Rediscovering a love of craft time

What have you rediscovered through lockdown? For us, it’s been our love of crafting. Ever since the grils were little, I’ve loved to craft with them working alongside me. There was a time when we would spend all day long crafting, our table would forever be strewn with in-progress projects, there would be glitter everywhere and paint splatters on the table.

Somewhere along the way, the time we had for rafting diminished. I had another baby, started working more and more, the girls began to have their own interests more and more as they grew older, I became a single parent and so I had to work even more, then had another baby… Sometimes you just get caught up in life and can’t ee the woods for the trees.

Then lockdown hit and we suddenly had so much time on our hands. Time to fill with whatever we liked. The slower pace of life gave me a chance to craft again, I dug out the canvases and the paints, I experimented and painted during nap times. The best way to encourage your kiddos to be creative is to be creative yourself.

Seeing me happy painting, not worrying about the end results but just enjoying the process unlocked something in my kiddos. They started joining me at the table. They started their own projects, dug out the clay, the paints, pens and paper, Baya discovered a love of quilling. We spent many happy hours with music blaring out, just creating.

It’s been a fantastic way to reconnect as a family, but also for each of us to reconnect with our own creativity. I’m a big believer in creative pursuits being a healer, helping us to work through emotions, to release negative energies, to soothe our anxieties and to ease our worries.

Whether you think of yourself as a creative person or not, whether you have painted twenty pictures or non, creative time is so rewarding. As a Mama, it is something that I love doing with my kiddos, and lockdown gave me the time to remember just how, much we all love creating.

One thing that I love about having kids who enjoy crafting, is that there is always someone keen to make the things we need. Whether it is birthday cards for their friends, a poster showing their chores, a sign to tell their siblings to keep out of their room{!}… I love giving homemade cards, family especially love getting little bits of the kiddos artwork to treasure.

Times have changed so much since my girls were little, then we checked out books from the library when we wanted to learn new crafts, now we can just hop online. They’ll often be found browsing Pinterest for ideas of what t omake, or making use of online sites for craft resources.

One site that we have used time and time again is Design Bundles. It is such an amazing site full of design resources, you’ll spend hours browsing and find everything you need. Whether you are looking for digital papers, colouring sheets, clipart, paper cutting templates or embroidery designs – you will find it here.

My girls have found it to be a really useful site, they often make use of it for finding clipart for cards they are making or projects that they are working on for homeschool activities.

The big two are about to embark on a paper cutting project, with so many templates to choose from the hardest part will be picking which one they are going to attempt first of all! Papercutting really interests us – it looks so intricate and detailed, these templates seem like a fantastic introduction for us to learn the skills without having to create our own designs from scratch.

I’m hoping that we can find a way to incorporate frequent craft times once life gets back to normal, while our daily craft sessions may not always be possible, I definitely want to make it a part of our normal weeks. Factoring in some quiet home time each week, when we have nowhere that we have to be so we can spend a morning just crafting will be an essential as life gets busier.

Even Oren has enjoyed craft time – he had a blast with a paintbrush and some purple paint – even if my plan to make some handprint thank you’s didn’t quite work out, and he loves drawing with felt pens!

Have you been gettign crafty through lockdown? What is your favorutie kind of carft to do/