Filth Wizardry

Battle of Hoth Ice-cream dessert printable

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:06:00 +0000

Star Wars Day is coming up on Saturday (May the Fourth be with you), so that's a perfect excuse right there for me to indulge in some Rebel Alliance themed geekery with the kids. If you fancy making your family a nice cold dish of Battle on Hoth, then pop on over to my post at Alpha Mom, where I've made a printable template that you can download.

And if you think a sci-fi themed battle dessert is a little odd, you're lucky I didn't go with my original plan, which was to make an upside down cheesecake pit of Sarlaac. Yeah. Nobody wants dessert that looks like vagina dentata, so, you're welcome.

In other Star Wars news... We met some of the Rebel Legion UK at the Newcastle Maker Faire last weekend, and the kids were very happy to have their pictures taken with a storm trooper and an X-wing pilot. They took great delight in telling the X-wing pilot about the Helmets they made a couple of years ago, and the storm trooper mask too.

We had a fantastic time at the UK Maker Faire, and are really looking forward to the Manchester Mini Maker Faire that's going to be taking place in August.

Here's a link to some of our other Star Wars themed posts from the archives (It seems there have been quite a few!) May the force be with you!

Easter bunny printable wrappers for your Cadbury's Creme Eggs.

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:11:00 +0000

Hello! Just a fly by post to let you know that I've done a post over on Alphamom .com showing how to make these little Easter rabbits easily from a baby wipe, a Cadbury's Creme Egg, and a little free printable that I made for you to download over there.

They would make a cute little gift this easter for kids to give to their friends. My kids saw me making these ones though, so they are nommed already! Happy Easter my Peeps!

Easter crafts from the archives

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:07:00 +0000

Today is the last day of school before the Easter break here, where the kids get two weeks off school, so I thought now was a good time to post a reminder of some of the Easter/Spring type crafts that we've done over the past few years, in case any of you fancy trying them.

I'm sure we'll be doing some new things over the Easter break, but you know what I'm like, we don't do crafts well in advance to blog about them at the right time. We do the crafts and then I blog about them with the excuse that you might want to do them next year! Ha! So, this is what I found in the depths of the badly organized Filth Wizardry archives of yore...

Easter egg hunt challenge and printables.

DIY daisy chain toy written for Alpha Mom, which I think should be appearing in one of the upcoming Family Fun Magazine issues too.

Rabbit ear paper plate hats for Alpha Mom.

Using left over plastic egg bases to make R2D2 secret storage containers.

Origami bunny ear head bands

Ukrainian egg (pysanky) wall decorations for Alpha Mom.

A bit about the way we do egg hunts and why.

Weatherproof fairy toadstool circles made using the left over plastic eggs from your egg hunt.

Hope some of you fancy having a go at one or more of those ideas. I think we may have a bit of a weekend of crafting indoors here, because although yesterday was the first day of spring, today it has already snowed, hailed, and now it is raining/sleeting and blowing a gale, with more of the same forecast for tonight and tomorrow! Brrrrr.

We were going to go down to Bristol for it's Mini Maker Faire, but it looks like traveling in this weather isn't advisable. Thought I'd put the link in there though in case any readers are down south and nearer to it and might want to pop in. It's free and is from 11am until 3pm at Bristol's M Shed museum. This co-incides with the last couple of days of National Science and Engineering Week.

DIY custom cookie stamps.

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:37:00 +0000

Whooo, it's the month for patron saints everyone! No sooner are we done with Saint David's Day, than Saint Patrick's Day is upon us! We got our leprechaun gold sorted in the form of some golden coin cookies, minted with some home made custom cookie stamps! I've posted about it over on Alpha Mom, with lots of photos and details on what worked best as far as materials and cookie dough went.

Pop and check it out, and even if you're not into the idea of golden leprechaun treasure, this technique can be used to stamp cookies for any event that you want a custom design for, at very little cost! Birthday parties, birth announcements, valentines, Christmas, Graduation, Bad hair days, bin day, days with the letter Y at the end... you get the idea.

