or stick form, whatever.

What You Do:
Print up the leaf template below and cut out the leaf shape you want. Cut strips of tissue paper in varying widths (half an inch to an inch) and in varying lengths that will span the leaf templates. (Really they don't have to be perfect and this is a great time for little hands to practice cutting). You just need enough tissue to span the leaf.

Fold the black piece of paper in half and trace the leaf template onto the paper with pencil. Then cut out the shape through BOTH layers of black . (OK, here you need precision. So you do this while your octopus cuts tissue). Now if the pencil marks bug you (as they do me!) unfold the paper and refold it so the pencil lines are on the inside. :-)

Open the paper back up. Now you have two cut out mirror-image leaves. glue around the right leaf on the black paper. Now spanning the leaf, stick on the tissue strips any which way you feel like it, layer it up, don't, whatever, it all looks great!

Glue around the other, tissue-less, left leaf, getting the edges too.

Now sandwich that piece of black paper back together so the leaves match up, and Voila! Trim any tissue that might have come out the sides and hang it up in a sunny window.

Perty!

The Printable:

Super Tissue

Apparently, you can do some pretty super things with a mere piece of tissue paper:

Pot of Gold Rainbow

We go to a lot of birthday parties and use a lot of gift bags. This means we also have a lot of tissue paper. I happened to check and we had all the colors for a rainbow. My kid loves rainbows and tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day so I could not resist. We made a Rainbow with a Pot of Gold at the end. It was definitely a parent-assisted endeavor with all the cutting involved but there was plenty for little fingers to do- glue, glue, glue and even some fun stretching and crumpling which my toddler was more than happy to assist my preschooler in.

What You Need:

tissue paper in rainbow colors, cut into long strips 1" wide.
white cardstock
cotton balls
string, cut about double the length of the tissue strips
gluestick
tape
scissors
hole punch



What You Do:

Cut your cloud out of the white cardstock. Ours was the full 8.5 inches wide so all 7 strips of color could sit nicely in a row along it. Take your glue stick and glue a line along the back of your cloud. Put the ends of the tissue strips on this line, one by one, right along. Do it backwards- purple (or "violent" as my kid calls it) to red so when you turn it over it's in the right order (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.). Pat, pat, pat.

Turn it back over. Cover the front of the cloud with more glue and stick cotton balls all over it, stretching them out a little to make them more, I don't know, wispy and cloud-like. Voila, rainbow and cloud. You can stop here, or you can add your pot of gold:

We folded a scrap of cardstock in half and cut out a pot shape, then colored one side of each black. Then we crumpled up orange tissue paper and stuck it on the blank back of one along with one end of the string. Then we glued the other side of the pot on top of that for a tissue sandwich, having both black sides facing out.

Hole punch the top of your cloud. String the other end of the string through that, leaving enough to tie a loop for hanging. Knot it and tie that loop.

Hang it up in a window.