Craft Gossip

Independent craft blog since 2007

Paper Bag Activities for Kids

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Here’s another one of those fun made up holidays: July 12 is Paper Bag Day for reasons unknown. But if your household is like mine, you probably have everything you need to celebrate this holiday every day. I think I bought a bag of paper lunch bags when my daughter was in preschool and we still have some (she’s about to turn 14!).

The first thing you probably think of to do with paper bags is to make puppets (we actually had a craft kit once that was all paper bag crafts, but you can design your own too). Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Another thing I liked to do was to make little books out of paper bags. There are instructions at Kitchen Table Classroom for how to do it. You can cover the “pages” with scrapbook paper or construction paper and kids can draw, journal, collage or whatever they want, and the ends of the bags are still open so they can slide little things into them, too.

Paper bag kites are another fun and easy craft to make with kids, because they’re fun to decorate with paint, stickers, drawings or whatever the kid wants to do. Check out the instructions at Somewhat Simple.

Make a whole little town of paper bag houses and buildings with this cute idea from In the Bag Kids Crafts.

And if you’re looking for an activity that goes a little beyond crafts, this guess the scent activity is low prep and lots of fun. Check it out at Raising Lifelong Learners.

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Cross Stitch the National Parks in Tiny Form

I love little cross stitch patterns, but it’s especially fun when a small cross stitch design has a lot of detail going on. That’s the case with this collection of national parks cross stitch patterns from Stitchin Madness. 

This isn’t really a pattern, it’s a full-on book with designs for all 63 of the national parks in the United States (which includes the Virgin Islands). Each design is unique and shows a distinctive feature or the park or what the landscape there looks like. 

The book includes a full table of contents and numbered pages to make it easy to find the design you want to make. 

Each design is 40 by 40 stitches without the park name included, and 40 by 50 stitches if you add the name. They’re designed for 14 count fabric and if you make all of them you’ll use 72 colors, though each individual pattern uses a lot fewer colors than that. 

These would be so fun to make as you visit different parks, or make the whole set to frame together if you’re a big travel person who loves the national parks. They’d also be fun as greeting cards or even ornaments for your tree with the year you visited added to it somewhere. 

The photo above shows a nice collection of some of the patterns in hoops, but I could see them done in little frames as well. This should give you a taste for what the designs look like and might even include your favorite park (mine is Acadia because I went there on my honeymoon; it isn’t on here but you can see it on the product page. 

If you’re ready to stitch the national parks, or even just a handful of them, check out this pattern book from Stitchin Madness on Etsy. I’d love to know which national park is your favorite or what you would stitch up first!

[Photo: Stitchin Madness]