Filth Wizardry

Valentines, and a couple of other things.

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:24:00 +0000

Here's a quick round up of all the possibly useful valentines type bits and bobs in the archives of Filth Wizardry for you. I was reminded the other day that I don't really have a great system for looking stuff up on this blog. I should really have nice drop down menus with wonderfully categorized post lists and thumbnail images and stuff and things, but basically it took me about two years to get my arse in gear to put a "search" box on here, so all of that seems sort of pie in the sky, given that I'm often typing one handed, and now with an added small person paddling me in the face with the palms of her adorably enthusiastic little hands and shouting "Dadadaaaaa!".

Something that is quite cool about the Blogger platform that I've only recently realized even though it's been available for ages, is that you can view any Blogger blog in several different ways. The way that I think works really well for browsing Filth Wizardry is the Magazine View that lets you see the first image from each post along with the first paragraph of text, so you can scan through them easier to find something that interests you. Anyway, on with the valentine's round up...

Paper plate hearty party hats.

(included with lots of other party hat ideas in my recent post over at Alpha Mom)

Giant Lollypop Valentines.

We're doing this for the third year in a row this year, because they are really cheap and easy and cute valentines, and I like seeing how the kids have grown since the last pictures too. Family Fun Magazine just published this, along with another project of ours (the Bernoulli box), which has been great for us, because they are lovely to work with and the extra income is very welcommed too. I've had a few readers contact me after noticing our crafts appearing in the Family Fun Mag, concerned that I wasn't being consulted about their use of our ideas, but fear not, they are totally above board with requesting permission to use specific original items from Filth Wizardry, and are super diligent with contract signing and all that good stuff too. I love that I am lucky enough to have wonderfully loyal readers that will take the time to let me know if they see our intellectual property being mishandled though. That makes keeping on top of the unpleasant side of blogging so much easier, so thank you to those of you that got in touch over this and other sighted uses of our crafts elsewhere.

DIY heart iron on patches.

Another post I wrote over at Alpha Mom showing how to make cute little custom felt heart patches using plastic bags and pens. Great for sewing on clothing or making badges from!

Mini Roses from Dollar Store Crepe Paper.

These are so cheap to make and reasonably fast too. There's a rather chaotic video tutorial of me trying to show you how to make them with just a little bit too much help from Carys ;)

Toilet Roll Tube Valentine's Necklaces.

We're doing these again this year too. The kids are really keen to make them again.

Printable mini valentines cards.

This is just a printable set of eight mini valentine's cards that I drew for the kids to colour back in 2009. Still available to download here.

Cardboard Heart Crowns.

Another rather old post with lots of messy paint. Aw, Ffi looks so teensy (and mucky) in this photo. Hard to believe she'll be six years old in a few weeks!

So that's the Valentine's round up for now. If we do anything new this year I'll try and post about it, but right now we are elbow deep in the latest bout of Star Wars nonsense. I'll pull together a post on the ridiculous latest Star Wars themed craft that we've been larking about within the next few days hopefully if I can get the kids to stand still long enough to take a photo with them! In the mean time, you might get a giggle out of Loo Roll Leiha recording a message on TP roll R2...

"Help us Obi Wan Kenobi! We've run out of bog roll!"

R2D2 mini secret storage box from recycling

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:59:00 +0000

This is something we made almost eight months ago and I just haven't found the time to post until now. We'd been to the Bay Area Maker Faire back in May 2011 and the kids had had a wonderful time there, the high point of which was hanging out with the Astromech group and all their R2D2 builds. Totally amazing workmanship and engineering! Carys, who is a Star Wars nut, wore her Droid t-shirt especially to go and meet R2 and even drew him a picture.

The kids decided that we needed to make our own R2 unit, but making anything even remotely as fabulous as Astromech have done requires rather a lot of cash for parts and a hell of a lot of time dedicated to it as well, so it wasn't going to happen on anywhere approaching that scale (not least because I was a month away from having Delyth). We did put together some baby R2s to play with though, and because they were made from things in the recycling bin and hot glue, the kids got to be involved in the building process. I've photographed the process here so you can also have a go at making them if you want to.

From Left to Right: Ffion's R2, Carys's R2, y R2.

These little guys are made using popsicle sticks, a cardboard toilet roll tube, the bottom part of one of those plastic easter eggs used for egg hunts, the lid off a gallon milk jug, and a cardboard print out that I designed to make the feet and shoulder parts. His dome can be put on and taken off easily, and you can store secret messages inside your R2 unit, just like Leia stores her message to Obi-Wan in R2D2 himself! My kids have written messages on paper to go in their R2s, but you could record something and put it on a USB flash drive or memory card to fit in there too, or make one to use as an elaborate gift box. We started off as we usually do with most creative endeavours, with our box of junk...

The thing that made me think we could pull this off was noticing that the bottom part of the plastic easter eggs that we'd saved from our egg hunt fitted exactly onto the end of a toilet roll tube, and I mean EXACTLY. It fitted easily on and sort of clicked like it does with the top part of the egg, so it will rotate like R2's dome, but won't fall off, even if you turn it upside down, but you can take it off easily without damaging the tube too, which makes it perfect to be used as a little storage pot.

Just look how well they fit together!

Here are most of the bits we needed to make the three R2s. You actually need six popsicle sticks for each model plus three lots of the print out template that I've linked to later on in this post.

First we cut the toilet roll tubes down to be the right height (about 5cm), then snipped lots of little tabs into the bottom of one end so that we could glue the milk bottle lid on. The milk bottle lid had just the right texture along the sides of it to be used for R2's base, but was a little bit too small to be glued in place without making those little tabs and folding them in.

We used hot glue to stick the two pieces together, because it works great for sticking plastic things, and the kids love using the hot glue guns to get immediate results.

So with the half of the plastic egg popped on top, that's the basic body of your R2 done.

Now we had to figure out how to make legs that were going to be the right size and shape, and be sturdy enough to hold R2's body and whatever we stored in it, without falling over or falling apart. There wasn't anything in our box of junk that was going to work for the feet or the tops of his legs. I did think about maybe trying to use the white lids from tick tack boxes, but we didn't have enough of them and it wasn't quite right anyway, so I decided to make little cardboard templates that we could cut out, fold and glue instead. The leg part that makes them sturdy enough is made from cutting down some popsicle sticks with an exacto knife and gluing them together. Generally we try to let our kids have hands on experience with real tools under supervision, but I did the exacto knife part for them. They were only five and six years old when we made these, and even as a grown up I still manage to maim myself with an exacto quite frequently. Maybe I need adult supervision?

It would look nicer if you glued the popsicle sticks together in sets of three after you've cut them, but we didn't have suitable glue, so we used some electrical tape to hold them together instead. The side legs need the popsicle sticks to be cut to 6.5cm long and the middle one needs to be 3cm.

Click here to get the pdf template that I made for the cut out and glue card leg parts. They are rather small, so if your kids are young like mine then you'll likely have to do this bit for them, or at least be an extra pair of hands to hold things in place while they glue. I reckon kids that are nine or ten and older will be able to do this bit just fine on their own though.

By the way, the pdf mentions a bead in the list of things you'll need. I was going to use it to glue onto the dome for a realistic thingymadoodle that R2 has poking out on there, but the kids wanted to draw it on with pens, so we didn't bother with that part in the end.

Here are the three feet and two shoulder parts from the print out, having been cut out and scored by me, ready to fold and glue.

Here they are all folded up and glued together. You can see that the middle foot is slightly different to the other two because the popsicle stick leg goes into it at an angle, rather than straight down like with the two side legs.

To fix them onto the popsicle sticks we squeezed hot glue into the feet and shoulder pieces and then pushed the popsicle sticks in, holding them in place until the glue cooled and set, then folded the feet parts closed and glued them shut.

This is how your R2 legs and feet should look, ready to be glued onto the body.

and here is the completed R2, ready to be decorated.

We gave the whole of the body a coat of white paint. This would be really easy if you have spray paint, but we didn't, so we just used some white acrylic craft paint to give R2 a plain white base coat. It doesn't look perfect, but R2 is an old droid in the original three movies, so having him look a bit untidy sort of works in the same way that our Wall-E we made out of recycling didn't have to look new either.

R2's dome is silver, and again, spray paint would have been useful, but what we had at hand was a silver Sharpie pen, so to make that adhere well and not rub off, we sanded the plastic egg part a bit to rough it up, then coloured it in with the pen. Here are our R2 units all lined up ready to decorate.

As far as adding the details went, I just put out a few fine tipped sharpies, one blue, one black, one silver and one red, plus a pencil and everyone used a picture in a book we had as a reference. Yes, I enjoyed decorating my R2D2 as much as the kids did!

R2D2 by Ffion, Aged 5.

R2D2 by Carys, Aged 6.

Hope you enjoyed this post and that, even though it's rather involved, someone out there (whether it be a kid or a grown up) will give this a whirl. I've noticed that the plastic Easter eggs have already started appearing on the shelves at the Dollar Tree!

If you like the idea of making robots out of recycling then you might like these two posts from a while back:

Wall-E from recycling.
Remote control Dalek from recycling (yes, I know that a Dalek is more a cyborg than a robot)

or, if you're just into Star Wars then maybe one of these posts from the Filth Wizardry archives will interest you:

Star Wars peg dolls and space ships from recycling (plus a link through to Mr Wizard's home made millenium falcon doll house)
Balloon torch light sabers plus some light painting photography.
Milk jug storm trooper helmet.

I'll be back in a few days with some links to Valentine's type crafts from the archives that might be handy in the next couple of weeks :)

Super easy paper plate hats for every occasion

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:14:00 +0000

Wheee! First craft project of 2012 that I've written up!

