Baby In the Manger

We had a very fun family event at church last Friday night. It was planned to kick off our Advent season. We were about a  week early but the way Thanksgiving hit we had to schedule this way and it was really perfect. Everyone was relaxed and not rushed because we weren't in the busy December season where everyone has 2 or 3 events every weekend night.
The event was called "Starry Night" and we served dinner so we needed centerpieces to go with the theme for each table and the budget was small - really small. Like $0.00 :)
So I scrounged around at home and this is what I came up with.
I had some large wooden balls and large jumbo craft sticks. I painted cute little faces on the balls and glued them to one end of the craft stick (which I broke in half)

 

 

Then I tore long strips of white sheeting that I had on hand.
 The strips were about an inch wide and about 30 inches long. 

I put a dab of hot glue on the top of the poor baby's head and glued the strip of fabric down. Then I just started wrapping the baby's head and body 
until it looked like a little baby all "swaddled" up!

 

And there you have the cutest little baby all wrapped up!

I went out in the yard and grabbed some 6 inch clay pots I had stacked up. I soaked them in Clorox water in the sink and washed them out very well. They were going on tables where we would eat so I didn't want some creature to come crawling out :)
I stuffed a couple of plastic Publix bags in the pots after they were dry.

Then I snipped a bundle of raffia into strips and
 filled my clay pot (manger) with the raffia (hay.)

Then I printed the verse that was our theme for the event onto some gold chevron scrapbook paper. I punched two holes and threaded it onto a skewer. This made a cute banner that I stuck in the pot and secured with a dab of hot glue.

 I glued the baby in the manger and 
then I repeated it until all the centerpieces were finished. 

 

 
I tied some scraps of ribbon on each skewer and when we got them placed on the tables I tied a star shaped gold helium balloon to each skewer. I didn't  take a picture of all of them on the tables but it was the perfect centerpiece - the baby in a manger was nice and low and then the bobbing gold star balloon was up high and out of the way of conversation around the tables. They were festive, the children loved them, they were perfect for our theme and I didn't have to buy a single thing other than the gold star balloons at the Dollar Tree!

And because the theme for our Advent Kick-Off was appropriately stars, we had a huge inflatable planetarium in our gym. This thing was awesome and can seat 60 people inside. Our families loved it - the tickets were $5.00 and 
benefited our Youth International Mission Trip 2014.

It was a fun and exciting Starry Night!

What Does The Fox (Actually) Say?

Had a fun little Art camp with my favorite 4 and 5 year olds a couple of weeks ago. The lesson was about drawing from verbal instruction using basic shapes and a limited palette.
We drew the currently trendy Fox.


We drew on rectangles of sandpaper which give a cool texture when you use crayons.

They all looked great and a little bit different from one another. We used a black crayon to draw our outlines - no going back. We "fixed' our drawing (if we felt we made a mistake) and made it work without starting over. Creative problem solving.

Just using black and white crayons plus 2 colors for the whole artwork.

 

Just a little bit of white crayon starts to add personality to Mr. Fox.
( Every time I write or say Fox it makes me think of the movie "You've Got Mail.")

After all the black and white was drawn and colored in we used an orange crayon to color Mr. Fox.

He's cute and doesn't it seem like more colors are involved than simply three??
In the end we added a fourth color and made the grass green.

 

Then we punched holes on each side and threaded a twig from the yard through as a cute woodsy hanger.
We used twine, too.

I love this fat, round guy!

 

They were very proud of their fabulous Fall Fox pictures and loved the rough sandpaper as the background.
We ready a couple of great books about foxes even though our fox did not tell the ox he had rocks in his socks :)