Fabienne remembers

 # 16 Crafty Gifts Mother's Day gift making was a lot easier to do. We would make flower pen  bouquets and put  them in a cup or glass holder.  The flower was made from tissue paper, twisted and held  on to the pen with green sticky craft tape. Another project we made , was candles.  One  candle I like to make was the cheese with a little plastic mouse in it.  We used old broken crayons to tint the color of the melting wax in an old saucepan. Using an empty clean milk carton  cut down to one third it's size, we put a small hole in the bottom with scissors, threaded a wick through it and taped it to the bottom of the carton. We made the wick stick straight up by tying the wick to a pencil and balanced it horizontally on the open carton. Next we filled the carton with various sizes of ice and poured the warm wax over the ice. The ice melted, the wax hardened and the carton was removed from the candle. The kids put the mouse inside one of the ho...

 # 15   Messy Craft Gifts I have always loved crafts. I enjoy doodling- abstract, kinda weird stuff, knitting, jewelry making, clay works, painting (bad at it), pretty much any 3-D kind of  objects out of any  materials. In the years , I taught elementary, my classes did a lot of arts and crafts for various themes and  seasons. We made gifts for  Father's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas gifts, Valentines' , Thanksgiving, and Hallowe'en.  Often times, our projects were very messy but we always  cleaned up before anyone discovered t he mess.  Sadly, not always... A Father's Day gift we would make was paper weights. We would take marbles of all sizes and crack them with a hammer (not break them).  Then we put them in large empty  plastic  prescription containers, put them on tin cookie sheets and bake them in the oven. Plastic burning is not pleasant, best to do after lunch.  They always melted into odd shapes and Dads alwa...