What We're "Pinning" This Valentine's Day

 We found some REALLY cute Valentine's Day craft and recipe ideas for your tween to make, and we "pinned" them to our board on Pinterest. Our favorites include the tinted milk hearts, the roasted potato hearts, and cinnamon heart rolls. Today we made meringue hearts and pink marshmallows for teacher gifts.

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Celebrating the Chinese Year of the Dragon With Tweens

We love celebrating Chinese New Year with our tweens - Washington always has a great parade in Chinatown, and it's one of the most colorful holidays to watch (the dragon dance is always a big hit). To help us ring in 2012 as the Year of the Dragon, we asked our very crafty, very creative friends at Club Chica Circle to share a dragon-themed craft with our tweens - and boy, did they deliver! Our tweens have dubbed this as "way cool", and we think yours will too.

Today kicks off the Chinese New Year for 2012, and this is the year of the dragon. But what does that mean? The dragon is an especially powerful and important symbol in Chinese culture. Those born in the year of the dragon are said to be powerful, artistic, intuitive, and lucky.

Chinese New Year is celebrated for 15 days in the Chinese calendar, and is the longest and most important celebration in the Chinese culture.

There are many customs and traditions associated with Chinese New Year celebrations. For instance, it is traditional to give red envelopes filled with money to wish good luck, wealth, or happiness. The color red is an especially regarded color and symbolizes luck in the Chinese culture.

The dragon dance is one of the most colorful and exciting events associated with Chinese New Year where dancers hold up dragon costumes and perform in parades and New Year's celebrations. The Chinese New Year dragon dance represents the bringing of good luck and success in the new year.

And on the 15th day, there is traditionally a red lantern celebration or festival where red lanterns are meant to decorate homes, storefronts, and town centers. The Lantern Festival signifies the end of the New Year and lanterns are hung as a symbol of good fortune and prosperity.

In honor of the year of the dragon, I crafted a dragon bracelet perfect for any tween.

Here is what you will need:
Red rickrack ribbon
Heart shaped beads (I used 12 - 6 red and 6 orange)
Thick orange foam (about 5mm thick)
Scissors
Embroidery thread and needle
Googly eyes
Glue
White and black puffy paint

First cut about 12" of rickrack ribbon, and string heart shaped beads on. I alternated red and orange colored beads and made sure they were all going the same direction. The heart shape along the with waviness of the rick rack is a great way to represent the scales of the dragon. Chinese dragons can be very colorful, so don't be afraid to use other colors. Also, because the rick rack is wavy is a great way to keep the beads in place.

On the end where the bottom of the heart shaped beads are facing leave about 1 1/2" and knot the end (this will become the tough of the dragon). On the other end, make sure to leave about 4" of rickrack and knot a loop at the end (this will become the tail and will wrap around the neck of the dragon to create a bracelet).

Cut two pieces of rickrack about 3 inches long. Tie each along each end leaving 2 beads on the outside of each end. This will be the feet of the dragon.

Now, using your scissors, cut two pieces of thick foam about 1" x 3/4" and 3/4" x 3/4". These pieces will create the head and mouth of the dragon with the larger piece being the top of the head. With an embroidery needle and colored thread to match the foam, knot off one end and push the need through the top of the head and connecting it through the smaller piece of foam and all the way through. Then push your needle back through the other side of the smaller piece, up through the bigger piece, connecting the two pieces on one end. Pull through and knot at the end to make tight. Don't worry the knots will be hidden with the googly eyes glued on top.

Glue two googly eyes on top of the bigger piece of foam on top of the embroidery thread knots. Let dry.

With white puffy paint, draw on white triangles on either side of the head for teeth. With black puffy paint, draw on black half circles for nostrils on top of the head. Let dry.

Once the head is completely dry, string the knotted end of the bracelet through the stitched end of the head until the knot sits securely in the middle of the mouth. Trim the rick rack tongue if necessary.

To attach the bracelet, carefully wrap the looped tail end around the dragon head while on your wrist. Make one for yourself of give as a Chinese New Year's gift to a friend!

We hope the year of the dragon brings you all the best of luck and good fortune, whatever culture you are. Happy New Year!

Are you a member of Club Chica Circle yet? You and your tween should be - it's free, fun and fabulous!

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Sewing Patterns for Tweens

Perfect for the crafty tween or the crafty mom: we stumbled upon these sewing patterns design specifically for tween girls. ModKid Boutique makes them, and their Kyoko style was the most popular for this age group. We love the idea of girls designing their own fashions, and this pattern is a terrific starting point. (And did you see our post about the Fashion School for tweens in NYC?)

