Shoebox Craft Day

There are so many great things that you can make to go in your shoeboxes. I've been posting some ideas on here lately. Saturday we had a shoebox craft day at our church to make things to go in our shoeboxes when we have our packing party in the fall. We had around 20 people, including some great kids, come and help out. You really don't have to have a lot of crafty people, just people who can follow directions!
I spent a few hours a day for 3-4 days getting the crafts together and organized so that everyone that came could just get to work without lots of instructions. Yes, it took a little of my time to get it all organized but then we were able to get so much more done than I would have been able to do by myself! We've got a good start for our shoeboxes.

I had the felt dolls, hair, shoes and clothes all cut out using my Big Shot and dies that I've had for my scrapbooking for years. I had the empty cd cases ready and a picture of the finished product to be put in the front of each case. The people putting them together wrote a scripture or "Jesus love you" on the back of the pictures. I asked them to put in one doll body, 2 types of hair and at least 6 pieces of clothing. They got over 70 put together. That means 70 little girls will have "paper" dolls to play with.

Making sewing cards for little ones was really easy. I started with patterns and rectangles of foam but then I found some foam shaped chickens and rabbits on sale after Easter. The ladies punched holes in each shape and cut lengths of yarn. We will put 2 or 3 in each shoebox.

Making washer necklaces was a bit more time consuming than we had thought that it would be but it still worked our well. Drying was the time consuming part. We painted the inside and outside of the washer and one side with cheap nail polish that I had gotten at Dollar Tree. It took a while to dry but as it was drying, we could paint more. When dried we flipped them over and painted the other side. We did at least 2 coats of polish on each washer. I had found some polish pens at Dollar Tree also and those made decorating the washers easy. When the washers were ready, we looped about 24" of ribbon through the washer and tied a knot in the end.

We now have a whole fleet of clothespin airplanes to delight many little boys. These are super easy to make. Just be careful with the hot glue gun! 

Spinner tops is something that we did last year too. We kept the hot glue guns on one table and had the top supplies at a nearby table. When they had everything together, the kids just turned to the glue table and did what was needed.

Crazy glasses were fun to do. The people who did these could really use their imaginations. We got some cute glasses with this project!

Another great project was the no sew scarves. Just cut 6" strips of fleece and cut fringe on each end. I am always looking for fabric on sale or picking up remnants. This Dora fleece would regularly cost $12-$15 a yard. I bought it as a remnant for just $3 a yd. There was .78 of a yard, so it cost me less than $3. There was enough to make 3 scarves from this one piece.

This project shows the imagination and inguenity of our kids! I had some pony tail bands and ribbons for them to just tie bows on. They took it to the next level and took silk flowers from another table and beads from another to decorate the pony tail bands.

Having several projects helped give people choices of what to do. They could choose what they felt comfortable with. Some people stayed at the same projects the entire time they were there. Others would work on one project for a while and then go to another. It kept everyone busy doing what they enjoyed doing. We had a few more projects but I just didn't get pictures of people working on those. Maybe next time! We will do this again on a Saturday in July. 

We've got a great start on getting our shoeboxes filled.