Here's a link to my latest post over at Alpha Mom. Pop on over to see how you can make a very simple hat design from a single paper plate, with no glue or tape or anything, just a paper plate and a pair of scissors. I've also included several hat variations that will suit different holidays and a print out that shows you how to cut twelve different hat designs, plus a couple of party game ideas that these hats work well for.

I've got to say that I'm really impressed that so many of the other bloggers with kids out there get so much written up and posted. I've still got half written posts from 2011 lurking back here! I have got a couple that should be quick to finish for you though. Man, one of them has been festering since 2010, and it's a good one, but I just haven't got a video of it in action yet. I also have one from last year that uses the plastic easter eggs that are now starting to appear in the stores again, so I'll try and finish that one up too. Ahhhh, the todo list, how it mocks me!

In other scatterbrained "the less sleep you have, the less you behave like a grown up" news... In my giddy enthusiasm for paper plate hats, I tried on Ffion's shamrock hat before it was completely dry and later several people notified me while I was out that I had "green in my hair". If only I'd had a hat, or Jedi mind control skills (Alec Guinness impersonation) "There is *no* green in my hair" (end Alec Guinness impersonation). So far today I think all that's on me is smashed up teething biscuit and drool (it's still early though).

Anyhoo, for any of my readers that happen to be in the Bay Area, there are a couple of cool things happening this weekend that we're going along to and thought you might be interested in knowing about too.

Firstly, this Saturday there is an "Open Make" event at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The theme is "Toys" and there will be a few makers there to share their works with visitors and lots of hands on stuff for the kids.

The second is a presentation given by "The Wild Cat Education and Conservation Fund" in the Los Altos Hills area. If you're up north of here then there's another presentation by them next weekend in Sebastopol too.

Hope you have a lovely weekend. We'll be sloshing about in our wellies, because the rains are finally here! I am very proud of myself because I managed to get all the rogue socks strewn about the back yard inside before the rain came. One was in a tree! My kids need spray on footwear.

Back from Blighty!

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:45:00 +0000

Well, we're what, nearly three weeks into 2012 now and I'm only just saying happy new year? It took us a while to reset after getting back from the UK, dashing up to Tahoe for a mate's wedding immediately, and then back home to get over the jet lag and start school again. I think we're back on an even keel now though, so, Happy New Year!

It was so so good to see friends and family back in Wales and England over the holidays. It hurts my heart that we can't be nearer to them more often. Everyone got to meet Delyth for the first time, which was great because she's such a happy little camper, and at six months old she adored the attension. Plus she is sitting up, crawling backwards and saying some darn cute babbly baby nonsense too, which the two bigger filth wizards think is great fun.

Just look how spoiled she was by our families!
My Mum.

My dad and sister.

Paul's folks.

Paul with the girls and their cousin.

I don't have a craft project to post for you right this minute, but I did want to share with you some pics from our trip. If you've been to Wales or live there then you'll understand my love for the place. If you've never visited then definitely put North Wales on the list! Really, no matter what time of year we go, whatever the weather, the beauty of the place shines through like nowhere else I've experienced.

From Rhosgadfan at sunrise,

to Portmeirion just before sun set.

to Llanberris Pass in the rain and fog

We also got to have a very personal guided tour of the Blue John Caverns in Castleton (Derbyshire) because it was off season, it was just our family and my best mate that were taken 300ft underground into the caverns by Ben, who is one of the two miners that works there. The kids were really great down there and Delyth slept in the sling for most of it too, so we could really take it all in and find out about the history of the place and what mining there involves. I felt really lucky to have had that kind of tour of the place, because Ben said that in the summer they can have groups of sixty or more going down there at once. One of the coolest parts for me was seeing the fossils of ocean creatures so far underground.

People have asked me a lot about the journey itself and how we've managed long haul flying year after year with the kids at various ages. I'm not really sure I have any advice on the subject because honestly I'm not sure that we've even got it figured out ourselves. There are just so many variables. We manage it and we have a sense of humour about it, but you just never know how it's going to go. As evidence I present Carys's journal entry for the day we flew San francisco to London, which takes about eleven hours... Poor Ffion. The other three flights were better thankfully!

We were reminded also how good our freinds are to us. We stayed with some friends in Manchester for a few days when we landed and dealt with the eight hours worth of jet lag and they were fantastic to us and even stayed up into the wee hours catching up, which meant they had to go to work with very little sleep! When we got home we were picked up from the airport by another friend, who's wife had put fresh milk and fruit in our fridge for us because they knew we were only home for a few hours before driving up to Tahoe and these friends have a two week old baby! Awesome friends are awesome! Actually, as I type this, Paul is off picking up these friends because their car has just broken down on the way to school. In the words of Bill and Ted, "Be excellent to each other!".

Just as a crafty tid bit to leave you with though, Kami over at "Get Your Mess On" and "Austin Tinkering School" let me know about a great instructables tutorial on making Unicorn poop cookies last week. We made some over the weekend for my daughter's friend's birthday party and the kids decorated the bakery box too. Here's the link to the tutorial. The kids had a blast making these, and we made more with friends on Monday too. The friend we gave them to called them "fantasy forrest fertilizer". Well worth making! Not least because the kids get to spend quite a while making not that many cookies, so the mess and sugar consumption to entertainment ratio is very agreeable.

I'll be back soon with more Filth Wizardry antics, but until then, party on dudes and have a most excellent start to 2012!

Gingerbread house photo cards

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Hello my festive little wizards! We're over the pond at the moment. Just beat the jet lag and there have only been three major barfing incidents since we landed, and that, believe it or not is an improvement on last year.

Just popping in to let you know that I've written a post over at Alpha Mom along with printable templates showing how to make these little gingerbread house cards that stand up and have little snap closing doors with photos inside for the holidays, so if you want to print them out and have a go (makes a good grandma and grandpa gift from the kids) then here's the link over to the tutorial.

The other nice thing about this project is that other than the print outs, it uses only a couple of things that you've likely got in your recycling bin, so very easy to pull together. Plus you can equally go freestyle with it if you don't have a printer, or your kids are more into drawing their own thing than colouring.

I hope you all have a lovely winter break with lots of happy family vibes and plenty of custard cream biscuits (Oh, wait, the custard cream biscuit thing is just us, because we haven't had any in over a year and now I need to eat all of them, plus Wensleydale cheese, sausage rolls from Edward's in Conwy and as much fish and chips as is humanly possible)

Fa la la la laaaaaaa, la la la laaaaaaaa! Burp.

Festive bits and bobs

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:22:00 +0000

We're off tomorrow to visit the family back in the UK! Whooo! Can't say I'm looking forward to the long haul flights with more kids than grown ups, but at least these days Carys and Ffion are carrying their own bags, rather than me and Paul carrying both them and the luggage :) Looks like the kids get to leave their shoes on going through security this year too, so that's at least a small change in the pleasant direction. Last year when we did this trip Delyth was inutero and flying whilst pregnant turns the morning sickness dial up to eleven for me, so I'm hoping I'll find this flight a lot easier having her on the outside as well. Anyhoo, besides the blerch of flying,we're really looking forward to seeing friends and family that we haven't seen for a year and introducing them to the wee one. While we're gone though, here's a little run down of links to some of the festive crafts we've done on Filth Wizardry over the years in case a few take your fancy...

From 2010.

Massive amounts of morning sickness and no blogging!

From 2009.

From 2008.

For any readers I might have that live in the SF Bay Area, I want to give a shout out about RSV Chrismas Tree Farm. We went there a couple of weekends ago and it was the best place ever! It's a family owned place and all the people that work there are the family and good freinds of the owners and it's just a delightfully chilled out place to be with your family. We'd never gone there before and only made the trip because we'd heard about the swings that they have there. OH MY GOODNESS, the swings are AWESOME! The kids had the best afternoon at this place, eating toasted marshmallows and trying out all the swings hidden around the farm, including a not so hidden utterly enormous swing that puts all other swings on the planet to shame. There are hammocks dotted around the farm and picnic tables and giant xylophones. Really lovely place to be and really lovely people running it too.

These people didn't pay me or give me anything to write about them, I just wanted to share because it was so much fun that I thought my kids faces were going to break from all the grinning! Well worth a trip if you're anywhere near, plus it's right next to Ano Nuevo State Beach, where you can go on a docent led tour of the Elephant Seal breeding grounds. We do that every year and will be going when we get back in the new year because the baby seals will have been born by then.

I'll have another Holiday craft appearing over on Alpha Mom before Christmas, so when that's up I'll let you know. Hope you all have a fabaroo winter break (or summer break if you're on the other side of the sphere) I can't wait to see the kids running up to Grandma and Grandpa's front door and to see the look on mum's face when she finally gets to cuddle Del. Happy Holidays!!!

Laminated Autumn leaf magnets

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:34:00 +0000

There are a couple of ways of preserving fall leaves that I keep seeing popping up on the blogs this time of year. One is painting them with Mod Podge, like Jean does with her daughter over at The Artful Parent, the other is dipping the leaves in wax of some kind (soy/beeswax etc) like here on Autumn Comfort Candles. I was wondering about doing one of these options with the girls, but I was chatting with my oldest daughter's teacher a couple of days ago and she suggested laminating autumn leaves and I started thinking this might make a more useable item for the kids rather than a purely decorative one.

