Hand Print Christmas Trees

Christmas is always such a busy time for crafts in our home. One of the kids' favorite holiday crafts is making painted hand print pictures. In the past they've made Santa hand prints and reindeer hand prints. This year they wanted to make something different so we decided to go for Christmas tree hand prints.

Making festive hand print pictures may be fun but it can also be pretty messy work, especially when there are toddlers involved. Trust me, there was about as much paint on Mathilde's t-shirt when we were done as there was on her actual hand print Christmas tree! Luckily we have method 4x concentrated laundry detergent to keep everything nice and clean once we're finished with all that messy paint.

Christmas Handprints

Ok, so this one is a little delayed. Let's just call it inspiration for next Christmas!

One of the recurring activities in our advent calendar this year was making Christmas crafts. One of the first crafts that we made back in early December was Christmas themed hand prints.

As you've probably noticed, we're quite fond of making hand print creations. We've made hand print flags for 4th of July and turkeys, pilgrims and native Americans for Thanksgiving. This time around we made Santa and his reindeer.

Here's a look at how we made them...

For Santa, I painted the base of the girls hands and their thumbs red for Santa's hat. I painted their fingers white for his beard and added a little more white on the sides on their hands and along the edge of the red. This left a section in the middle of their palms which I painted a flesh colour for Santa's face.

Ava's Santa hand ready to print

Thanksgiving Handprints

Thanksgiving is almost here again. In fact, Ava is already off school for the holiday.

We've been working on a few Thanksgiving crafts to decorate our apartment. Last year we made hand print turkeys and they were such a big hit with the kids. You can see them here. Both Ava and Lola were pretty keen to make hand print turkeys again. This year we decided to mix things up a little and rather than making just hand print turkeys we went for a whole Thanksgiving theme and made hand print pilgrims and hand print Native Americans as well.

Thanksgiving handprints on our front door

Hand Print Flags for 4th of July

Another 4th of July craft today...

Back in November the girls and I made hand print turkeys and we've been eager to make something similar ever since. Searching through Pinterest for 4th of July craft ideas I came across just the thing: hand print American flags!

Ava's hand print flag

Hand print flags

These flags were really simple and lots of fun to make. Anything that involves covering your hands with paint is always fun!

Turkey Hand Prints for Thanksgiving

In just one week's time it will be Thanksgiving. It feels like only yesterday we were celebrating our very first Thanksgiving here in America. It sounds like such a cliché, but the time really has just flown by. 

Ava is super excited about Thanksgiving - especially the turkey part of the holiday. She can't wait to eat turkey, she wants to dress as a turkey and she's eager to create turkey crafts. Dressing as a turkey may be a little odd but making turkey crafts is right up our alley.

A little search on Pinterest provided a lot of inspiration for turkey themed activities. I've got a few turkey projects planned for the girls but first up here's the messiest (and therefore the most fun!) of the lot: turkey hand prints.

Hand print turkey

This is a really simple project and the kids had a lot of fun with it.