For me, I love it because it removes the need to do complicated cookie icing, which I suck at and have no patience for, and you can't dunk iced cookies in your tea! Well, you can, but your tea would be sweet, and eugrchhh sweet tea?! Are you trying to poison me?!

My kids have told me that we need to make custom cookie stamps with the names of the members of our family on. There are some serious cookie ownership issues simmering beneath that request if you ask me. I would feel slightly guilty if I ate a cookie with someone else's name on though, so maybe they have something there.

Do I have any long time readers among you? Do any of you remember way back in the distant past of 2009, when the kids were all tiny and we made golden leprachaun cookies with some friends back in the US. Some Irish friends no less! That's what gave me the idea to try and make our own cookie stamps. Something a bit more suited to my now seven and eight year old's crafting abilities, but still fun and edible. Awww, just look at little barely three year old Ffi, all covered in flour. I'm looking forward to doing more of those preschooler crafts again with Delyth!

UPDATE (16th March 2013): Alpha Mom has cautiously recommended that you do not use the polymer clay version of the stamp on foods. The reason for this is potentially twofold. They are mainly bothered about phthalates (plasticizers that until 2009 were used in all polymer clays). If you purchase your polymer clay from anywhere in the EU, or California then it will be phthalate free due to regulations that were introduced several years ago, but if you are buying it from elsewhere then you will need to be aware of the fact that your clay may contain phthalates.

Polymer clay has been thoroughly tested by ACMI (Art & Crafts Materials Institute in Boston) and by CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commissions) It has been evaluated to be non-toxic, meaning there are no acute toxicity concerns even when assuming a large (24 mg) daily ingestion of polymer clay, but don't be doing that m'kay? Yuck! Understandably Alpha Mom did not want to recommend the polymer clay option to it's readers when they couldn't be sure if the readers had access to phthalate free clay.

The second issue is that polymer clay is designated as non-food grade plastic. This is not because of toxicity, but rather because it is more porous than food grade plastics, meaning that it is harder to sanitize properly once it has come into contact with food. So, not a good idea to make yourself a dinner plate or a mug to drink your Bovril out of with it, because it could harbour nasty bacteria from the food making it unsafe to use a second time. With this in mind, if you feel that is an issue with using it with raw cookie dough, then you can always make it a one use item and throw the stamp away (the same applies obviously to the salt dough version, which is even more porous than the polymer clay). I will not be throwing away the wooden rolling pin that also came into contact with cookie dough and is porous though, so you've really got to make your own informed decisions about these things.

So, there's a bit of info for you to make a judgement call. If you want to be super cautious then just make your cookie stamps out of the salt dough and then chuck them in the bin when you're done (the stamps, not the cookies silly!).

Here's a hazard risk assessment study done by Duke University Medical Center in 2000 on polymer clay that DOES contain phthalates. (this also addresses the PVC content of the clay for those that are concerned about PVC in their products)

Recycling containers with crochet

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:26:00 +0000

This is a post that has been lurking unfinished in my drafts for YEARS!!! How bad is that! The first one of these I made was I think in 2008 maybe. I've made loads since then, for halloween trick or treat pots, for Easter egg hunt baskets, and just randomly to store things like bits of polly pockets, or pens, or any one of the zillions of odd little collections that the kids have. For a while we had one that contained sparkly bits of asphalt?! I always liked the glass jars with crochet over them thing, but everyone would end up in the ER if I made those and left them around the house. The ones above are made from an old plastic mayo jar and an old plastic cordial bottle, and that way the kids can swing them around their heads and bash them on the floor and no one's going to require stitches. The mayo jar one is my favourite, and it's been used so much. Right now it's full of crayons (you can see Del using it in the background of this pic from the dragon mask post)

You can even make them really small if you have something like a dremel to drill little holes into a travel sized shampoo bottle, and a teensy crochet hook and thread. Very useful for collecting random small objects as my children are wont to do.

