Kids Crafts Archives - Sweet Frugal Life

Easy Homemade Harry Potter Wand With Chopsticks

Last month my youngest turned ten (I can’t believe how fast he is growing up!). He asked for a Harry Potter themed birthday party. I’m pretty sure he decided on this idea from our recent Universal Studios trip….but I wasn’t complaining! Once we decided on the theme I knew we couldn’t have a Harry Potter themed party without having wands (amiright??). So, with a little bit of DIYing and patience we whipped up a few budget friendly wands! My son and I had so much fun making these DIY Harry Potter Wands! They are SO easy and addicting to make! I seriously didn’t want to stop creating!

These homemade Harry Potter wands with chopsticks are the perfect craft for any Harry Potter lover, including kids and adults! And, do you want to know the best part???? They were also really cheap! The only thing I had to buy were the chopsticks and some hot glue! Fortunately, I had paint and paintbrushes at home, but luckily they are both really cheap to buy if you need some!

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How to Make DIY Harry Potter Wands

The first thing you need to do before making these homemade wands is to gather your supplies. You will need:

1. Squeeze Hot Glue Onto Chopstick

The first thing you will need to do to make your DIY Harry Potter wand is to warm up your hot glue. I like to place the hot glue gun over a paper plate, so that the melty glue will drip onto the plate as it warms. This makes for easy clean up!

Once your hot glue is warm and melty, it’s time to make the design of your homemade wand. I love this part!!

All you have to do is take your hot glue gun and slowly squirt hot glue onto the handle part of one chopstick.

This is the part when you can let your creativity shine! You can put a lot of hot glue on the end for a nice, thick handle. Or, you might choose to only put on a small amount of glue. Feel free to add some swirly glue designs too. I tried to cover about 1/3-1/4 of the chopstick with glue, just depending on the design I was going for. Whatever you think will look good!

One of my favorite things about these homemade wands is that no matter how your glue comes onto your chopstick, the finished product will still look good! I worried a few times that I had messed up a wand with clumps of hot glue, but once I was done, it always looked just as good as all of the other wands!

2. Let The Hot Glue Dry

Next, you will need to set your chopstick onto a paper plate and let the glue dry. Hot glue dries fairly fast, so it shouldn’t take very long before being able to move to the next stop.

3. Paint Chopstick

Once the hot glue is dry, you can start painting your chopstick/wand! We all decided we preferred the dark and moody colors for the wands, but really anything goes! It was so fun to mix colors together and make something magical and unique!

This step is so easy, just dab a little bit of glue onto your paintbrush and paint the wand!

Once you are done painting your wand set it onto a paper plate to dry.

Most of our wands needed two coats of paint. So, make sure to check the wand once the paint is dry to see if it will need to be painted again.

Enjoy!

That’s it! Your DIY Harry Potter wand is complete! See how easy that was??? It’s the perfect craft for adults and kids and everyone in between! All that’s left to do is to spend hours casting magical spells (Acio wand!).

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Have fun making your own DIY Harry Potter wand!

An Easy Valentine Heart Craft for Kids!

A friend shared a brilliant idea with me the other day! She said she uses a small Christmas tree for Valentines Day; instead of decorating it with Christmas ornaments she has a little box of Valentines decorations that she brings out every February and her kids get to decorate a Valentines Tree. I thought this would make a fun valentine craft for kids.

So, I got to work putting together my own valentine tree. I already had a small tree that I use for Christmas each year, the only problem is that I didn’t have any decorations for the tree….and I did NOT want to buy any.

We got to work crafting. First, we made a few hearts out of beads and pipe cleaners. They were so easy, just stick beads on a pipe cleaner and shape it as a heart. Done and done!

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Next, we made this darling Pom-Pom Garland. I loved it so much and I can’t wait to make more! You can find the tutorial here.

And last, but not least, we put together these Yarn Heart Ornaments. They were SO fun to make and easy enough for my 6 year old to join in. I love the projects that all three kids can enjoy together!

Yarn Hearts Tutorial

First, you need some cardboard hearts. I grabbed a box from my large stash of amazon boxes and cut out a few hearts.

Choose your favorite yarn color. Here is one of my favorite yarn brands. Use a little bit of tape to attach the yarn to the cardboard heart.

Now for the fun part. Just start wrapping your yarn around the heart. Try to wrap it in different angles to make the design interesting. It wasn’t easy to get all of the small nooks and crannies, but we kept working it and was able to get the entire heart covered.

When your cardboard heart is all covered and looks just right tie a small knot and cut off your excess yarn. I tucked the knot underneath some yarn to try to hide it, which seemed to work well!

And guess what! You are done! That’s it! We attached a few ornament hooks through the yarn and hung it up on our Valentines Day Tree.

I just love how these crafts and little tree turned out, and what’s even better….my kids love it! They are so proud that they helped make all of the decorations; and seeing my kids happy faces is the best kind of valentine gift I could ever receive!