Hearts & Flowers Home Made Gift

Homemade gifts are so special and personal, plus let’s be honest what with Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, Easter, Birthdays, Anniversaries, Christmas there’s only so many shop bought gifts you can give or receive. For me you really cannot go wrong with hearts and flowers. The idea for sand art bottle vases I got from a gift from my second oldest son one Mother’s day.

Sand-Art bottle Vases are really a straight-forward activity and allow for the children to be creative too. We simply took some glass bottles (these were from a certain orange brand that we drank over the Christmas period) and soaked off the labels. We used these because I thought the size was good for my younger children. For a bigger vase simply use a bigger bottle – and what an excuse to drink wine! It does not matter the colour of the bottle if you are completely covering it in sand, otherwise you may want to consider what effect the colour will have on your design, or whether you want to be able to see through it.

First we simply drew a heart shape in glue on a see-through glass bottle and then stuck sand to it. Once the sand was dry we carefully painted the heart red. See I told you it was simple. We filled our bottle with water and used it as a vase for flowers, but it could also be filled with sweets as a gift.

Next the boys wanted to cover their whole bottles in sand. Incidentally the sand we used was just out of our play sand pit, which I just put on a tray normally used for party food. We covered the bottles in PVA glue and rolled them in the sand backwards and forwards. If we noticed any small areas not covered properly we added more glue and gently tapped some more sand into it. We left the bottles to dry and then repeated the process.

Again we left them to dry, then the boys were left to paint them as they would like (again with just normal craft paint).

We took a lollipop stick and wrapped around it some green tape leftover from Christmas. This was really good for helping develop those fine motor skills.

We made a flower head (from the paper often placed inside shoe boxes) – we folded the paper like a concertina, securely attached it in the middle and then fanned it out. We attached it to the lollipop stick with more of the green tape. We then placed our flower in our vase.

Alternatively you can make a Rose from Egg cartons

Other heart craft ideas are:

Why not get some Heart shaped wall art stickers.

Or make a heart shaped stuff cushion.

Or why not use some cutters to give a romantic touch to cheese on toast

Over on RedTedArt I wrote about making a Personalised Heart made with wire and beads.

For other great ideas go visit Domesticgoddesque for this months #Getyourcrafton Linky