Available at modkidboutique.com, $12.95

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More Back to School Fun For Tweens: Martha and Friends

Featuring a tween-age Martha Stewart, Martha and Friends is a new webisode series from Martha Stewart and AOL Kids. It's all digitally animated and includes craft instructions and recipes from each episode. The show chronicles what a group of four kids do as they wind down summer and prepare to enter middle school. All of the characters, including two french bulldogs, are sweetly illustrated, and the show is even true to Martha's legendary bossy personality. Our favorite part is the fully stocked clubhouse that most scenes take place in - it's kitted-out with every craft supply imaginable and technology features heavily - sort of a dream treehouse for tweens. This is fun viewing during the Back to School season - each episode is about 11 minutes long.

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Fun Tween Tradition on School Year's Eve: Schultuete

Happy Back to School! Our tweens return to school tomorrow, including one starting middle school (!). The girls aren't the ones only excited/nervous about Back to School - Mom loves the idea of starting fresh too. Readers know that the MsTwixt household celebrates every little thing, so here is one of our tweens' favorite Back to School traditions that your family might enjoy too:
Schultuetes are a German tradition of giving paper cones filled with school supplies and trinkets to celebrate the first day of school. They remind us of Christmas stockings. They are SO easy to make - all you need is: poster board, a stapler, some tissue paper, scissors, a glue stick, and a piece of ribbon.
Here are  the instructions:
1) Roll a piece of poster board into a cone shape. Your goal is to have the smallest opening possible at the tip of the cone. The overall size of the cone itself isn't critical. We find that a standard piece of drugstore poster board rolls naturally into a narrow cone that is approximately 30" tall.
2) Staple the poster board closed to keep the cone shape, and then trim the base of the cone so that the end is fairly level (precision isn't important here).
3) Decorate the outside of the cone as you like - we tend to use school colors and then use Sharpies to write our tweens' names on the schultuetes. Stickers are a great choice too.
4) Fill the cones with small school supplies. This year we included PJs from BeePosh, thin pens to help her color-code her notes, personalized pencils from Oriental Trading, erasers, rulers, portable hand sanitizer gel, a new toothbrush, and some scratch-n-sniff stickers.
5) Once the cones are filled, run glue stick along the INTERIOR edge of the cone's base. Then press tissue paper along the glued edge (we find that 2 pieces of tissue paper works well).
6) Cinch the tissue paper closed with the piece of ribbon, and Voila - a homemade schultuete! Schultuetes can be made in any size and any color combination - have fun with it!
Our tweens open theirs the night before school starts (School Year's Eve), and it's a great opportunity for parents to tuck in any straggling supplies.
What Back to School traditions does your family have? We'd love to hear!
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Getting Ready For the Final Harry Potter Movie

It's no surprise that we are HUGE Harry Potter fans (even traveling to Boston to take in the Harry Potter Exhibition), and we've had our movie tickets for tonight's midnight show for months. To help us pass the time in line (and yes, our tweens will be in costume), we made our own Skiving Snackboxes. In the books, Skiving Snackboxes were an invention of the older Weasley twins to help students get out of class for medical reasons. Our version is designed to do the opposite - to treat our tweens as they wait for the film. Here's how we tackled this project:

We found these wonderful "cardboard satchels" at Paper-Source for $6.00 - they even have straps!  Then we lined the interiors with glittery purple paper (brilliant purple seems wizard-like, right?):

 

We're using colorful cupcake liner papers to hold little bags on goodies inside including Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans (jelly beans), Puking Pastilles (chocolate nonpareils), licorice wands, crystallized pineapple (Professor Slughorn's favorite), lemon drops, Droobles Blowing Gum (gumballs), Peppermint Humbugs (York Peppermint Patties), Ton-Tongue Toffees (toffees), Fizzing Whizbees (Pop Rocks), and Chocolate Frogs.

The tweens made custom decals for the boxes like this one:

Then we envisioned what a Skiving Snackbox would look like in the Muggle World and went to town with some paint pens and glitter:

And here it is filled:

 Now we're off to join the throngs of other Harry Potter fans in the movie queue. Even though we'll be in line for hours, there's a carnival-like atmosphere amongst the crowd. It's always fun to see other kids' costumes and to play (Wizard) Chess and broomstick Quidditch while we wait. 

We'd love to learn what you're doing too - what are your tweens doing for the last Harry Potter movie?

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Celebrating Flag Day With Tweens

Our tweens are celebrating Flag Day today by making red, white and blue Jell-O (click here for this super easy recipe) and crafting fun ribbon barrettes in patriotic colors (thanks to our friends at Chica Circle for sharing the instructions). Bonus: these accessories can be used again on the Fourth of July!

