Beyond the Doily: 5 Rad Red Crafts for February

While adoring couples may tipple champagne and nibble Godiva chocolates come Valentines’ Day, February is all about r-e-d for the toddler set. Embrace the fiery fun of the season’s signature color with these super-easy, rad red crafts that you’ll be happy to hang onto long after February 14th. (No frilly doilies required.)

1. Red Scavenger Hunt & Collage

How many red items can you find? Spend some time with your child hunting around the house for red items that can be transformed into a one-color collage (Search the junk drawer, the recycling bin, craft box, toy bins, etc.) Three-dimensional objects like crayons work great for this project, as do pictures cut from magazines, newspapers, or catalogs. After the scavenger hunt, sit down with your rosy bounty and a bottle of glue, and join your child in creating a red collage straight from the heart.

2. Celery “Roses”

Slicing a bunch of celery in half yields a perfect stamp for painting a bunch of “roses.” Here’s how you do it: Simply take a bunch of celery (with the stalks still connected at the root) and cut the bunch cross-wise, a few inches from the bottom. Then let your little artist dip the cut end into a small dish of red paint and press it onto paper. Once the paint dries, set your child up with some crayons or markers to add flower stems and leaves, or create a whole garden scene. Bonus: The celery sticks you snipped off make a great post-craft snack!

3. Paint-Chip Mosaic

How many different kinds of red are there? Head to your local home-improvement store and pick up a few paint-sample strips, from crimson to light pink. At home, you or your child can use scissors to cut different-size shapes out of each strip. Once you’ve got a small pile of shapes, grab some craft glue or a glue stick and work together to make a mosaic collage with all of the colors in the (red and pink) rainbow!  

4. Modern Art in a Minute

This painting technique helps kids create a modern work of art you’ll be proud to display year-round—and even better, the supplies aren’t costly. Just grab a ready-to-paint canvas from a craft store, place painter's tape across the canvas in a cool pattern, and then let your child loose with a few different shades of red or pink paint. (Whether she goes with a paintbrush or just uses her fingers is entirely up to you!) Encourage your child to paint over all the white spaces. Once the paint has dried, carefully peel off the tape to reveal the pattern underneath. No matter how your kiddo chooses to redden up the canvas, the result will be wall-worthy!

5. Balloon Stamping

In this fun stamping craft, inflated balloons stand in for a paintbrush. Add a few squirts of tempera paint to a small, shallow dish, and then drizzle or drip complementary colors (think other tones of red, or a bit of white or pink) over the base color. Dip the top of an inflated balloon into the paint. Then let your little one use the balloon as a stamp to mix the resulting color swirls onto white paper. (Note that deflated balloons can be a choking hazard for young children, so it’s important to supervise the kids on this one.)-->