Friday Craft Corner

I like to have my kids make gifts for mothers’ day for their grandmothers and their great grandmother. It is fun for the kids and (I think) more meaningful for the grandma’s and great grandma’s. So this year I was looking around online for an idea. I wanted my kids to plant flowers. But more than that I want them to make or decorate the containers that the flowers will go into. After some searching I found a few ideas that I combined into one (frugal) idea.
I know it is early to get started, but if you are growing seeds and want the gift to have an actual plant then now is the time to get started!

To start I bought impatient seeds. The packet says they do well indoors as well as outdoors. Hopefully this is true! If not, at least the pot will be re-usable. I was going to buy terra cotta planters but they are breakable. And my kids are VERY good at breaking things. So we settled on some plastic containers that I found at Target for 99 cents.

All the ideas I found online suggested using acrylic paints. Those stain. Again, my kids are VERY good at staining things. So instead I came up with a compromise. We will paint with poster paints and then I alone will spray the containers with a clear acrylic, water proof coating that adheres to plastic. After looking at a few sprays I even found one that is UV protective at Michaels. That cost $6.99.

So far I have spent less than $12 dollars on the gifts. All that is left to buy is the soil which I can pick up for about $3 (and use the remainder for starting my garden!). So the total for the gifts for three wonderful women is less than $13. Not bad!

I thought about having the kids go to town with painting the pots. And while I am sure they would be masterpieces I wanted to do something a little simpler. So instead I decided to have them make handprint tulips on each pot. Two handprints per kid, and two kids= four tulips on each pot. I allowed Madeline to choose the colors for each flower pot for her hands. Then after allowing the handprints to dry I went back with green paint and added in leaves and stems. With a sharpie marker I wrote the child’s initials under each handprint and around the rim I wrote Happy Mother’s Day and the year. Jon the sprayed them with the acrylic gloss sealer to make them waterproof.

On the second day we added soil and seeds. We will water the plants and hopefully have some beautiful plants to give away on Mothers’ Day next month. My backup plan if the flowers do not grow is to go out and buy some flowers and replant them. Hopefully I won’t have to do it, but it could happen! I also plan to tie a pretty ribbon around each pot.

Come back and visit before mother’s day to see how our plants turned out!