Obviously sealing leaves inside plastic isn't going to give results as natural looking or eco-freindly as the other preservation methods, but I hope that these will last through a good few years of play. My kids would turn leaves made in the other methods into fall coloured dust in no time at all. The other thing about this approach that suits us is that our fridge-freezer is ancient and ugly as sin. Our landlord obviously looked at it's rusty ass and said to himself "no-one's going to want this in their kitchen, but it still works, so I'm not getting rid of it". His unconventional solution was to paint it with the same paint that he used to paint the walls.The result scores a negative eight on the Marthastewartometer. We need pretty things to cover this lumpy magnolia matt emulsion and rust speckled monolith with! Fall leaf magnets to the rescue!

We pressed our leaves in a book for a couple of days, then sent them through the little laminator we have and then cut them out and taped a bit of flexible magnet to the back. You can buy rolls of magnetic tape from craft stores, but we just cut up free magnets that businesses hand out like the Round Table pizza ones that come through the door with tear off coupons attached.

They work like a charm and the kids have been sorting them and making patterns with them. We deliberately walked home along a different road from school this afternoon to see if we could find some yellow leaves to add. Have any of you laminated leaves before? I'm wondering how long I can expect the colours to last before we get photodegredation. They aren't in direct sunlight where they are, so I guess that helps. We'll have to press some flowers in the spring to do this with too!

Thanksgiving turkey craft over at Alpha Mom

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 04:19:00 +0000

Another crafty thingumyproject for you that I've written up over at Alpha Mom. It's an easy peasy lemon squeezy thanksgiving craft that should help keep the littlies busy at the dinner table and there's a print out template that I made for it too, so pop on over to the post here to see how they are put together (they are made using things that you probably have at home already).

Something that I didn't put in the post over there, but thought that my readers over here would get a giggle out of is the "thankful feather" that Paul drew before he went off to work this morning. Yeah, geek dad is geeky. That's a false colour representation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (including the microwave contribution of the Milky Way, which is the central red part). And Ffion thought it was pretty, so copied it. Definitely keeping those!

Being British rather than American, I've always leaned towards doing generic Autumn type activities around this time of year, rather than specific thanksgiving themed projects, but I was still surprised to find that after eight years of living in the US, this is the first thanksgiving themed craft I've posted about!

We've taken to celebrating thanksgiving by taking a packed lunch to a local forrest. It's turned into a nice tradition for us and one that I look forward to (yeah, it's also nice that I don't have to cook a proper thanksgiving feast. I just have to make sandwiches!) I just looked through some of our old photos from thanksgivings gone by and got all nostalgic. These little people grow so fast!

Hope you have some lovely times planned for next week, even if you aren't from the US and don't have the thanksgiving tradition.

P.S. The turkeys survived most of the day here, even after we had ten kids marauding about the house after school, but around dinner time I found some unfortunate turkey roadkill splatted on the kitchen table.

Cheapskate cardboard canvas wall display

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 06:22:00 +0000

I know I only just mentioned a couple of posts ago that we still have our leaf rubbing mural from 2009 up in the kitchen, and really this is the right season to have it there too I suppose, but for some reason the urge struck yesterday to change things up a little. Maybe it's because it's getting darker and gloomier out and we are craving a bit of extra vibrance around the house, who knows. It had been a good few weeks since we'd got out the pots of sloppy paint too, and that was a travesty that needed to be put right.

I've got a few of these corrugated sheets of cardboard from inbetween the pallettes of toilet roll at Costco. Actually, I've always got at least a few of these handy, but shhhhhh. We needed something big to fill the white wall space above our kitchen table, so rather than getting the girls to collaborate on one big piece, I thought we'd try a lot of smaller "canvases" that could be put together to make a larger one.

I've always loved seeing posts that other people do where they use proper artists canvases and let their kids paint them and give them to grandparents as gifts or put them up in their own homes, but several factors have meant that we've not gone that route ourselves. Firstly, those lovely stretched canvases are kind of expensive, even if you get them on offer, and especially the larger ones! Secondly, we rent and so putting lots of holes in the walls to hang big things is not really going to happen. Thirdly, and I think this is really the biggest reason, but maybe it's all in my head, is that it seems like a lot of pressure to put on someone. Giving them a canvas. A proper big blank artist's canvas, and saying "go for it. Paint whatever you like". I would have been frozen as a child, torn as to what I should paint, worried that I only had the one canvas and didn't want to waste my chance or mess up what I decided to paint. I think I'd be somewhat like that now as an adult too if you gave me a nice big proper canvas and said I could use it to paint something big for our home.

In an effort to get the effect of having canvases hanging rather than the paper taped to the wall that we've been doing up until now, but not have the kids feel any pressure or have to spend any money, I decided to chop up some of that corrugated cardboard and cover it with butcher block paper for them to paint.

Because we had seven canvases that were all going to be displayed together, I asked the kids if they could explore with colours and shapes, rather than painting people or objects. They were really open to the idea of just playing with the paint, rather than trying to make a representation of something. Honestly, I was expecting a bit more of a push back against the idea of going abstract on this project because both girls are heavily into drawing comic books at the moment, but they always surprise me with the varied directions their enthusiasm allows us to go.

We had a couple of hours in the back yard before the sun packed up for the day and happily, the bairn was very contented to sit and watch her sisters paint, which meant I got a few photos.

Paint, shoot a bow and arrow, go back to painting, it's the creative process right?

Today I put the paintings together to go on the wall by taping two lengths of string to the back of each column of canvasses and tying the strings together at the top. I hung each of the three columns on a single thumb tack, which meant we have this large display with just three teensy thumb tack holes high up on the wall. The cardboard and paper was light enough that we could have hung more from a single thumb tack if we'd wanted to. If our home had stairs then I'd really want to use this method to have artwork all up the stairs.

I have a feeling I'll be making a lot more of these "canvases" in the future, because the children got a kick out of being presented with the various sizes and dimensions to work on, and they could really be free and uninhibited with their painting, because they could see that we could make more easily and very quickly so they could just keep going with it until they felt done. The hallway is likely to get a similar treatment soon I think.

The bright colours in our kitchen came at just the right time, because today was so rotten and rainy and dark that we had to have the lights on in the house ALL DAY! Blergh. I've talked about some of the abstract paintings that the kids have done in the past:

One post about easle painting here
and another one here.

My oldest daughter was especially prolific with these, and I think I was missing the ones we used to have up in the kitchen. They are very proud of how it all looks hanging up like this.

Halloween 2011 chuckles

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 05:42:00 +0000

I wanted to post a couple of photos of our Halloween antics for you, because I'd mentioned plans to make costumes that the kids had requested and also I wanted to show you the decorations they helped to make for the front yard.

I think maybe I'm an unorganised blogger, because often our seasonal projects are very last minute and I don't get to post about them until after the holiday is over, so too late for readers to really do anything with the idea other than bookmark it for next year if they like it, but in my defence, I do try and do a round up of previous year's antics before the holiday, so I'll likely mention anything we did this year for Halloween, just before Halloween 2012. We were so last minute with our yard decorating that it got done on the afternoon of Halloween itself. We enjoyed the frantic putting it together though and the girls thought it was really funny.

So, I ended up making Carys the Ms Frizzle costume that she had requested, but like I usually do, I left it until the night before, so I was up quite late trying to make the dress. I used an old kid's white shirt and a white knitted dollar tree earwarmer/headband thing for the cuffs of the dress. I would have used the shirt cuffs, but it was a VERY old shirt and the cuffs were too small! The material I got for it was outerspace themed cotton print that I think was likely quilting material. It worked really well though and I sewed some satin type quilt binding around the bottom of the dress. To make the pattern for the dress I used a shirt dress that fitted Carys and just approximated the pattern pieces from that. One thing that was very helpful though was a post by LiEr over at Ikatbag, showing how to adapt a sleeve pattern piece to varying styles of sleeve, whilst making sure that it's still going to fit well. Thank you LiEr! By following her advice I was able to make the slightly puffed top sleeves that Ms Frizzle wears. Very clear tutorial that even me at stupid o'clock at night could follow :)

Kiddo wore a tutu under the dress to make it nice and full and we glued a sun and moon cardboard decoration to her dress up shoes. The finishing touch was just luck really. The local thrift store happened to have a really ratty looking auburn wig for $2, but after a bit of a clean and brush I was able to tie it back into a Ms Frizzle style hairdo and her costume was complete. It nearly didn't work at all when I realised that I hadn't taken into account if the dress would actually fit over her head with the buttons undone, but a tab of velcro on the front placket of the dress fixed that. Phew.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that Ffion had decided to be Rapunzel, which was really easy because there was a princess dress at the same thrift store that we got the wig from for just $3, so all I had to do was shorten it a bit and make her a fake frying pan out of foam sheets from some of computer packaging and a roll of black craft from from the dollar tree. Yay hot glue funtime!

I also talked about the idea of dressing Delyth up as a lizard to be either Pascal to Ffion's Rapunzel, or Liz to Carys's Ms Frizzle, and a couple of readers gave some excellent suggestions as to how we could pull that off, but, well, we saw a frog costume at the thrift store and it was very cute and snuggly and only $3, so we figured it was close enough and she was lovely and cosy in it while we trick or treated.

The thank you cards that we made from Carys's drawing were a big hit with our neighbours and Carys did enjoy giving them out almost as much as she enjoyed the candy that they gave her, so we'll definitely be doing that again next year!

Now for the last minute yard decorating. My kids caught the bug for the game "Plants vs Zombies" from some friends of theirs a while ago. They dont' really do much in the way of computer games, but this one really caught their attention and I kind of like it because it's funny and silly but does involve a bit of strategy and a bit of math. Our front yard is in a similar style to the one in the game, so for Halloween the kids wanted to decorate it with the plants and gravestones from the game. I just grabbed a few of the polystyrene gravestones from the dollar store to use and then I drew out some of the plants and the kids coloured them in. We taped a BBQ skewer to the back of each one to stand it up in the lawn.