Because they're on summer break now, nail polish is back in their repertoire - so of course their nails are red, white and blue (check out these instructions for doing a patriotic manicure inspired by Beyonce in her "Telephone" music video - very fun!).

Does your tween know the essentials about the American Flag? Our girls earned their United We Stand badge in Girl Scouts, and whether or not your tween is a Scout, this is a great guide for learning about the flag.

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The Best Easter Basket Gifts for Tweens: Origami Lucky Stars

Our tweens' seem to have developed a bit of an origami obsession of late - which may be due to their recent origami crane project for Japan. Whatever the reason, origami is an entertaining and fun (and quiet!) activity that your crafty tween will love. We've left hints for the Easter bunny to fill our tweens' eggs with little strips of origami paper so that they can fold these "lucky stars" and love that this idea helps to distinguish a tween's Easter basket as original, inexpensive and crafty.

Origami star strips are widely available, and this website sells them for $3.00 for a package of 100 (instructions are included) - or you could simply cut letter-size, lightweight paper into one-half-inch long strips.

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The National Cherry Blossom Festival With Tweens

One of our tweens' favorite annual events in Washington is the National Cherry Blossom Festival. This year it runs from March 26 to April 10, and it will be especially poignant given the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan (the Festival highlights our historic friendship with the Japanese people). There will be a Stand With Japan Walk planned for 630pm on March 24, and all donations will benefit the Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief Fund.

Here are our tweens' picks for the best activities to do during this event:

• View the cherry blossoms from a unique vantage point: by paddle boat in the Tidal Basin. During this busy season, you can reserve a paddle boat in advance online, and some of the best photos are those taken from the water. Tip: bring sunscreen, sunglasses and water - it can get really hot out on the water on a sunny day.
• Visit the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery for a unique day of art on March 27th. The gallery will host a special ImaginAsia workshop geared for tweens (ages 8-14) that explores how spring flowers are used in Japanese design. Tweens will complete a project painting paper parasols based upon their study of the galleries. (Our tweens took part in two ImaginAsia camp programs last summer and are clamoring to return - they love the staff and galleries.)

For younger tweens, the National Park Service will offer a special "Blooming Junior Ranger" program, and if your tweens collect Silly Bandz, this year you can purchase special cherry blossom festival-themed Silly Bandz from the gift shop at the base of the Washington Monument.

If you can't make it to Washington for the festivities, your crafty tween will enjoy this project at home: cherry blossom treat cards. This idea is from Family Fun magazine and while they recommend it for Valentine's Day, we thought it would be perfect for use for a spring holiday too. Here are the instructions:

1. Gather your materials: scissors, solid and printed cardstock/scrapbook paper, and some lollipops
2. Cut 2 petal shapes from the solid cardstock or scrapbook paper (to see what real cherry blossoms look like, check out the National Park Services live "blossom cam", or the petal shapes in the Flower Shapes kit from the Paper-Source would work too (and be faster). These form the outer petals of your blossom.
3. Cut out a smaller petal shape from the printed cardstock/scrapbook paper. This forms the inner petal.
4. Cut out two leaves that are long enough to be seen when beneath the outer petal shapes. You'll write messages on these later.
5. Stack the paper in this order: 2 leaves, 2 outer petals, 1 inner petal.
6. Using the lollipop stick, pierce through the center of the stack starting at the center of the inner petal.
7. Fan out the petals and leaves and write a message to the card's recipient on one or both of the leaves.

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It's Fat Tuesday! How to Celebrate Mardi Gras With Tweens

Our tweens have discovered Mardi Gras and are excited to celebrate Fat Tuesday as a family. This year they've asked to have pancakes for dinner (I'm not entirely certain how traditional these are as a dinner option - let us know if this is legit).

We saw these Mardi Gras mask cookies by Sweetopia that use this amazing decorating ingredient called "disco dust" (which we'll need to try because of the name alone):

In past years we've made beignets for breakfast, but we haven't tried to bake a King Cake as yet.

We were looking for cool jazz tunes to introduce our tweens to and stumbled upon this great organization called Jazz House Kids. Their mission is to introduce young people to the joy of jazz and provide them "with a unique opportunity to explore the rich heritage of this great American art form firsthand". They are "dedicated to improving the quality of life for young people through the medium of jazz and provide young people with an innovative concept of understanding music." We love that they celebrate "multiple intelligences" by teaching of jazz.

We're looking for some jazz music to play with our tweens tonight - do you have any suggestions?

Some other fun ways to celebrate Mardi Gras with tweens:

• A library in New Jersey held a tween dance party that featured an air guitar competition
• We thought this craft to make unique Mardi Gras masks was really well thought-out.
  

How will you ring in Fat Tuesday with your tween?

