Creative Afternoon

Every year the boys & I look forward to a card swap hosted by Amber at Kids Craft Weekly. It's rather simple to participate. Each November she hosts a sign up page. Once you sign up the computer does its magic and you are matched with nine other participants (ten total including yourself). Then the kiddos create Christmas cards and send them out to each of participating families. We always send one to Amber as well.

Last year and this year we started splitting up the creating amongst the boys. B14 & N9 made four cards each and J6 (with some help from me) made three cards. That gives us 11 cards - just right.

This afternoon we sat down and put our creative juices to work. Here is what B14 came up with. I love the sentiment he created inside each one.

He used a Christmas tree stamp I have to punch a negative image on the front of the card. Then he back it with green paper. He used markers to color the stumps and outline the stars as well as add ornaments to the tree. Simple but cute.

Do you see why I love this?

Here is what N9 created. 

We had planned to do just the snowflakes (another negative stamp) and add the blue paper. He wanted to do more. 

And on the inside he added a little pop-up "hi." He told me he learned this from lapbooking. Loved that!

Last we have J6. I came up with the design but he helped put them all together.

Essentially we just paper-pieced a snowman together - my scrapbooking background coming in to play. I used my little Xyron to make them into stickers. The boys thought this was beyond cool! The snowflakes are the positive images from the cards N9 made.

I love that the boys did all of these on their own. They each signed the cards. I will be putting together a short note to go inside each card that tells about us and these will get mailed out shortly. We have three of them heading off to Australia! In years past we had more countries we sent to, but this year we only have Australia (Amber is from there) and the rest are in the USA.

We'll be tracking the ones sent to us on a map. A little geography study thrown in to all the fun crafting.