Craft Swap

One of my friends recently had a great idea: a craft swap! Many great mommy bloggers out there have posted about Busy Bags and Busy Bag Swaps, which are a similar idea to our craft swap. Here is how ours worked:

• 4 moms participated. We all have kids around age 2 (give or take several months). 
• Via email, each mom submitted several age-appropriate crafts she would like to make/do with her kids, and we compiled a master list of crafts.
• Each mom picked 5 crafts off of the master list and committed to making 4 sets of each craft.  
• We gave ourselves about 2 weeks to make the crafts. (We live in different cities, but we already had a get-together planned when we could swap. This saved shipping costs.)
• As a general rule, each activity fit in a freezer-sized Ziploc bag and was inexpensive or even free to make.  
• We got together and gave each other the crafts we had made.  At the end, each of us had 20 new crafts/activities to do with our kids.

I have LOVED having these crafts on hand.  I usually pull one out in the morning after breakfast. Most mornings, I'm very hazy and slow-thinking until my coffee kicks in (and sometimes even after it kicks in.)  It's been wonderful for me to be able to reach for one of these bags and have an activity ready to go - no prep work required!  Plus, starting our day with some structured fun/learning is really nice. After we do the activity, I put it back in the bag and store it away.  This helps the activities stay fresh! 

As we play with the different activities, I will share some of our favorites.

~ Lauren

I store our craft bags in here...

... so they are out of sight.