Russian Arts & Crafts for Children
Traditional Russian art objects fascinate the eye with their intricate design and meticulous detail. Museums display the original jeweled Faberge eggs and painstakingly carved matryoshka dolls. But you don't have to be a rich collector to brighten up your house with homemade versions of these wonderful treasures. All you need are some inexpensive supplies such as paper, paints and glue.
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Christmas Star Ornaments
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Families in pre-Soviet Russia predominately decorated their Christmas trees with homemade ornaments or commonly available objects. Paper chains often girdled the tree, from whose boughs dangled apples, oranges and foil-covered walnuts. And an elaborate homemade star topped the tree.
To make a star like those used historically in Russia, start with a file folder no longer needed in the office. Sketch a star shape onto the file folder, cut it out and paint it in bright contrasting colors on both sides. To make your star twinkle and shine, sprinkle glitter onto a thin smear of glue. While your star dries, spray-paint a wooden dowel gold, protecting your working surface underneath the dowel with a thick spread of newspaper. Glue the paper star along with some ribbon, as much or as little as you want, to the top of the golden dowel.
To decorate your Christmas tree, simply insert the golden dowel among the branches so that the needles support the star.
Faberge Eggs
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Between 1885 and 1917, the tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II commissioned Peter Carl Faberge to make the fabulous jeweled eggs now famous throughout the world.
This Easter, decorate your home with paper eggs colored in the style of the original Faberge eggs. ScissorCraft.com has made this easy for you by providing more than 40 templates you can print out, cut out and color in.
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Matryoshka Dolls
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You have probably seen examples or replicas of these wooden dolls decorated to look like smiling peasant women. They appear to be a single doll until you open it up and find a smaller doll nestling within--and another, smaller doll within that, and another within that, and so on until an entire family of dolls is revealed.
Send your friends handmade folding birthday cards in the style of matryoshka dolls. The craft blog Zakka Life has published a free, printable template which you can cut out and accordion-fold so that the smaller paper dolls completely hide behind the larger ones. Print on decorative card stock for a colorful exterior and write your message on the blank side.
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- Photo Credit russian nested dolls image by Gramper from Fotolia.com
