A rainy day is a great opportunity to get out the arts and crafts boxes and spend time with the kids making personalized gifts for friends and family. Nothing expresses love as well as a homemade card or a giant tissue paper flower. Many artists choose tissue for art projects because it can be easily shaped and cut into patterns for multiple craft projects.

This art medium is perfect for young kids as it is nontoxic and perfectly safe, with no sharp corners to cut into tender fingers. Tissue can be purchased in a wide variety of color hues and sizes. It is recommended that a giant package of tissue paper be bought because there are so many craft ideas tissue can be used for.

Tissue paper is popular with children and parents alike because it can be torn or ripped easily, avoiding the necessary use of scissors for art projects. The colors are bright and the tissue paper is very easy to handle for small fingers. Art projects for kid to create with tissue paper include beautiful and colorful tissue paper flowers.

These flowers can be given away as gifts or tied together to make a chain of colorful flashy paper tissue flowers to hang in their room as flower swag. To make a tissue paper flower, take a piece of paper and gently scrunch it into a fan-like shape. Holding the tissue pinch in the center, tie the folded paper with a pipe cleaner, preferably the same color as the tissue paper. Fan out the tissue paper to reveal a beautiful flower.

Kids can use scissors especially made for children to round out the petals of the flowers before they fan the paper out. Easter projects for kids that deal with paper crafts are fun and easy to make. Different colors of tissue and glue sticks are recommended for this project. Eliminating messy dyes, an Easter egg can be decorated with bits and pieces of tissue, applied directly to the shell with craft glue.

Kids will have fun taking paper and shredding them into tiny pieces of confetti paper as the eggs are boiling away in the pot. When the eggs are cooled and dried off with a paper towel, the kids can take glue sticks and rub the sticks upon onside of the egg and stick bits and pieces of different colored paper to the egg. The surface of the eggs should be cool to the touch for safety reasons. This is a quick and unique way to decorate Easter eggs for that all important Easter egg hunt!

A favorite among children are piñatas and a simple version for making a piñata can be accomplished by the use of tissue. For this project, a simple paper bag stuffed with assorted toys and candies and taped together at the top is needed, along with six to eight inch strips of colorful paper and stick and some string. The kids can glue the strips of tissue paper all over the paper bag in a bright and colorful pattern. The piñata can then be used for a birthday party right away!

One silk flower is not like ever other silk flower, they are all as unique as the quality of wine. I can remember 50 years ago creating zinnias and roses from crepe paper and thinking, I had created the utmost flower ever but in fact, the only things remarkable about my early "flowers" were their individuality. This was the beginning of my love of flowers and it did not matter to me, at that time, their poor quality. In the 1960's crepe paper flowers gave way to colored thin foam sheets which only increased there durability by not fading as quickly as crepe paper.

It is stated that the Chinese mastered the skills of working with silk more then 5000 years ago and in turn created the elaborate silk floral replicas. As early as the twelfth century, Marco Polo brought the art crafts to the Italians who began making artificial flowers and in the 14th century, the French continued to improve the quality of both fabrics and fabric flowers that they became know as the best.

Manufacturers have tired to recreate the beauty of perishable flowers and the mass production of the "plastic flower", kept the interest in artificial flowers at an unusually low point in history. The term "permanent botanicals" became the term most florist used for silk and other artificial flowers for many years.

Most flowers are now from the cotton/polyester blend fabrics that hold color dyes, retain their textures and display well, exceeding any manufactured product from the past. Today's flowers are magnificently real that to look at them from a distance one could never tell the authentic from a silk that you almost have to touch them to distinguish from nature's own. I challenge you to walk into a hotel lobby or a fine restaurant and see if you can tell the difference from a silk floral arrangement or the real plant. Some high quality flowers are hand painted to give that illusion of real blooms and stems.

Silk flowers are so well crafted one would never guess the authenticity. These beauties captivate me and I have to step close to touch them to see if they are in fact real. I have seen silk floral arrangements designed with a mix of silk flowers and leaves with real plants and I cannot tell the difference, I commend the florist designer their creativity.