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A Project for the Father-Daughter Dance

Our tweens attended the annual Girl Scout Father-Daughter Dance a few weeks ago. This has become a tradition that the girls look forward to every year, and this year's dance was particularly exciting because it was the first year our youngest tween was old enough to attend.

We wanted to make the experience extra special for her after she spent so many years watching her sisters go off with her dad, so we made a boutonniere and corsages to mark the day. We've purchased these from our local florist before, but the project seemed easy enough to attempt at home. 'Turns out, it was pretty painless, and it was about one-third of the cost.

Here's what we did:

• We went to our favorite neighborhood florist and asked which flowers they had that would work best for this type of project. They had some really nice white anemones with dark, inky blue centers and suggested that we use one white hydrangea stem cut into small florets to fill out the pieces. The flowers cost $12.
• They also threw in the remnants of a green floral tape roll for $1.
• At home, we assembled our supplies: scissors, some pearl-headed pins, and some ribbon.
• We cut the anemones very short and wrapped the stems with floral tape. For the corsages, we added bits of hydrangea and bound those with the floral tape to surround the anemone. 
• Then we cut the tape and wrapped the stems with ribbon (we just used curling ribbon which we had around the house).
• For the boutonniere, we framed the anemone with a hydrangea leaf and secured the floral tape with a pearl-head pin.
• We stored the flowers in the fridge until the dance.

Our eldest used an extra flower in her hair. We think these turned out great!

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A Candy Diary!

If you and your tween had started a journal this year (or were considering it), this fun diary is just the thing to jump-start your efforts. Dylan's Candy Bar has partnered with craft kit company Alex Toys on a line of candy-inspired projects. This sweet diary craft caught our eye, and at $14, it would also make a terrific birthday gift for a tween.

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Valentine's Day Projects For Tweens

Tweens have outgrown the drug-store Valentine card kits, and they're a crafty bunch anyways. Here are some ideas for your tween to make for her class Valentines over the weekend:

Pencil hearts make a fabulous non-candy gift for a crowd. Instructions at alphamom.com

Here's a cute idea for a message in a bottle written with lemon juice invisible ink. Instructions from mini-eco.

This craft will take some time but is sure to be a big hit in the classroom - iPod Valentines made from Conversation Heart boxes. Instructions from FamilyFun.

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Cool Winter Craft for Tweens: A Pom-Pom Scarf

We love this craft for tweens from Disney's Family Fun magazine for a pom-pom scarf. It's perfect for a snow day or sleepover party activity.

All you need is a bag of large pom-poms, a needle, and embroidery floss. Simply thread the needle through 40 pom-poms and knot. Each tween can customize her scarf with pattern and color.

Instructions here.

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Tween New Year's Eve Countdown: Making Fuzzy Flower Rings

As our tweens plan their New Year's Eve sleepover party, we are stocking up on crafts for the girls to do while waiting for midnight. Crafting fuzzy flower rings out of pipe cleaners fits the bill perfectly: these are inexpensive, independent, and fun!

'Turns out there's a Pipe Cleaner Lady who was on the Martha Stewart show showing folks how to make them. We put a copy of her how-to video on our YouTube channel - click here to see it.

Our tweens are heading to the craft store to pick out all manner of sparkly pipe cleaners for this project. Let us know if you try it and send us photos - we'll post them (removing, of course, all tweens' personally identifiable information)!

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Crafty Holiday Presents for Tweens

Crayola has entered the tween market with their Pop Art Pixies line. It's actually a pretty cool website with tween characters who love art. You can download project instructions online and purchase art kits that will appeal to tweens - our fave is the Bento Box Stationery Kit (pictured above). Tweens can also upload images of their projects to the site to share, create their own avatar, and post messages to other avatars online (their privacy policy nicely spells out the ways they protect tween's identities online).

These would also make great holiday gifts!

Bento Box Stationery Kit $9.98 from Crayola  (plus a $2 coupon here)

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Indi's Blog: Review of the American Girl Place in Boston, MA

As reported by 10-year old tween, Indi:
The American Girl Place in Boston is definitely one of my top ten things to do. This winter my family and I went there, it was AMAZING!!!!

When I first got inside what I saw was rows and rows of every American Girl thing I had ever heard of. There was everything from doll clothing to doll food, there was even clothing for you to match your doll! Even that did not end it, upstairs there was even more clothing but there was also a doll hair salon!! At the salon you could get your dolls hair done or even treat them to some special skincare. I had my doll’s hair done; she looked really good afterward. I was really impressed. Across from the salon there was a café where you could order food for you and your doll. It was really good food. I am definitely going to go there again very soon.

I give it 5 stars!

We blogged about American Girl craft kits earlier.