Last touch was a zombie mask that Ffion was insistant must be a girl zombie, so she could reinact the game. I'd love to have gone all out with this and made more masks and more plants and maybe even a cut out of Crazy Dave to go on our porch, but we just had enough time to get those few bits done and that was enough to please the kids.

By the time we were done with all the sewing and chopping up paper and cardboard, the kitchen looked like someone had thrown a grenade onto the set of Project Runway, but it all worked out in the end. I've been pretty lucky so far with the kid's requests for Halloween costumes. The last two years only one kid has asked for a costume that you can't find an approximation of at a thrift store.

Last year Carys wanted to be Darth Vader, which was great because a mate of mine had a costume from her son and it was Ffion that needed the custom approach because she was hell bent on being Cindy Lauper from the music video of "Hey Now". Given my habit of leaving everything until the last minute, I'll be in big trouble if they ever decide to both ask for something awkward one year. I know I'm not the only one that gets unusual requests for Halloween costumes, because this year a reader wrote to me about her son wanting to dress up as a chair. Hooray for kids with oodles of imagination! Have any of you had to accomodate unorthodox costume requests? I'd love to hear about them if you have.

Hope you all had a lovely Halloween!

Trick or treat thank you cards

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 20:12:00 +0000

Just a quick fly by post today. I have a lot of sewing and drawing and cutting out to do this afternoon! I've talked before about how we try to give something in return for the treats that we get at Halloween, just to offset the feeling of trick or treating being a grabathon. In past years we've taken cookies around with us to give to neighbours along our trick or treat route, but this year Carys wanted to make them a Happy Halloween card, so she drew this spooky picture and I scanned and shrunk it for her so that we could print out four little thank you cards to one sheet of paper.

They are just black and white so that you can print them easily and colour them if you want to. I think she's just going to write "thank you" on the inside of the cards and give one to whoever is handing out candy at the doors we knock on. She's very proud of them. If you'd like to print some too then just click on the thumbnail image below to get the full size image (which fits on US letter sized paper). Or if you have time let your kids draw their own.

Happy Halloween!

Colourful skull and monster cookies

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 04:16:00 +0000

I've just written up a little Halloween project over at Alpha Mom about using cookie dough as playdough and baking it into nomable 3D monster and skull cookie sculptures. We had a lot of fun doing this one and as you can probably tell, it's not something that you have to limit to Halloween. You can make any cookie your imagination can invent with this technique. I'm quite tempted to get a bunch more dough made and make a cookie solar system or a cookie self portraits. Endless possibilities and when you've got more than one kid and only one rolling pin and hardly any cookie cutters, this is a great alternative to conventional cookie baking! so pop over to Alpha Mom to read more and see some more photos too.

We have had fun with cookie dough and food colouring in the past here as well, making giant cookies and pizza cookie here, plus candy cane cookies last year and cookies that you could lace with too.

Hope you've all got your Halloween costumes ready. We haven't! Carys only told me a couple of days ago that she wants to be Miss Frizzle from The Magic School Bus series of books, which I think is a totally awesome choice, but does mean that I need to do some sewing over the next week. At least the princess dress that Ffion wants to wear just needs the length altering. Any ideas for a really easy baby costume for Delyth? I thought maybe I could make her a lizard costume, so she could be either Liz to Carys's Miss Frizzle, or Pascal to Ffion's Rapunzel, but that seems like a lot of work right now!

Halloween and other people's projects

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 07:25:00 +0000

I want to post about the birthday gift that we (me and Paul) made for Carys this year, but it's going to have to wait because it ain't done yet! Arg, bit off more than I could chew in the time available, but she's a cracking kid and totally understands that it's nearly ready and I just want it to not be a rushed mess because with any luck this gift will be something that lasts for many years. I'll be excited to show you some pics when it is done though.

She had a few little gifts actually on the day though, so she was happy. One that really went down well was the "birthday coupons", which was a totally last minute thing scribbled on some index cards at almost midnight before her birthday. She's actually using the ice-cream for breakfast one tomorrow morning, at least that's what she said before bed anyway. Have any of you tried this? I think we're going to do it for every birthday from now on (maybe even for me and Paul!)

This post is mainly to give kudos to some people that have tried out some of the things on Filth Wizardry and made their own versions and also to give a bit of a round up of anything Halloween themed or fall themed from the archives for any of you that are new here and won't have seen them because they are burried in the depths of my badly tagged posts.

I got into the habit last year of doing round ups every now and again to share other people's versions of our projects, but I let that slip and I'd like to start doing those round ups again. Unfortunately, even if people did email me about their takes on our crafts over that period of time, I'm not going to be able to find them easily in my chaotic inbox, so this little round up is just a few things that have been brought to my attention over the last week or so. In the future I'll try to be a bit better about putting emails in the right places and not getting burried under them.

Kami from Get Your Mess On (also of Austin Tinkering School awesomeness) posted about the hot glue and wooden stick marble and ping pong ball fun they had after reading our tribute to Scott Weaver post. Love that they got some marble run action going with theirs, because we all got sidetracked into the sculpture side of it and didn't get very far with the plans to make it a dynamic sculpture.
Eden Folwell and her daughter did some snail painting together. Boy is that a blast from the past for us! Our 2008 snail painting is still up in the kitchen. I am rather sentimental about certain pieces of art that we've made together and that was a very fun afternoon we had making that one!
Speaking of art that I am sentimental about, Meri cherry over at her blog by the same awesome name posted about the leaf rubbing mural her class made after seeing our one from 2009. This is another thing that we still have up on our wall years later because I love it so much. Seeing the one that Meri's kids made gave me the grins and a bucket full of nostalgia too.

If you have had a go at one of the projects/experiments/crafts/stunts posted on Filth Wizardry then let me know and I'll add your link to a round up in the future :)

Possibly useful Halloween and Fall posts.

With Halloween around the corner, here are a few old posts that might come in handy for last minute costume making or decorating or just fall themed makings...

Halloween pancakes from 2009. This was before Jim from Jim's Pancakes went and put my efforts to shame! Have you seen, he's doing Star Wars pancakes now! Tardis Pancake dude! Make a Tardis pancake!
Jack-o-lantern apple printing, Frankenstein hand prints and halloween stencils from 2009.
Toilet roll bat decorations from 2009.
Milk jug trick or treat pumpkin pots from 2008.
Jack-o-lantern pinata from 2009.
Pumpkin carving daftness from 2009.

As far as costume stuff goes, here are a few posts that might help with last minute cheap ideas...

If you've got a little girl and two little boys, I would love to see someone do Amy Pond, The Doctor and Rory as The Last Centurion. Yes, if the remote controlled Dalek from recycling didn't give it away, I am a bit of a Dr Who fan. Here's our Roman centurion costume from cardboard and crepe paper that you could whip up pretty fast.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy mermaid tail from some old sweat pants and a flouncy skirt at Goodwill.
Headband Star Wars masks for trick or treating. With bonus weird photo of our dessicated 2009 Christmas tree done up for Halloween.
Balloon torch light sabers for last minute Jedi trick or treating.
The funny looking but beloved old milk jug storm trooper helmet. Also milk jug batman masks.
Insect antennae for bug costumes. Made from felt and electrical ties.
Superhero fleece poncho capes for if it's very cold where you are trick or treating.
Newspaper swords for pirates, muskateers and I dunno, kid's that want to be olympic fencers?
Seriously last minute panick stricken costume possibilities also include Origami bunny ears and the gift bag robot costume (Aw, my girls look so little! How time flies) and all manner of weird stuff out of aluminium foil :)

One kid has decided she wants to be rapunzel for Halloween, no doubt along with all the other girls in her class, but she'll be the only one with a Vic and Bob style homemade foam frying pan if I have my way :) The other one hasn't expressed her preference yet and I have no idea what to put the littlest one in either, but we'll figure something out closer to the time.

We're off to have some fun at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire tomorrow. Thought I'd mention it in case any local folk don't know that it's going on and might like to take part.

Back on Thursday with a new Halloween project for you!

Invention kit party bags

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:57:00 +0000

Well, I left this until the very last moment! I'm not sure if this is the norm all across America or if it's done anywhere else in the world either, but here locally in the elementary schools, kids bring in treat bags for their friends when it's their own birthday. Carys is about to turn seven and she wanted to make each of her classmates an "invention kit". She's really into making things, totally random things, mind bogglingly weird things with all the bits and pieces of craft supplies and recycling that we have in our home, so it seemed like a natural sort of gift to come from her.

My first thought was "How do I make this not look like a bag of bits and bobs of random rubbish?" I personally loved the idea of an invention kit vs the usual plastic party bag misc, but I didn't want her friends to think "Why are you giving me paperclips and string you weirdo?", so I figured a bit of creative marketing might do the trick.

The other reason I liked the idea was that we could put it together quite cheaply for a class of 24 kids. I had quite a lot of stuff around already that we could use in the kits, so it only took $4 spent in Daiso for the bags and candy, plus another $10 in the Dollar Tree for extra bits.

In the bags are:

Paper (origami sheets and strips)
Craft foam
card (coloured index card)
Goggly eyes
Rubber bands
A balloon
Metalic tie tags
Paper clips
Straws
Glitter glue
A Magnet
Popsicle sticks
Crayons
Double sided sticky foam pads
Pom poms
Adhesive Jewels
String
A mini flourescent cable tie
Foam stickers
Pipe cleaners
Modeling clay
2 different candies

Quite a lot fits in the little bag! I won't lie, it took a while to divide up all the bits into the 24 bags and make the paper topper for the kit, but it was done in a couple of hours, so not all that bad really.

