Kid-Made Holiday Gift Bags

Do you love to give homemade gifts? We do. But sometimes you want to give something they’ll really use, instead of a salt dough coaster set, right? Enter in Kid-Made Holiday Gift Bags. Oozing with all the homemade charm, plus room for a gift they really want. Plus I bet, these bags will get used over and over again too! Read along to hear more about this child-led art project, plus I can’t wait to tell you all about the amazing book that inspired all this creativity!

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Kid-Made Holiday Gift Bags Supplies Needed

These gift bags are an open-ended process art type of project, where it’s all about the materials and how your child uses them. But the cool thing is that all this process makes for a really cool product too in these gift bags. It’s like a double-whammy project :) And one of the things I love most about open-ended creating is that you can use whatever you have on hand. And you can let your child be your guide. I only gave my daughter one criteria for this project…. She could use any supplies she wanted, but they had to be red, green and white. So out came a really fun and sparkly assortment of stuff.

• Craft supplies. We used the following:
  • Tempera paint (Btw, I just tried Prang Tempera Paint for the first time and am in LOVE with it. Such great color coverage, even in white and easy to wash off hands.)
  • Washi tape
  • Glitter glue
  • Rubber stamps
  • Cookie cutters
  • Sequins / sparkles
• Recycled craft or white paper bags like grocery bags. They’re also really cheap on Amazon {affiliate}.

Decorate Your Christmas Gift Bags

After you gather your supplies, have at it!! The stampers were really fun, for me too, because I decided to get my creativity on and played around in the paint with my daughter. We also loved using cookie cutters as stampers. They make such a beautifully, crisp line.

My daughter really enjoyed painting on craft paper because it creates a whole different scene. So she kept painting and painting little tiny snowflakes on her bag. I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen her sit at a painting project this long. Maybe it was something about how she picked the direction that made it more engaging…

And here’s mine :) I highly recommend next time you set up an art project for your kiddo, to sit down with them and create a little too. It’s hugely therapeutic, especially during busy days around the holidays!!

The Best Gift for Creative Families

So now that you have some gorgeous gift bags, it’s time to figure out what to put inside them! And I have the perfect gift for creative families… A gorgeously inspiring activity book called The Art Workshop for Children. Barbara Rucci, the amazingly creative person behind the book and the blog Art Bar sent us a copy to check out. And we got inspired by her philosophy of child-led creative sessions.

The book is packed full of over 25 process art experiences that encourage children to explore color and feel how art supplies help them create. I especially love some of the helpful information on setting up your own art space and the collaborative projects for when you have a group together. Oh and I definitely loved these paper bag collages that were the inspiration behind our holiday gift bags.

Definitely check out the book for your next creative project or your favorite creative kid in your life. Oh, and by the way, The Art Workshop for Children pairs well with my book STEAM Kids: 50+ Hands-on Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math Activities for Kids. :)