Happy New Year!

Welcome 2015!

We had a lovely Christmas how about you?

And now the festive season is over and the children are back at school Mrs Fox needs to wake up, sort out her messy den and get back to work.

We moved house before Christmas.  To a cottage with an acre garden and much, much work to be done on it.  It has overwhelmed me, I will be honest.  Having started another blog Mrs Fox's Den to write about the renovation of our house and garden it has been so all encompassing that I've written very little, taken none of Mrs Fox's wares to market for months now and Mrs Fox's workshop is not even unpacked!

However, thats the end of that kind of behaviour.  A new year and we are back on track, crafting, partying and having fun.  Christmas Thank You-cards have been made by the little foxes using paint, glue, stamps, string and Christmas wrapping paper I had saved off of their presents.

And while the kids were stamping, sticking, cutting and crafting their thanks, I made gift tags for next year out of more of the recycled Christmas wrapping paper.  So, we are feeling suitably crafty and thrifty.

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Handmade Christmas Cards - Part Two

The first Christmas Card shows a scene of a family raising a toast to the Holiday Season

Our modern Christmas cards can be traced to a card printed in December 1843 by Sir Henry Cole, the first Director of theV&A.  Sir Henry found it time consuming to write greetings and best wishes to all his friends and family at Christmas and so he commissioned John Callcott Horsley to illustrate a card with a single greeting: 'A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year To You".  Sir Henry had also been involved in the introduction of the penny post in the UK three years before so he had something of a vested interest in the success of this new form of holiday communications.  His print run of 2050 cards sold for a shilling each (a weeks wages) and only 12 of these cards remain today.

We of course love the hand-made variety.  For the last few weeks we have been churning out hand-made Christmas cards at a phenomenal rate. The exchanging of Christmas cards can also be traced back to the "Christmas Pieces" made by children in the early 18th century.   Children copied out texts at school in their best hand writing and decorated them to give to their parents.  Intended to show parents how well their children were doing at school, these are some of the earliest examples of children's art.

Very much in that tradition Little Una Fox used her new sewing skills to create this lovely card for her Uncle David in Canada:

You Will Need:
5 or 6 different buttons
needle & thread
card & envelope
pencil, pen &/or  letter stamps

Instructions:
We first wrote "Merry Christmas" along the bottom of the card - we used our letter stamps but you can simply write this in colourful letters in your best hand writing.

We decided where the buttons would go and then drew the lines and bows onto the card in pencil first to get the spacing right.  Then went over this in black pen.

We then carefully, with needle and thread, sewed each button into position with just a couple of stitches, knotting the ends of the thread at the end.

Last month's Mrs Fox's Crafty Box contained card blanks and envelopes so that our crafty little foxes could make Christmas cards for friends and family.  They are also included in our Bumper Christmas Crafty Box that includes a whole host of Christmas crafts and is available for £15 +p&p.

The little foxes came up with so many designs for Christmas cards that we've been posting all last week with ideas for hand-made Christmas cards, we’ve also put together the best of other people’s ideas on a board on our pinterest site.  So with oodles of inspiration at the click of a mouse, we would love you to send us some pictures of your creations, we could add them to the gallery.

For loads more Christmas craft ideas including more designs for handmade Christmas cards CLICK HERE

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Handmade cards - Christmas Holly card.

OK, here we are with another easy design for you to customise in your own unique way.  Holly is wonderfully Christmassy and a plant which is only really truly appreciated this time of year, so to show our appreciation for this prickly symbol, we took a very standard design which we initially used in our November Crafty Box on a trivet for our crafters to make and placed it on a greetings card.
The trivet is also available in our bumper Christmas Craft Box, in which there are also materials to make angel decorations and a felt snowflake decoration, Christmas or 'thank you' cards and lots more to boot.

You will need;

• card/heavy paper/old Christmas card
• scraps of wrapping paper
• white paint
• paintbrush (or finger)
• glue

Instructions;

1. On a scrap of nice paper, draw two holly leaf shapes and cut them out
2. Using a contrasting paper, cut out three small balls for berries
3. Fold your card in half or use an old Christmas card and in the middle paint a messy large white snowball
4. Arrange and stick your holly leaves in the snowball and then stick the berries in place

For loads more Christmas craft ideas including more designs for handmade Christmas cards CLICK HERE

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Handmade Christmas Cards - The Not So Lonesome Pines.

So the Lonesome Pine Christmas card was simple and surely there couldn't be a more simple card to make... well, perhaps not more simple but then, maybe as simple.
Instead of the Lonesome Pine, which seems a rather sad title for a Christmas card (especially as the pine is not an unhappy one), we thought we'd bring in a few friends, hence the Not So Lonesome Pines.
Just as easy and just as beautiful.              