I put together the label for the top of the bag to personalise the gift and to make it look a bit like a proper craft kit so the kids are more enthused with the notion of an open ended, inventing project. They are just printed on regular printer paper, two to a sheet, folded over and then stapled onto the top of the bag. This is the back of the label that lists the contents.

I actually had enough supplies to make 30 bags, which is great because we have some freinds coming over for Pizza and a movie on her actual birthday, which is Saturday, so they can have a kit each too.

We've been planning and making her birthday present again this year. You might remember the Falcon dollhouse and Star Wars peg dolls from last year, well this year we've attempted something a bit bigger and significantly more ambitious, so with a three month old also in the picture, it'll be interesting to see if we can get it finished in time. By the way, the aforementioned three month old just keeps getting more and more delicious every day and looks so much like her biggest sister, the birthday girl did at that age!

The photo on the left was taken almost seven years ago! Seven! Brain cannot compute!

DIY cloth pirate maps

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:12:00 +0000

Yarrrr! Talk like a pirate day be just around the corner Mateys!

September 19th to be exact. We've been making our own pirate treasure hunting maps over at Alpha Mom this year. It's a very simple project, using things you likely have around the house anyway. These maps will stand the test of time too, because they are cloth and so can't be ripped easily and can also be laundered, providing a keepsake of your child's artwork as well as a nifty play thing.

So me hearties, click over to Alpha Mom to see my post there on how we made these.

Also, if you are new around these parts, you might want to check out last year's Talk Like A Pirate Day craft that I did over there, making rolled newspaper pirate swords and pirate girl bandana skirts for all your feminine swashbuckling needs :)

The technique used to make these maps is one that we've used in the past to make skirts for the kids out of their own artwork, but as you can see, it's such a flexible and easy way to get designs onto cloth, kids can use it to create pretty much anything their hearts desire.

Ooooh, you could even make a pirate map skirt or shorts ;)

"Make Stuff Together" Giveaway winner.

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:18:00 +0000

Aaaaaand the winner of the copy of "Make Stuff Together" that isn't covered in jammy fingerprints iiiiiiiis...

Carrie, who was chosen by random.org as the sixth commenter on the thread, and said:
"What an interesting book! It sounds right up my alley."

So Carrie, if you send me the address of your alley I shall send your copy of this lovely book right up it as soon as I can get to the post office :)

You can email me at filthwizardry at gmail dot com.

Thank you to all of you that commented. It's always nice to be able to see who some of my readers are, because I know a lot of you will have blogs of your own and it's nice to be able to click through and check them out. I've got more time to do that sort of thing now that I have to sit down to breastfeed several times a day :) Now I just need to get better at one handed typing, so that I can reply to my emails at a better pace!

For those of you that didn't win the draw but are still interested in purchasing a copy of Bernadette and Kathie's book, here's the link to it's page on Amazon (not an affiliate thing) and I'll have another craft project for you on here tomorrow :)

"Make Stuff Together" Book Giveaway

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 01:43:00 +0000

Here we are! That illusive book review that has taken me so long to write up.

I was approached by Bernadette Noll and Kathie Sever, the authors of “Make Something Together” a few months ago, before their book was released. They asked if I would like to be part of their book blog tour and although I have never said yes to a giveaway on Filth Wizardry before, and I was just about to give birth, I wanted to say yes to this particular book. The way they described it to me, it sounded quite lovely and totally in keeping with the vibe of our home, so I wanted to be involved in helping to promote it in some way.

Now that things have reached some sort of rhythm in the newborn department and I’ve had a chance to really sit down and read through the book and see how the projects and philosophy are applicable to our own family, I’m ready and able to write about it and of course offer a copy of the book to one lucky commenter on this post.

Bernadette and Kathie, the authors of this book, have had a lot of experience with collaborative crafting, especially with children. Bernadette co-founded Slow Family Living and Kathie is the creator of Ramonsterwear. Together they have formed Future Craft Collective to find ways that families can be creative together in a sustainable fashion. At the start of the book, before you get to the detail of the individual projects, they take the time to share their experiences and talk about the “why” and “what to expect” aspects of creating with your family. This part of the book, as well as being very well written is also extremely encouraging to those that are nervous about setting the right environment for a pleasant crafting experience when children are involved.

I think the thing that I like most about this book is that it is relevant to a large range of ages and abilities. Out of the 24 projects, some are simple projects that younger children can use as an initiation into sewing and to gain confidence quickly, but there are also more complicated projects that preteens will be able to throw themselves into. As much as I can see me and my five and six year old making some of these things together, I can equally imagine that the book is still going to be in use when my older girls are ten and eleven and they have their little five year old sister to help join in with the making too.

The other thing that stood out to me when I read through this book was that the projects are all real keepers. You're upcycling, reusing and recycling materials, but in a way that creates family items that will really become part of the home atmosphere and traditions. Most of the upcycling that I do with the kids when we craft is making things that are fun and yes they use recycled materials most of the time, but they aren't things that I can see us having and still using say ten years from now. In contrast to our usual fun with recycling, I'm excited to make some items from this book, such as the table runner and napkins or the family flags, that can be more permanent creative fixtures in our family's home for years to come.

I've wanted to sit down at the sewing machine with my older girls, who are five and six years old for some time now, but deciding on what we should try and how to go about it has delayed me taking the plunge. I think it's this book that's going to ease us into the process of sewing together and I'm looking forward to it!

If you'd like a chance to win your own copy of "Making Stuff Together" then just leave a comment on this post and I'll announce a winner on Wednesday next week.

Disclosure: Bernadette and Kathie gave me a copy of this book for myself as well as one to give away on Filth Wizardry, but all the views I have expressed above are my own and this also means that the book the winner gets won't have little jammy fingerprints all over it from my children ;)

Stamping with Lego and craft foam

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 06:41:00 +0000

Hello! Long time no blog! Delyth is six weeks old now and we've been enjoying both the scrummy new baby and the summer vacation. I have got plenty that I want to get up on Filth Wizardry in the next month, even a book giveaway, which I've never done before. It's a cracking book, so that'll be coming soon (a month after I intended, but you know... baby, so bear with me), but in the mean time, here's a simple craft we came up with, that you've likely got all the bits to do already, and if you don't then they are nice and cheap.

You will need:

a stamp pad. If you've got more than one colour, all the better.
Craft foam sheets
Random bits of Lego
A roll of clear contact paper (sticky back plastic if you are from the 1980s Blue Peter generation like I am)

You've probably noticed that we like playing with Lego in ways other than it was intended. For example, here, here, here and here. I'm also a big fan of making art projects be open to creative diversity, so although the kids love stamping things with stamp pads, we don't have many store bought rubber stamps. If you've been reading Filth Wizardry for a while then you might remember the stamping with plasticine that we did last year. That is still a very popular way to use the stamp pads with the kids, mainly because the possibilities are limitless with it, but it's a very organic, fluid kind of art that you can create in that way.

In contrast to that, I've wanted to find a way that the kids can experiment with the geometric shapes of the bases and tops of various Lego pieces. Lego blocks are already designed to fit together, all measuring multiples of a unit length, so constructing art with them should be interesting. Back in October last year we tried it on paper, but with a silicon baking sheet under the paper to give the needed "squidge" for the solid plastic Lego to make good contact for a decent looking stamp. It was ok, but not brilliant and I never got around to blogging about it. You can see the result in this picture. The good thing about this method was that the kids could colour in their creations with pencils after if they wanted.

This week I remembered that we had some craft foam that hadn't yet been chopped up and used in the bathroom like this, so we tried stamping directly onto the craft foam and it worked beautifully. Just the right amount of squidge for the ink to make really good contact and print cleanly. The other great thing is that it's very easy to clean the water based ink off the Lego pieces after you're done. We just wiped ours clean with a baby wipe.

We had a handful of stamp pads from the dollar store and a roll of clear contact paper to cover the artwork and make useful items from it such as coasters, place mats, book marks and picture frames. The Dollar Tree by us sells stamp pads, packs of craft foam and rolls of contact paper, so if you have some Lego you could do this with a bunch of kids for as little as three dollars.

My six year old was into using the pieces to make representations of objects like flowers, butterflies, people and clouds, but my five year old seemed to enjoy a more abstract approach. They made themselves place mats, but you could easily make a mouse pad as a gift in this way.

You do have to cover the printed foam with the clear contact paper though, because although the stamps take well to the foam, the foam is not going to hold a water based stamp permanently, so the sticky back plastic over the top protects it from getting smudged. I was worried that the contact paper might not adhere well to the craft foam, but it actually sticks to it really well.

You don't have to just do dark coloured stamps on light coloured craft foam either. I had a white stamp pad that we tried on black craft foam and that worked really well too. While the kids were making their place mats, I made a couple of coasters. The large circle was made by dabbing the stamp pad around the rim of a cup. I couldn't resist the urge to see if I could make a millenium falcon coaster, and I think it worked out reasonably recognisable, at least to Star Wars fans anyway.

The kids also made some bookmarks to give to grandma and grandpa.

It's an easy way to decorate a little craft foam photo frame too.

If you've given me enough of your time to get this far down a rather lengthy post then let me reward you with a photo of a cute baby!

I'm sure we'll be having more fun with this way of stamping in the future. If you don't have stamp pads or Lego handy, you can also make all these things without the stamping, by just using Sharpie markers to draw on the craft foam and covering that with the contact paper.

