Think Crafts Blog – Craft Ideas and Projects – CreateForLess

By Recycled Crafts Contributor, Anitra from the blog “Coffee Pot People”.

My husband and I recently had the pleasure (not to mention mild shock!) of attending his son’s 50^th birthday party. It was a family celebration, and the attendees ranged in age from four years to 74 years.

What do you do at a party with that wide an age span, encompassing both sexes, other than eat ice cream and cake and watch the birthday gifts being opened?

Our son, Jeff, had the perfect solution, and I’m only sorry I didn’t get the camera out earlier, because once we got started on our activity, all I could think was, I’ve got to share this! It’s great!

We had all settled in and were standing or sitting around the family room when Jeff got our attention and told us to team up in groups of two or three, choosing a partner or partners we thought we’d like to create something with. We were soon laughing, wondering aloud just what we’d be doing, and standing in little clusters before being led out to the garage.

There, Jeff had set up a large table, with small, identical, piles of materials places all around the edge. In the center of the table were jars of nails, hammers, and a big glue gun. As each team chose a station and examined the assortment of wooden pieces, Jeff explained the “game”.

Each team was to build whatever they wanted out of the pieces they’d been given. The only stipulation was that we had to use every piece, although we were free to cut or break any piece, or alter them, as we wished.

We had each been given two wooden circles with a hole drilled through the center, a piece that appeared to be the corner of a square piece of wood where a circle had been cut from, a couple of sticks roughly ½” X ½” X 4″, scrap of a 2X4, and a largish piece of very thin wood, which Jeff told me later was a door skin, cut into rectangles. You, of course, could use any scraps you had lying around, or cut scraps into interesting shapes, just making sure everyone got the same things.

After we’d made our “sculpture”, and named it, we were to visit all the other ones that had been made, and vote for the one we thought was the best.

There was so much whispering, chatter, and laughter, with every single person a happy participant, from youngest to oldest.

Here are pictures of three more projects, and while you might not be able to tell from looking which team had the 4-yr-old, which teams had cabinet maker partners, or which were comprised of a woman and child, I’ll bet you can tell we all had fun!