You will need;

• card/heavy paper/old Christmas cards
• scraps of wrapping paper
• white paint
• paintbrush (or finger)
• glue
• scissors

Instructions;

1. Fold your card or use an old Christmas card and along the bottom half, messily paint a snowy landscape
2. Cut triangles out of your paper scraps or old cards
3. Cut some strips out of paper scraps for trunks
4. Stick the trunks around the snowy landscape
5. Stick a triangle over the trunk
6. If you wish, using a finger or a chop stick, dot snow around the trees

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Handmade Christmas Cards - The Lonesome Pine.

Making a beautiful Christmas card at home probably couldn't get more simple than this, yet the finished item is charming by this very simplicity.

You will need;

• card/heavy paper/old Christmas card
• old Christmas card (to cut shapes out of) or,
• wrapping paper scraps
• glue
• scissors
• white paint
• paintbrush (or finger)

Instructions;

1. Either fold a piece of card or use an old Christmas card and messily paint the bottom half white
2. Cut 3 equal sized triangles out of your paper scraps
3. Cut a strip of paper/card to use as a tree trunk
4. Stick the trunk near the bottom of the card.
5. Stick the triangles so that the top points overlap the next triangle to form the top of your tree
6. Stick the tree over the trunk so that it pokes out of the tree's skirt
7. Using white paint on your little finger or a chop stick, dot falling snow around the tree
8. If you are using an old card, cut and stick a piece of paper inside over the old message so that you can write your new message to the recipient

Hey presto!  Easy for small and big people alike to make lots of these, all slightly different - same same but different, as they say in Thailand!

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Handmade Christmas Cards - The Snowman.

This is yet another unbelievably easy Christmas card design and there are two ways to achieve the final result.  If you get your pieces cut and prepared beforehand, your little one's can just stick the paper in place and the card will see them proud.

You will need;

• card/heavy paper/old Christmas card
• white paint
• paintbrush (or finger)
• glue
• scraps of wrapping paper and/or fabric
• cardboard
• marker pen

Instructions;

1. Using scraps paper or fabric, cut out a hat shape, a carrot shaped nose and a scarf
2. Paint one large white circle towards the bottom of the card and another on the top of this, then smudge some white paint around underneath the bottom circle (**)
3. When the paint is dry, stick the hat on top of the top circle, the scarf around the neck and the carrot shape where you want the nose to be
4. Using marker pen or scraps, make some dots for eyes and buttons
5. Using thin strips of cardboard, cut and stick on 'twig' arms
6. Using a finger or the end of a chop stick, dot flakes of snow around the snowman          

**Instead of using paint, cut out a wave of white, then a large and a small circle and use these for the head and body of your snowman before adding his accessories.

This one below was made using an old card for the background and cut paper for the snow and the snowman.

Mrs Fox's loves to craft and create and celebrate the festive season with hand-made creations.  This year we are doing a series of posts on handmade Christmas cards you can create with your children, or for even more ideas check out our "Handmade Cards" pinterest board.

http://www.pinterest.com/mrsfoxs/handmade-christmas-cards/

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Handmade Christmas Cards - Part One

This month the first of our Christmas Craft Boxes go out.  They contain; child friendly craft kits including materials and instructions to make;
6 hand-made Christmas cards,
2 Christmas trivets,
pom poms,
hand-made gift boxes,
concertina Christmas trees,
and a Father Christmas from a loo roll.
There is also a recipe for Christmas ginger cookies.

So, this November's Crafty box is filled with things to make for others and the hand-made Christmas cards have really caught our imaginations and that of our little foxes too.  It seems that their fascination is to be the expected, in fact Nina Fox has been telling me of her discovery on the origins of Christmas cards:

"Our modern day Christmas cards were almost certainly based on the 'Christmas Pieces' made by children in the early 18th century.
School children would write affectionate, often rhyming, messages to their families on special paper with an engraved border and then decorate them further before taking or sending them home.  These engraved Christmas papers were designed to show parents how well their children’s handwriting had improved over the past year, and are now rare and extremely sought after examples of children's artwork."

We hope that our suggestions and papers help our crafters to create sets of cards with a cohesive theme where the colours compliment, no matter how different the designs and shapes used are...

Those familiar with us will know that we do our upmost to ensure that everything in our monthly boxes that can be, will be, used somehow within the crafts.  We relish our self set challenge to recycle as much as is possible.  We tell our crafters that anything left over should not be thrown away as it will come in handy for future crafts and November's 'making Christmas cards' craft is a perfect example of how to use up remnants of paper snips too beautiful to have gone directly into the recycling.

If you have any card, thin cardboard, heavy paper or even last year's cards and some wrapping paper, you and your little one's can have fun making all the cards you need this year.  You will be recycling, having fun and reminding people that you think of them and love them, all rolled together in one fun activity.

We will be running a series of posts explaining how we made our designs (see below) with instructions so that you can make beautiful cards using materials you will probably have at home.

For even more ideas check out our "Handmade Cards" pinterest board.

http://www.pinterest.com/mrsfoxs/handmade-christmas-cards/

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