I've got another Lego craft option to blog about, but if I add it onto the bottom of here it'll be the world's longest blog post and I may never get it finished, so hopefully I'll get to that another day (if I can stop staring at my baby long enough)

Can you think of anything else that we could use besides Lego to make interesting stamps with on craft foam?

Alphamom guest post and DIY mobile

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:54:00 +0000

I just wrote another post over at Alpha Mom, showing how we made some window decorations and beaded butterflies using the plastic from gallon milk jugs. You can read about how we made them and get the free butterflies template here.

We'll definitely be making more to hang in our windows in the future, and I doubt a milk jug will make it into our recycling bin without being used for this purpose again! I just need to get about a thousand more suction cups to keep up with the girl's creating.

We used our butterflies to hang on a mobile for the third mini Filth Wizard, so in addition to the tutorial over at Alpha Mom, I thought I'd share with you a few pictures showing how we put the mobile together once we had made the butterflies. Here it is from the baby's veiwing angle, looking up from the chest of draws we have in our bedroom where the changing pad is.

I used a few things that I'd found in thrift stores to put it together. The main ring was part of a medium sized embroidery hoop that I wrapped in green cotton yarn.

Then used a random small wooden ring that Paul had found in a big bag of misc wooden items at the thrift store to hang the mobile up from a hanging basket bracket.

I'd also found some wooden curtain rings with little metal clips at the thrift store and thought if I covered those with some bright yarn remnants then they would look pretty and also allow us to swap out whatever was hanging from the mobile whenever we wanted. My two older girls are very into the idea of making new things to clip up there for the baby to see.

Once I tied all that lot on the mobile and hung it up, I thought it would be nice to have a little bit of decoration around the main hoop, so I cut out some felt leaves and made six little crochet flowers to attach using the mini flower tutorial over at Attic 24.

Here it is all finished and hung up in the corner of our bedroom along with the rocker and towel rail we put up for hanging her clothes.

Have any of you made your own mobiles for your babies? I'd love to see some of them if you have! It'll be interesting to see what my older two girls come up with to hang on this one when they get bored with the butterflies.

Thank you all for your congratulations and warm well wishing on the arrival of Delyth :) You're a lovely lot! It's nice to hear that a lot of you have more children than hands and are enjoying every minute of it too. Delyth is still an easy going little scamp and we're having a very relaxing and quite mellow start to the school summer vacation with her. She was two weeks old yesterday and Paul's been back at work this week, but thanks to some wonderful friends who have made us dinner on a few nights and another that had the big kids over to play for a few hours on Tuesday, I'm not feeling maxed out and have been able to have kids over to our place to play and get out a bit with them too. The trip I mentioned that we were going to attempt on Monday to the wild animal exhibit at the local library went much better than I had anticipated. No one was eaten by the artic lynx and no one broke the armadillo. Success!

She likes her recycled t-shirt sleep gown :)

Made using the tutorial and pattern here at "This mama makes stuff".

Baby is here, and thank you LiEr!

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:40:00 +0000

Delyth Lyn arrived at 10.30pm on 15th June. She was the biggest of my three girls at 8lb 4oz and is also the most chilled out of my babies so far. In case anyone is curious, Delyth is another fairly common Welsh name, just like Carys and Ffion. It is pronounced "Dell-ith". I feel very lucky indeed that she is so calm and happy, given that my first daughter screamed incessantly for her first three months of life. Her demeanor is certainly making my first few days as a mum of three a lot easier to manage than I was anticipating. Here's the little love before she was even a day old...

The big sisters are in heaven! They felt like they were waiting an eternity to be able to meet her. 9 months must seem like forever to a five and a six year old. Now that we have her to cuddle and fuss over, Carys and Ffion are made up.

She hasn't worn much of the knitting and crochet that I made for her while I was pregnant yet, but she does love the blanket that I hooked a couple of months ago :) It was a free pattern I downloaded from Ravelry called "Rainbow Ripple baby blanket" by Celeste Young, and was very quick to make. It only took three skeins of Caron Simply Soft yarn.

We made it to the hospital to have her, but only just. I was admitted at 9.30 and had her just before 10.30. They had just about enough time to get me in a room and in a gown and get the doctor in there! We had to fill in all the hospital admissions paperwork after she was born. It was also the first time I've managed to give birth without being pumped full of Pitocin and I have to say, it was a totally different experience. No pitocin and no time meant no epidural and I found it so so much nicer that way. I'm just so happy that my body co-operated this time around and I got to give birth with minimal medical intervention, albeit rather hurredly! It's made recovery a lot faster for me and I can't help wondering if Delyth's Zen composure is somehow linked to not being put through a long and intense labour with medication like my other two had, then again, maybe it's just who she is. I almost can't imagine having a calm child!?! The other two are raging stuntwomen, so I don't really expect it to last ;)

I have a blogosphere thank you that I want to send out to LiEr, who many of you know writes Ikatbag, where she makes fabulous sewn creations, plus plenty of recycley toy goodness that of course I'm well impressed and enthused by. LiEr, being really sweet and lovely just sent us a welcome to the world baby Boardman parcel, full of gorgeous things that she'd sewn. I've taken a photo so that you can see how totally cute this stuff is.

Six reversible bibs in many different prints of brushed cotton, a snuggly fleece blanky, and one of her fleecy baby balls with ribbon tags and a jingly bell inside. She also put in a cute little homemade card for us and a load of cool little wooden shapes for the big kids to paint up and play with. Thank you LiEr! The personal value of handmade gifts is immense and I'm really touched that you did this for us. I hope that I can get something in the mail to you and your girls soon too. I have to figure out nursing in a sling so that I have both hands free to knit and crochet ;)

Oooh, and I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing how alike my girls looked as newborns. Most people comment that we have a brunette now, but both my other two started out with dark hair like their dad's too but had started to go blonde by about eight or nine months old.

Paul goes back to work on Monday, so we'll see how well I cope with more children than hands when that happens! We've actually got plans to go to see a wild animal exhibit that's being brought to the local library. I'm curious to see how wrong that can go, given that last time I took my kids to an animal exhibit at the library when they were toddlers, we had to leave because their volume settings were malfunctioning and the igunanas were terrified.

Open ended sculpture fun with glue and sticks

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 18:03:00 +0000

This project started off before Maker Faire, I think back at the end of April. We went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco (the kid's favourite museum and probably mine too). They had just brought in an amazing matchstick sculpture by a guy called Scott Weaver (I didn't realise until just now when I went looking for something to link to for him that he started doing this at the age of eight, and says he started off building abstract pieces of about 2 to 4ft tall! So cool!). His sculpture was hunormous and had taken him over 30 years to construct. I snapped some photographs of it so that you can see it's awesomeness, plus a video clip of it in action, because it's not just a static sculpture featuring landmarks throughout the bay and the city of SF. It's contructed with many different paths inside it, twisting and winding through that you can drop ping pong balls into and watch them roll their way around the bay's sights, hence the sculpture's name "Rolling through the bay".

Here's the video I took of it in action:

My girls, who are now five and six years old, were blown away by this sculpture and it's complexity and the fact that it was made out of so many simple little sticks just glued together. My older daughter in particular usually has the following first response to things of this magnitude: "Can we make that?", and these days I'm pretty used to finding ways to facilitate a project for them that's at least similarly themed. I have to be quick off the mark with these things though, because it only takes a couple of days max for the kids to move on to another "grand scheme". Luckily in my stash of random thrift store and recycling finds I had a massive bag of wooden coffee stirrers and another massive bag of lolly pop sticks that I'd scored for a buck each at the local charity shop. These were ideal for allowing the kids to build big and fast. I had a feeling that toothpicks or matchsticks would have been a bit too small to inspire the youngest among us, especially given that it was the scale of the structure that they were most keen to emulate. As always with the kids I opted to use the low temp hot glue guns, because they give immediate results.

The day after we'd been to the exploratorium we had some friends over and I was glad that I'd taken the video and pictures of Scott Weaver's creation, because we were able to enthuse my daughter's friends with the project plans too. So, once they were all on board and were chattering about ideas of what to make, I gave them a big bit of plywood from the garage and a box of sharpie markers to draw on it with, while I pulled out the glue guns and glue sticks and extension cords and wooden sticks and set them up around the table for them. This is what they started off with that morning...

This is what we had by the time the kids went home that day...

It was interesting to see the different approaches that the different kids took. I deliberately gave them one big bit of plywood to work on because although they started off in different corners of the board, working in groups of two or three or sometimes alone, eventually the separate elements would come together into a collaborative piece and would grow quickly. My younger daughter and her friend started with an organic approach of gluing sticks to the board and to each other's sticks without much of a plan as to where it was going, but their imaginations quickly took over and they were chattering about the "magical ancient swimming pool" they were building. Other kids like my older daughter and her friend were planning ideas on paper before they picked up the glue guns and other kids were making objects off the board and then attaching them to the sculpture afterwards. All different approaches and all resulting in equally interesting creations.

The kids did start to create a track for ping pong balls to run along, but that aspect of the sculpture was clearly very secondary to the freeform building going on.

I think you can already guess that this project has no end goal. It's lived in our home for over a month now and changes daily. For a couple of weeks it was sat in the livingroom being used as an ever changing imaginary playscape for various toys. It's had my yarn remnants draped over it like a crumbling ruined city deep in the jungle...

It's been painted all sorts of colours and had flags added. Actually the kids are painting more of it as I type this.

It's even got a Lowes Build and Grow wooden trebuchet added to defend it. I think it's become a sort of building in their minds.

