I have been living in the suburbs of Chicago since 2008 after marrying a dashing American man. I am an illustrator, a mother of two very active boys and a big fan of my sister’s art.
You can see my illustration portfolio at www.gabriellavagnoli.com
I’m a Ui designer and an Artist. I live in Tuscany, Italy, and I miss my sister. 🙂 My passion is to bring art to everyday life, creating hand-made fashion accessories and home-decor products. My creations are available at artistante.com
Our motto is “All you need is a printer, paper, scissors and glue!” and really there isn’t much else you need.
PRINTER:
Some of our content might require a color printer, although we try to do our best to include many that are in black and white, especially those that might be used in a school or educational setting. Most of the activities fit in a US Letter Size Paper (8.5″ x 11″ = 21.59 cm x 27.94 cm). If you plan to use a different paper size just make sure you set up your page to cover 100% of the page. We try to post in high resolution so you should be able to enlarge our images without losing quality.
SCISSORS:
You will need scissors for almost all of our activities and we try our best to keep the cutting to an easy level when kids are the ones expected to do the cutting.
GLUE:
You will need regular school glue sticks for the kids activities, while some stronger glue might be better for crafting activities, especially when you are trying to build something 3D like a box or a paper house.
PAPER:
Regular copy paper is usually enough, but a better quality or a thicker paper might give you nicer results for things like wrapping paper, gift bags or other decorative elements. Consider a paper heavier than regular copy paper for any of the building activities (houses, boxes etc.) if you want them to last more than a few hours and hold their shape better.
OTHER:
For some activities there might be other stationery items required: for example for our very popular solar system model we use metal brads. Staplers or tape might be useful as alternative ways to make paper stick together. In all these cases we will specify it in the post, and we try to keep it simple so that you can easily find the necessary items.
For the coloring activities you will obviously need colors: crayons, pencils, markers or any other medium you or your child prefer, they all work.
If you plan on reusing the same activity more than once you might want to laminate the paper and use velcro strips to glue the different elements together with dry erase markers for coloring.
Use your creativity and let us know how the activities turned out, and if you have any advice on materials we will be happy to hear!
We try to post our images either in hi-res JPG or as an easy to download PDF. Usually you will see a lower resolution image in the body of the blog and a separate link that will take you to the high resolution files. Sometimes, through no fault of our own, these links break or our server stops responding: please make sure to let us know as soon as possible if you encounter such a problem so that we can resolve it for you and for others that might want to access the same file.
For best results make sure to set up your printer so that the image is scaled to fit paper size. Unfortunately this setting is located in different locations depending on the printer you own or the software you use so we cannot be more specific.
Unless otherwise stated, our activities are meant by default to be printed on US Letter size paper *, therefore if you are printing on any other size you will need to take that into account. Usually setting the printer to scale to fit paper size will let the computer figure out whether to enlarge or shrink the images according to need.
* US Letter size = 8.5″ x 11″ = 215.9 mm x 279.4 mm