Easy Crafts for Children, Inexpensive Creative Fun

You don't need to spend a fortune on safe kids arts and crafts. You can gather supplies from plenty of stuff from around the house, gather natural materials in your neighborhood, and make non-toxic art and craft supplies yourself using ordinary ingredients and supplies from your kitchen.

Make Your Own Art Mixes

You can easily whip up your own art mixes using staples from your kitchen like corn syrup, flour, constarch, cooking oil and food colors.

Mix up batches of playdough and paints and sticker glue from home kitchen pantry supplies. The simple recipes s take only a few minutes to prepare, and won't make your child ill. For example:

To make modeling dough combine 1 cup water, 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup salt, 2 teaspoons cooking oil and 2 teaspoons cream of tartar in a pan. Add a little food coloring and cook gently for a few minutes until the mixture forms a ball. Store in a plastic container in the refrigerator for a week or so.

Craft Materials for Free

Recycling materials are perfect for kids crafts. Magazines can be cut up and used for projects such as collage, posters, paper beads and art.

Check out your sewing stash for buttons, pieces of fabric and trims or scrap materials. Clothes pins, popsicle sticks, pasta, yarn, tins and food boxes can become craft supplies.

Paper plates make great masks. Cut out holes for the eyes and attach a piece of elastic once the plates are painted or drawn on. Halve the plates to make carnival eye masks and attach a popsicle stick as a handle. Or, use the paper plate as a mask backing for printable masks.

Print out the ready to use mask templates and glue them to the paper plate backing.

Printable Masks

lion face mask skull mask dia de los muertos

Easy Cheap Crafts for Kids

Image by Alex Sanderson from Pixabay

Thrift Store Craft Supplies

Visit thrift stores and charity shops to find all sorts of items that you can decorate. These shops are a great place to find rolls of wallpaper, old window shades, fabrics, and other items you can cut up to use for crafts.

Dollar stores and bargain bins at retail stores are a great place to find artsy resources. Be sure they're safe for kids to use, but consider household items like wooden spoons, cardboard containers, stationery, and other items not classified as craft materials.

Remember to be safety conscious with any materials you collect, recycle or buy at tag sales and thrift stores, then have fun with your inexpensive art supplies.

Recycle Bin Art Supplies

Old Greeting Cards, Newspapers

Salvaged greeting cards offer many different arts and crafts options; the cut-outs used to make new cards, gift tags and decorations plus gift boxes, ornaments and toys. Newspapers can be turned into papier mâché, pirate hats, folded paper crafts and funny paper hats.

Cereal Boxes, Milk Cartons

Recycle sliced up cereal boxes and milk cartons to make fun place mats!

Clean out the containers, dry well, then cut the cartons into 1-inch wide strips, retaining the design from the package.

Weave the cutout carton strips together to create a mat, fasten the edges with duct tape, and VOILA! you have a sturdy place mat.

More Recycle Crafts.

Craft Materials from Mother Nature

A great place to find free craft materials is right in your own yard or at the park. Natural materials are ideal for kid crafts.

Collect seed pods, twigs, leaves, bark, acorns and bits of grass. Use for making nature collages, rubbings, covered boxes and cans, or woven creations. Glue twigs together to create free form nature sculptures.

Pick and press or dry flowers, leaves and grasses in between the pages of a big book like an old telephone book or layer in paper towels and place between sheets of waxed paper in a big book.

Wait a few days then remove your flat and dry creations. Glue onto card stock or press between sheets of laminating paper.

Beach Comb for Shells, Sticks, Rocks

Collect shell fragments, driftwood, and stones at the beach. You can use craft paints or nail polish to add color and sparkle to shells and stones. Make mobiles from shell fragments and hang them from scraps of driftwood or sticks.

Make an interesting texture painting by spreading glue over a sheet of constuction paper or recycled cardboard and sprinkling on sand, then add shells, dried seeds, flowers and other found natural materials.

Make a Weaving Panel

Cut a piece of corrugated cardboard about 12 inches square. Mark off 2 inch spaces around the edges and cut 1 inch slits into the borders. Thread twine or raffia to make an openwork grid on the cardboard. Weave leaves, twigs, bits of grass or flowers and seed pods into the grid.