Do you remember doing little home made crafts? You know the ones with construction paper, a little good old fashioned Elmers glue, maybe some crayons. I did them all the time with my kids. We had paper plate santas complete with a cotton ball beard, we had turkeys, sheep, pilgrims, everything went on the fridge or in the window to celebrate every holiday we could come up with.

Well my kids are grown and some now have kids of their own. My grand daughter Brooke just celebrated her 3rd birthday and I wanted to make something with her. We all know at 3 that we don’t have a long attention span! It needed to be something quick and cute and something she could really help with. So we couldn’t make something requiring a lot of cutting or gluing. I googled, as we all do and ended up on Martha Stewarts site. I went to the site not thinking I could possibly find anything that would fit the bill, after all Martha has the reputation of perfection and maybe not for the beginner. I have since repented and mentally apologized to Martha!

With a little tissue paper and some aluminum foil we had a crown! No gluing, no complicated pattern, however she did have some ideas for the jewels that I believed to be over the top and too hard for Brooke. But ever since my kids were tiny I have kept a small drawer full of stickers just for fun projects. Brooke likes stickers! So I thought we would follow the pattern for making the crown but let Brooke loose with the stickers for all the decorating. She loved it! She had a great time putting dozens of stickers on the crown. The only rule was we had to be done when mom came to pick her up. She decorated the inside and the outside of the crown, I was amazed at how long she paid attention to the project. We sang Happy Birthday while we decorated the crown and she wore the crown later that night while she opened her Birthday presents.

It took me about 2 minutes to make my part of the crown, another 10 for Brooke to decorate, but it made a great memory for me for quite a while to come. So find an old craft book, google something up, my daughters are heavily into pintrest it has a billion ideas. Just remember that it’s not about how perfect something turns out, it’s not about whether it means anything to anyone else, it’s about the memory, the time spent together and the smiles.