My daughter and her friends also love doing crafts together. They get excited about them in advance. Lol. At one of Dd’s Sleepovers they split into pairs and made different color jellos with fruit in them. They enjoyed waiting for them all to solidify and taste each other's’ Jello. That was fun and cheap. Last year they mixed up gingerbread cookie dough to make cut-out mini gingerbread houses, decorated them and baked cookies for them each to take home. They spent a lot of time on that, trying to get their houses right. We also used 3-D cookie cutters to build objects with their cookies. They spent a lot of time on that too. Another year they had a cup-cake decorating party. Then they ate them. We have also had a “build your own ice cream sundae”, bar. That went over well but didn’t take much time.
Some non- food things have been a scavenger hunt with clues. One time we made individual invitations out of a large poster board on the back of which we had drawn a major clue. We cut the poster board into invitations. The girls had to bring their invitations to the party and work together to put the poster board image back together and figure out the clue. It lead to other hidden clues which led to more, etc. Another time I saw a container of plastic figures in the Target dollar spot so we hid them all over the main floor of our house. They had to find all the hidden figures before they could move onto the next fun event.
I know you have done tie-dyeing but have you done dyeing with sharpies and rubbing alcohol? That’s also pretty fun and much less messy. As soon as the alcohol dries, the color won’t spread. Maybe instead of doing teeshirts you could do swatches of fabric or blank white scarves, if you can find some. Once they are dry you can show them how to do Japanese fabric origami (can’t remember what it’s called). It’s ways of tying scarfs to make purses, gift wrap, etc. The Lush cosmetics website had a link to the folding and tying techniques.
At that age, the girls might enjoy making Koolaid lipgloss with solid coconut oil. That was easy for each girl to make her own little pots of lipgloss. And of course, each girls wants to make little pots with all the different flavors/colors so buy like 10 tiny pots for each girls (cheap on Amazon). Last year we made lotion sticks and lotion bars scented with essential oils (since it was close to Epiphany right after Christmas we scented the lotion with frankincense and myrrh and used food-grade gold dust. They were beautiful!!). . Pretty easy to make and that was their take-home prize. You can find links for all this stuff on Pinterest, of course but if you are interested in any of those, I’ll dig out the recipes we used.
oh, I just thought of another thing. My dd and her friend spent a ton of time enjoying learning to knit. There are a couple of good YouTube l videos that will show beginners how to knit basic kitchen scrubber sponges (with that scratchy yarn you can find in bright pretty colors at Hobby Lobby). You can get cheap packets of knitting needles on Amazon to give the girls. The girls would talk and giggle about how they would screw up and unravel it and start over. They seemed to love that.
Last edited by gatorsmom; 09-22-2019 at 06:29 PM.
" I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." Mahatma Gandhi
"This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multiplies evil and violence in the universe. It doesn't solve any problems." Martin Luther King, Jr.