Christmas Planning In July – Home Made Works Of Art

SPOILER ALERT – To my family and to the children’s “special” friends, please do not read on as you may see your Christmas Gift for this year!

Last week I showed the handmade books that I have set aside for Christmas Gifts this year. Today is a very simple activity which can be done with the children and be given to those special people in the children’s lives. Ours will be going to godparents, nanas and aunties.

If you are anything like me and find it difficult to part with the beautiful creations that your children come home with, then you will plenty of material to use for this activity.

To make today’s gift you will need:

- Art work from your child.

- A frame

- Guillotine (or scissors if you can cut straight!)

(for these ones, I actually chose to fold the edges)

As with all these gifts, I am trying to make them high on the thought and love factor and low on the cost factor. The art work coming home from kinder and school is priceless, but already paid for by fees!

For the frames though, to keep costs and consumption low, I hunted through a few op shops (thrift stores), to find old frames. I was looking for ones that had removable backs so I could insert the children’s art work. I managed to pick up two different types of frames, at two different stores.

These ones cost $3.75 each, which I thought was pretty good, and other than being a little dusty and finger marked they were in good condition. The first job was to clean up the frames and remove the price written in texta.

I then let each child search through their art collection (which are very much in need of organisation) and choose what pieces that they would like to frame for their special person. In the end we all agreed on the collages they made during January.

The children made these at an Art Session after seeing the Yvonne Audette exhibition. We will probably keep them as a set to give to someone!

We then decided that to keep the edges nice and not risk scrunching the tissue paper, that we would fold the edges of the collages. I then let the children place them into the frame.

The children felt incredibly proud of their work being framed and saved for a Christmas gift and I think they have come up beautifully.

I have entered the costs into my Christmas Budget Spreadsheet (see this post on Christmas Planning for more info) and am pretty happy with the small collection of home made gifts that I am building up so far.

Christmas Presents Excel Tracking Spreadsheet .

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