Arts and Crafts for Christmas in July

Instead of waiting until December, when the idea of making gifts for friends and relatives competes for time, often unsuccessfully, with holiday recitals, shopping for presents, cookie baking, and parties, now is the time when kids on vacation are looking for things to do. Besides, if a project is messy, this is the season when it can be done outside. Last weekend, for example, my granddaughter and I went to a neighbor's home to do some tie dying in their driveway.

Potato Prints

Potato printing is one project that can produce holiday wrapping paper, gift tags, and cards. When my daughter was only three, I helped her use a big potato, a star cookie cutter, and yellow poster paint in July to turn white tissue paper and blue construction paper into all the items we needed to wrap gifts in December.

     Begin by cutting a potato in half. If you are going to use a cookie cutter for a design, the potato has to be big enough for the cookie cutter to fit on the potato's cross-section. Original designs can be made to fit on any sized potato. For example, you can cut a fir tree out of cardboard to any size. Place it on the exposed half of the potato and cut around it with a knife. A cookie cutter can just be pressed into the potato to make a design.

     The purpose of printing is to be able to repeat a design. Relief-printing uses the raised part of the design, while the area around the design remains white. Consequently, it usually is necessary for an adult to cut away all the potato that is next to the design. Put some paint in a saucer or dish. Carefully dip just the raised part of the potato design into the paint. Stamp it on white paper or another light color. You also can use white paint to create a potato print that will show up on dark paper.

     Hobby stores often sell linoleum blocks, knives, and folded card stock that older children can use to make more intricate designs for holiday cards. Again, the area around the design is removed. Instead of dipping the block into paint or ink, a roller applies paint/ink to the raised design. The card is placed on top of the painted/inked surface and the back of the card is rubbed to transfer the design.

     Kids who learn how to make and use prints, or a master plate known as a matrix, are following a long tradition of those in China, Tibet, and India who first printed multiple copies of Buddhist texts.

Family Tree Scrapbooks

Any relative would appreciate a scrapbook that presented a well-researched, attractive family tree. Begin by collecting pictures of relatives and finding ancestry information from genealogy websites. You might to go to ancestry.com for a free trial to see how much you can discover about your family's background. Once you identify the countries from which relatives emigrated and where relatives live now, you can combine flags, maps, ethnic clothes, and pictures of cities and geographical areas (mountains, rivers, lakes) with photos of relatives and the information learned about births, marriages, children, military service, etc. (The earlier blog posts, "Picture the World," "You Are Here," and "A Salute to Flags," may give you some additional ideas of what to include in a Family Tree Scrapbook.)