Crafting with my kids: Chinese New Year {The Year of the Horse} Money envelope horses
Happy New Year! It’s time to bring this little space into 2014. We had a very happy Christmas and New Year, although Lily and my nephew came down with some sort of Norwalk/stomach flu virus(ugh) over New Year’s (thankfully, it was over quickly!).
It is frightfully cold (the so called “polar vortex”) and I am worried about what the next 48 hours will bring - fiercely studying the literature on how to prevent frozen pipes.
On the crafting front, we are gearing up for the Lunar New Year (Jan. 31) and I thought I would share this quick and easy project using recycled red money envelopes (lai see in Cantonese / hóngbāo in Mandarin) . We have acquired quite a collection of money envelopes (from several friends and my husband’s colleagues and students).
For this project, we cut out a number of horses from recycled cardboard (cereal boxes, etc.). For a template we used a dala horse template because of it is simple cutting lines, but something more elaborate would be beautiful. If you have a horse cookie cutter that would work as a template as well. We painted the cardboard in acrylics (yellow or red or gold). After the paint had dried, we made coats / blankets for our horses using the money envelopes. We cut the envelopes to the desired size and glued them to our cardboard houses.
All the pretty horses! We might attach our horses to a banner or a mobile or use them for place settings. We haven’t decided yet.
P.S. Canada Post releases the CNY Year of the Horse postage stamp on January 13th!
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