From Crayons to Quilts

With us in lockdown FOREVER it seems, I have only been able to visit my son and his family outside, masked and 6 feet away or via FaceTime. They have a 2 month old that I have not been able to hug yet.. sigh!

I have started a series of craft projects to share with my 3 year old granddaughter, which we mostly do online. This has been a fun adventure seeking out age-appropriate things that she might be interested in. What kinds of things have we done?

We did a few Christmas related projects for their tree: made brightly coloured paper chains to hang, we made candy canes by putting beads on pipe cleaners, also for their tree. We made small wreaths by gluing pompoms onto green felt circles.

We did some fingerprint painting, turning fingerprints into bugs, people, etc. I printed off a photo of the family onto a magnetic sheet, and cut it into jigsaw puzzle shapes (with another copy of the photo as a cheat sheet!). And since she has shown so much interest in learning to read I made a small “book” with index cards and rings to hold them together. I wrote some simple words on each page, and she used sticky foam alphabet letters to copy those words. She especially liked this one!

We’ve done a few outdoor activities too: I dyed ice cubes with food colouring to use as building blocks outside (flop!), and created an 4 foot high outdoor slide from snow. It started to melt away the next day, but we had a lot of fun making it and trying it out.

My favourite so far, though, has to be the colouring book I made. I went through my photos of the family, used an app on my iPad to trace simple outlines, printed them off, and stapled them into a book. And being a quilter, I kept looking at those images and decided I NEEDED to make a quilt or two from them.

The middle photo is called Mom’s Boots, and brings back fond memories. It is the one I have turned into a small wallhanging. The photo on the far right means a lot to me- it was taken at the final Quilts at the Creek in 2019, and will become a quilt one day.

Hopefully we will be able to meet up close and personal soon..before I run out of ideas!!