Father's Day Craft

I bought a handprint kit for the kids to make gifts for Father's Day.   The kit came with individual packages of clay, plastic molds and letter stamps.  The Party Pack has enough to make 10 handprint plaques.  The kids have three grandfathers plus Daddy, so I thought 10 should be enough for us to get some decent handprints.

I followed the instructions on kneading the clay and putting it in the plastic molds.  This would have been too hard for the kids since I found it tricky getting it to the edges and smoothing it out.    The clay was not very soft and when the kids went to make their handprints, they were unable to push down hard enough, even with my help, to make a noticable handprint.  So, we had to come up with a Plan B.

I had seen a post about clay mosaics at Shannon's Tot School and had wanted to try it for a while so I figured this was the perfect time (since I had a big lump of clay just drying out on my counter).  I used a heart and a star cookie cutter and let the kids fill them in with beads and stick-on gems. Vicki insisted on pulling the paper backing off the gems even though it wasn't necessary when squishing them into clay.

They came out pretty cute but I wasn't sure what to do with them next.  I decided to flatten out another package of clay into a plaque and put our mosaics on it.   I also used the stamps to write #1 Grandpa on the plaque.

The kids had fun doing this but it was a lot of work (for me) putting it together, it's very heavy and probably fairly delicate so I decided to do something a little different for the other two grandpas (both of whom go by Pop-Pop).

I laid the clay out in the molds, wrote "#1 Pop-Pop" and "Best Pop-Pop" on them, made a slight impression of the heart and star cookie cutters and gave them to the kids with more beads and gems, with instructions to not put too many over the words.  Notice this time the beads and gems are in a bowl, not just scattered on the table.  I learned something from our first attempt.

The kids had a lot of fun with this project.  It was easy enough for Vicki to do and I think the results were pretty cute.

After we cleaned up our clay and left them to dry (it's been two days and they're still not completely hard) we made cards.  As usual, Vicki had to do some body art as well.