Friday, June 20, 2014

Craft Corner: When Life Gives You a Pile of Ribbons...

One of the things I do to supplement my income is babysitting. I love it! I get paid to play with Legos, make food, and then read books after the kids are asleep. Seriously, I sometimes feel like I'm swindling the parents, but they insist on paying me. Ok, SUCKAHS!  But sometimes, babysitting requires a bit of creativity. Like today, when I walked into the home of one of my regular afternoon babysitting homes, we'll call him AJ. The last time I'd mentioned willingness to do crafts with the mom after a successful run of homemade Play-Dough. I entered the home and witnessed this before me:


Yes, that is a pile of ribbons and pipe cleaners. Mom said that she had emptied her entire craft drawer and tells me that she was at a yard sale and got all this in a box for 25 cents! Yeah, it was a steal, but I had to find something to do with it.  OK, great, see ya mom!  I chatted with AJ for a bit, picking through the vomitous pile of red, white, and blue, trying to decide what to do. Ok, EVERYTHING is red, white, and blue here... and it's mid June, FOURTH OF JULY!

Great, OK, we're doing a Fourth of July theme. Still no base for a craft.  Then it hit me.  There are pipe cleaners, which will make an excellent base for a small, simple wreath. You've seen those wreaths made solely of ribbons on Pinterest, right?  So I took two pipe cleaners and put them together in a circle.  Then we used little green wire stuff to make ribbons stay on as we wrapped them around the pipe cleaner to make a base. We tied ribbons on, used shiny silver pipe cleaners to look like 'fireworks', and added a big bow at the bottom.

Mine ended up looking like this:


Yep, I'm 24 and I'm proud of that!  The kids looked way better... In the end, this literally could be a super cheap and fun craft to do with your kids, or kids you're babysitting. Sometimes the best crafts come from a chaotic mess and a need for structure.  What do you think?  What was your best "in a bind, need to do something now" craft or activity with kids?  (Yeah, I need your help here, I'm a babysitter!)

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