They have added a door to one part of it that is made from a baby wipe packet closure, which works really well and I have a load more of them that they can add too because friends have been saving them for me to use in a different way, but we have plenty to use for this too.

The kids quickly found out that if they didn't like something where it was then they just had to touch the hot tip of the gun to the glue to soften it and pull off the sticks to go elsewhere. The combination of hot glue and porus wooden sticks made a beutifully sturdy, yet lightweight structure, so I can move it between rooms for them really easily. It's likely to be worked on or played with gradually over the summer. Both my girls say that it's supposed to reach the ceiling, so they have their work cut out if that's what the really want. I'm interested to see where this ends up by the time school starts up again. We're sure to have a bunch of kids around here this summer, so there will be plenty of varied brainpower to contribute!

I think we have enough in the way of wooden sticks to get this thing to about 4 feet tall. I'll keep my eyes open for more coffee stirrers and popsicle sticks at the thrift stores though, just in case they want to keep going with it. I remember one of the most frustrating parts of epic building projects as a kid being running out of materials when you wanted to keep going. I like how this is turning out to be a slow paced project, because it gets played with more often than it gets modified and as the kid's imaginations work on it through play, the new ideas to continue building are born.

In other news, this third little girl is still inutero, with less than a week until her due date now. We were really expecting her before now because of the extra amniotic fluid I'm carrying (my bump is mahoooosive!), but I guess she's very comfortable, even if I'm not ;) It's buffet night at the local Indian place this evening though, so maybe that will help to serve a fetal eviction notice and I'll have a cute newborn photo of the latest filth wizardlett to share with you before too long.

2011 Maker Faire fun

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Tue, 24 May 2011 05:16:00 +0000

This was our second year that we were able to get to the Bay Area Maker Faire. I wrote a bit about our experiences at the 2010 Maker Faire here and mentioned one of the mini maker faire's we got to go to back in 2009 here too.

We were looking forward to this year a great deal, knowing from last year the kind of awesomeness that was awaiting us. We were also a little concerned that we might not actually make it this year, because I am really close to the end of this pregnancy and I'm carrying around more amniotic fluid than normal as well as the wee bairn, so I'm measuring really big in the bump department and it's seriously affecting my mobility by aggravating a couple of disks in my back that got damaged when I was a teen. We made it though and I managed to not go into labour at the faire too, which was another worry with all the walking around involved (been having contractions on and off for about a week even though I'm not due until June) This is how big the bump was at 35 weeks and it's growth has gone exponential over the last month. Oh yeah, and My six year old cut my five year old's fringe/bangs. Sneaky little toads! That's going to take a while to grow out!

So, yes, Maker Faire... We noticed this year that the Make people were offering a really great opportunity to get two adult day passes for free if you joined the "Maker Faire Street Team", which just involved posting fliers and posters and a few stickers and badges around your local area in places like coffee shops and libraries, schools and other appropriate places, so we jumped at that chance and one Saturday morning the whole family had a bit of a jaunt around our neighbourhood doing this. The kids actually enjoyed doing this quite a lot. As a result we ended up only having to pay for two $5 children's day passes to all go to the Maker Faire this year!

If you're thinking about going next year and live within a 200 mile radius of the Faire then I would definately keep an eye out for that Street Team offer again because it was so worth it. We went on the Sunday and the first port of call was to check out Arc Attack's tesla coil show that we had missed out on the year before. Fantastic stuff! If you've not seen them in action before, here's a link to them playing the Dr Who theme tune this year with Adam Savage dancing like the geek he is in the faraday cage.

The top attraction for the girls was the area set up by Astromech, the R2 unit builders club. The kids knew that they were going to be there and had been looking forward to seeing R2-D2 "in person" so much that Carys had actually put out her starwars tshirt two nights before the faire ready to wear and when she found out that there would be more than one R2 unit there, she drew a picture for each unit.

We must have spent a total of an hour with them between two visits (she wanted to go back at the end of the day before we left) We got talking to a couple of the builders there and found out that one of them was actually a fellow Welshman, who had moved to the Bay Area about a decade before we did. It's a small world! He's got some fantastic resources on his website for people looking to embark on their own R2 build. Seems like the perfect long term project for Carys and Paul, especially now that Paul's got the CNC milling machine he built up and running.Me and the girls have made several trashy robots from recycling in the past, like Wall-e and a Dalek and some space craft from Star wars too, so I might get the kids involved in making an R2D2 this way to give Paul some time to look into the specifics of cost and material options required to build a more accurate and robust droid. Thank you to Chris for letting Carys and Ffion into the R2 area to meet the units up close. It made their day :)

Other favourites with the kids were the Bay Area Lego Users Group area and the inflatable glowing asparagus forrest from "O Yeah Toys". The interactive discofloor, and the muffin cars pictured at the top of this post that were powered with modified electric wheelchair components were also big hits with both girls.

The kids had so much fun last year at Gever Tulley's "tinker your way out of this" challenge area. This year Gever had an outdoor area where he was letting kids have a go at some of the things from his book "50 dangerous things" By the time we got all the way up to the far end of the Faire it was getting late in the day though and although Ffion was keen to try the stick your fingers together challenge and did really well with it, both kids were quickly distracted by the enormous electric giraffe that was wandering past, so they didn't try all the things that Gever had out.

I'm hoping to find a chance to go and check out the space that he and Bryan Welch have secured for an amazing k-12 school in San Francisco before I have this baby too. It sounds like a wonderful creative environment for such a huge age range that I'm really keen to learn more about Brightworks and how they plan to operate.

Another cool interaction that was had at the faire was meeting a guy called Tommy Murrah. He was part of the team manning the ShopBot area. Amongst other impressive things, they had milled out a load of interlocking play planks based on the ones published in Modern Mechanix back in 1953. I only saw this type of play plank for the first time a few months back when Teacher Tom wrote a post about the ones that they had at Woodland Park. Paul has been gradually making a set by hand from any remnant plywood that he's found cheaply in the offcuts section at Home Depot, but having talked to Tommy at Maker Faire, it seems that we can actually get the open source plans to mill out a set with the CNC router that Paul built last year and this modern template also includes additional pieces allowing kids to build curved surfaces too!

The plans are made available by a site called LinkerLogs under the creative commons license, and even better than that, if you run a school or non profit then there is a forum on the Linker Logs site where you can find out if there is a person in your local area with a ShopBot that can donate their time to helping make a set for a worthy cause! You can also buy the finished item from Murrah Woodcraft if you have the money, but not the tools and time to make your own. They call their version Thinker Linkers.

One of the things that I missed out on doing that I wanted to was getting into the center of the Expo Hall, where all the Craft stuff was. The Expo Hall was so very very busy and crowded that it was difficult to get to see things in there, especially with two small children with us. I was hoping to go see the kanzashi folding devices that Diane Gilleland has been talking about recently on her blog. We've made giant kid friendly kanzashi out of Baby wipes and paper towels with the kids after I read about about the craft on Diane's blog Craftypod, that I've been subscribed to for a very long time. I couldn't figure out from just looking at these different shaped plastic contraptions she showed on her blog how exactly they might work. I'm guessing that there will be a video online at some point showing how to use them though. I'd also hoped to just say hi to some of the Craft team there because they have been very supportive of Filth Wizardry in the past and have posted about several of our projects over the last couple of years on the Craftzine blog. Hopefully there will be some more mini maker events over the coming year and I can say hello and thank you in person then. I think next year, we will have to try and get just adult tickets for one day of the event and find someone willing to babysit for us, and then take the whole family on the other day, because me and Paul are really into the technical stuff that is at the faire, but don't really get a chance to endulge when we have the small kids in the equation.

Right now though I need to really take it easy for a couple of days because my back is rather displeased with me and the weekend's antics. I still haven't planted the bed of spinach and the bed of peas and beans that I was planning to get sorted before little miss Boardman no.3 arrives, but with only a couple of weeks to go, my body has informed me that it is on strike when it comes to digging, lifting or bending. I'm really looking forward to meeting this little girl and introducing her to my older two, but I'm also hoping that she'll submit to another week or so of cooking time ;)

Did any of our UK readers make it to the Newcastle Maker Faire back in March? How was it? We are likely going to be back in the UK next year and I'm hoping there will be another UK Maker Faire in 2012.

Kid's Clothing Week

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 13 May 2011 23:19:00 +0000

Edit: Not sure if the 24 hour technical issues that Blogger had resulted in anyone getting notification of this post and then finding that it temporarily wasn't there to read, or if you tried to comment and couldn't or what. I hope that even if you managed to read this post before it went down for a while, that you'll let me know if the subject matter is something you'd like more of sporadically in the future. Sorry to the few people that did comment and then their comments also vanished. Can't help thinking that the poor people working to fix this issue over at Blogger, probably all night, must have several new grey hairs today.

I don't tend to put too much on Filth Wizardry about the stuff that I make (sew/knit/crochet) for the kids, because this blog is usually more of the stuff that we make together or they make themselves, but I did say in a post a few months back that I was thinking of posting links to some of the patterns and tutorials for things that I have had work out well for us. This week, as I'm sure a lot of you already know is Elsie Marley's "Kid's Clothing Week" for Spring 2011, so I've taken the opportunity to pull out a lot of half finished sewing projects that have been begging to be completed and thought I'd share those along with a few other bits and bobs that others might find useful if they are also into sewing/knitting and crochet for their children. I'm not sure if KCW is supposed to be purely sewing, or if the yarny stuff counts too, the yarny stuff is still clothing for the kids though right, so I'm guessing it's a legitimate part of the deal?

Right, first off, here's a few links to some kid's clothing projects we've done on here in the past that you might want to try out. I'm not a very skilled seamstress, so mostly what I do is basic or involves hacking together other garments either outgrown or from thrift stores.

Superhero fleece poncho capes.
Pocket Softie Skirts
Pirate girl bandana skirts (post I wrote for Alpha Mom)
Tea towel skirts and a couple of years later kid decorated tea towel skirt.
Post no.1, post no.2 and post no.3 on plastic bag iron on transfers
Kid's princess dress from old formal wear
Underpants pockets
Tea towel shorts
Hawaiian shirt dress hack
Dress up mermaid tails

The thing I finally finished today was a strawberry shortcake outfit that I had meant to get done for my younger daughter's fifth birthday back in March. I mostly hand sew, so sometimes things take longer than they should do ;) LiEr over at Ikatbag has made a couple of really cute strawberry shortcake outfits in the past that are totally from scratch. You can see hers here and here. My little girl had her heart set on a replica of this particular version though and I'm not awesome enough with the sewing machine to accomplish that from raw material, so I hacked it together from other garments...

The way I ended up going about it was to use felt from Daiso to cover a cheap baker boy type hat that we also found in Daiso (total 5 bucks), then I found a pair of stripey socks in the dollar section in Joanne Fabric. The dress was made by applique onto a dollar store kid's tshirt that I cut off short and used a piece of tshirt material fabric that I found in the remnants at Joanne that was just big enough to squeeze six panels out of that I could sew together into the skirt and then sew it onto the tshirt to finish the dress. You can't really tell from the photo, but the skirt part is pink and red polkadotted, just the opposite way around to the one in the cartoon, but it was all I had handy. She's very pleased with it, and although the hat is a little over the top, the dress is perfectly fine to just wear out and about this summer.

She's asking for pink hair to go with it, and I can't really say no given that she's seen plenty of pictures of me with pink hair :) The kids do find this funny, but not nearly as funny as the fact that their dad, who has a shaved head, used to have dreadlocks!

Something else that I've got on the cards to finish off this week is more sewing clothing for the kids from old felted cashmere sweaters. I keep my eye out for these when I'm in the thrift stores. Usually someone has accidentally felted them and that's why they are in the thift store in the first place, other times I wait until Goodwill has it's everything for $2 sale and go see how many of them I can find. Here are a couple of pictures of a sweater I made for my younger daughter a while ago from a couple of different blue adult cashmere sweaters that had been felted and cut into pattern pieces. They are so warm and soft and snuggly! I have a pale pink felted cashmere sweater that I'm planning to make some trousers and a top out of in a 6month size for the baby to wear this winter.

Something else I've been making a few of for the new baby are sleep gowns from old tshirts. There's a great tutorial and pattern for this here on "This Mamma Makes Stuff", and I've already made the two below, but have another three cut out and ready to sew up this week (all from old batik tshirts that my husband brought back from his trips to Nepal)

As far as the crochet and knitting goes, I'm pretty new to this game. I started really having a go at it about two years ago, but really it's only been the last year that I've been able to do anything beyond a scarf or a dishcloth. The way I taught myself was basically via Youtube videos. There are so many of them out there, showing everything from the basic stitches to less heard of techniques like Norwegian Purling (which I am now a big fan of and use whenever I'm knitting ribbing) The other massive source of patterns and inspiration has been the free to join site Ravelry.com, which I signed up to in 2009 out of curiosity, but didn't have enough knitting knowledge to really get any use out of until this year. There are so many brilliant and totally free patterns available and beautifully catalogued there. It's really a marvelous site and resource! So anyway, here are a handful of the more simple projects I tried and had sucess with, plus links to the free patterns they came from in case there are any beginner knitters like me reading that want to expand the types of garments they can make without jumping in at the deep end.

Newborn bolero jacket.

This cute little teensy jacket is by Babyfatness and the free pattern is called Sweet and Lo. You can find it here. It was so quick to knit up that I want to make more! I used a bulky yarn to get a newborn size, but worsted weight would make a perfect baby doll jacket and I haven't tried it yet, but I bet sock yarn would make one that fitted a barbie doll nicely.

Easy sock pattern.

This was the pattern that I used to learn to make socks. It's a pattern for baby socks, so they knit up really quickly, but I've been able to change my yarn and needle sizes to make fluffy bed socks for my six year old or nice big stockings for the kid's for Christmas with the same pattern. The pattern is called "North Country Baby Socks" and you can find it for free here. I learned the basics of sock structure from several Youtube videos so that I could understand what the pattern was telling me to do.

Shell stitch baby hat.

The free pattern for this cute little hat was written by Betsy Thompson over at "The Dainty Daisy". Here is the link to the "Shell Stitch Beanie" pattern. She's provided it in a range of sizes and they are so quick and easy to crochet up that I've made probably about ten of them so far this year in various sizes for various children and with different alterations, like having the center of the beanie start with a flowershape or making a sunhat brim for them.

granny square slippers.

These are thanks to Purl Bee. I learned to crochet granny squares using the Purl Bee tutorial here, and then when I wanted to make something with them, but knew I didn't have the attension span to make a blanket, they published this neat tutorial showing how you could make a pair of cute pixielike slippers using 12 granny squares. By using a smallish hook and some finish yarn I was able to make a pair for my five year old. I'm about half way through a totally green pair that I'm going to put white pom poms on the toes of when I'm done, because she's tinkerbell mad.

Crochet Hexagon jacket.

This free little jacket pattern can be found over on Elisa's blog "Yarn Tails" here. It's a very nifty pattern that can be altered to any size easily and I've made three of these already this year. It's just two crochet hexagons that fold up to each make one side of the jacket. I ended up adding to the lengths of the jackets that I made from the pattern and adding a hood to the one I made for an older baby. I still have to sew buttons on the latest one that's in blue, but it's nearly done.

So, last thing to say is that today's KCW task I have is to finish sewing up the hem on the Tinkerbell skirt I've been making for the fairy fanatic of the house. Here it is nearly finished. I used part of an old bridesmaid gown that I got from Goodwill for $2, and sewed it up using the same technique as the pirate girl bandana skirts that I wrote a tutorial for over at Alpha Mom earlier this year.

Please do let me know if any of these links are useful to you, because if they are then I can write other posts now and again that cover things made for the kids and not just by them, including toys as well as clothing and link to any free patterns I've found out there on the intertoobs that have worked well for us.

Happy Mothers Day.

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sun, 08 May 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Well, in the US (which is where we live at the moment). I already wished my mum happy Mothers Day back in April, because my mum, dad and sister live back in the UK :) This is me with my lovely mum. I hate only getting to see her once a year now that we live so far away.

It seems a little strange to post Mothers Day craft ideas on a blog like this, given that I think most of my readers are actually mums, but I know I have at least a handful of dads that read this blog too, so maybe if you're thinking you might want a last minute gift that the kids can get involved with making today, here are a few ideas from Filth Wizardry posts of the past. I chose these ones because flowers tend to be a hit, and also because these few ideas will likely be doable with stuff you have around anyway, so no need to go out and get anything.

Kid drawn iron on plastic bag transfers (post I did for Alpha Mom)

Printing with plasticine (to make a nice card maybe?)

Mini roses from dollar store crepe paper (one for the grown ups to give to their own mums really)

Kitchen paper or baby wipe Kanzashi flowers (my mum loved the ones my kids mailed to her)

Cardboard flowers (great for really little kids to have fun with the paint)

These are the cute drawings that my girls made for me this morning. My five year old drew our family with me looking surprised at the cake that is taller than me.

My six year old seems to think I will be getting cake, chocolate, balloons and a throne!? There had better be cake at some point in the day, because you don't go showing a woman who is 8 months pregnant multiple pictures of cake and then not give her any!

Have a lovely mum's day! :)

Origami Bunny Ear Headband

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 01:54:00 +0000

I know this is a little late in the game for an Easter craft, but the idea only occurred to me yesterday when we had some friends over and I was making paper planes and boats with them. We made these headbands today for the kids that were hunting for eggs in our back yard. Very quick and easy to whip up! Thought I'd get a post up quick in case you want to make some with the kids on Easter Monday.

All you need for one pair of bunny ears are two sheets of paper, a stapler a strip of card and a little bit of elastic.

If you've been hanging out with us here for more than a year or so then you might remember a post way back about "origami for preschoolers" that I wrote. Well, in that post is a little tutorial for how to make the paper boats that we used to make these bunny ears. It's a quick little bit of origami that you can use a regular bit of A4 or letter sized piece of paper for, so you don't even need to cut paper to be square like you have to with a lot of origami.

Fold up and turn out your two sheets of paper into two little origami boats following the instructions in the "origami for preschoolers" post.

Then fold down one end of each of the boats like this.

and staple them to the strip of card you have cut out.

Then you just need to staple on your elastic at the right length for whoever is going to wear them.

Easy peasy! Some of the kids we made them for decorated theirs with markers, but I didn't get any good photos of those.

We did our slightly unusual version of an egg hunt again this year. I wrote about how we do our egg hunts in this post from last year. It's just much nicer to have the kids all working together to find everyone's eggs. They even found eggs for my friends baby, who is nearly one (we filled them with rice and other noise making stuff and hotglued them closed, so she had six different sounding rattles).

Here's the gorgeous girly with her dad, both sporting a pair of the ridiculous bunny ears (hers were made from half sheets of paper). Too cute!

Ooh and one last thing... Don't throw out any of those plastic egg bits, even if you've lost one half of them, because they make great little toadstools for fairy circles in the garden! Ancient post on that project can be found here.