This one was for Ffion to use as a trick or treat pot. It was made from an old protein shake plastic jar that a friend gave us.

Anyway, I've been wanting to show you how I make these for ages, because they are really useful for a number of reasons.

the kids can see what is in them (if you use clear plastic jars or bottles to make them), and can root around for stuff without having to tip it all out.
They hang up places, or can be carried around easily.
They are pretty easy to make (very basic crochet stitches) and are really cheap as they are made from old plastic bottles and jars.
They are virtually indestructible. We've not had to throw a single one out due to breakage yet, despite them being dropped all over the place and flung around.
I think they look pretty, given that they are made from trash, especially if the kids decorate them with stickers or sharpie pens.
Because the crochet narrows the opening to the basket, generally if you drop it, whatever is in it doesn't come spilling out all over the floor.

Here's one that I made from a yoghurt pot for Del to egg hunt with last Easter. She was only nine moths old, so she really enjoyed taking the eggs out of it and putting them back in again.

Given all that, and the fact that Easter is around the corner and a few of you that can crochet might want to make kid's Easter baskets with this technique, here's how I make 'em...

You'll need a plastic container, so go rummage around in your recycling. It doesn't have to be transparent, but the plastic does have to be reasonably flexible if you are going to punch through it with a regular hole puncher. If you have something like a Dremel that you can use to drill holes then you don't have to limited by that. You do need to make sure that your crochet hook can fit through the holes you drill though! I've happily used a hand punch on all the baskets that are shown here (except the tiny necklace one) The easiest to punch through was the yoghurt pot.

If you've got a container with labels on then weight it down in some water to soak them and make them easier to peel off.

It's handy to note that if you have a container that has printing on it that you want to get rid of first, then giving it a scrub with a Mr Clean Magic Eraser or similar product will take off the printing (on a transparent plastic it will make it translucent though) here's the yoghurt pot with some of the printing scrubbed off.

Sometimes a container will have a thicker rim that you need to cut off to be able to punch around the top. You can see below that I cut off the rim of the yoghurt pot with a pair of kitchen scissors before punching the holes.

Here you can see that I also cut off the top part of the protein shake container before punching the holes into it.

The littlest one was made from a travel sized shampoo bottle that I cut the top off and used a small drill bit to put the holes in it.

To do the crochet part you can use whatever yarn you like. Chances are if it's going to be dragged around by children you won't want to use white cashmere, but anything will do really. I've used various coloured cheap acrylic scraps for mine. The tiny one was cotton fine crochet thread though. The basic method to start these off is to treat the row of holes as though it is a row of stitches and just crochet into them all the way around the container. I start off with a single crochet into each hole by pulling through the yarn like this to make a second loop on your hook.

and then making a single crochet stitch with it by hooking the yarn over the top of the rim and through the two loops on the hook, like this.

If you keep going round the whole container like that, then you'll end up with a nice base to then crochet further rounds of stitches into.

Here you can see the base round crocheted onto the protein shake bottle in pink yarn. I joined the round with a slip stitch and chained one before starting the next round.

From here on out you can just wing it really to get the shape you want from your basket top. Each basket I've made has been different and I kind of like the "make it up as you go" way that these come together. With this one it looks like i made two single crochet stitches into each of the base round stitches, but generally if you do just one stitch into each of the base round stitches then the top will start to pull in like the style of the larger ones I've posted pictures of in this thread.

To make the handles for most of these baskets, I started a round and then made a length of chain stitches the size of the handle I wanted and then joined it again to the round with a single crochet stitch, carrying on around with single crochet stitches and then doing the same thing on the other side for the second handle. Then I just continued to do single crochets into each stitch of the much larger round that now included the handles. A couple of rounds of stitches is enough to make the handles really quite sturdy, but you can see that with Del's little purple easter basket I didn't even bother with that and just left the handles as a single row of chain stitch.

The teensy necklace one just has one big loop of chain stitch for it's handle too.

Once you're done with the crochet (which doesn't take that long unless you make really big handles or something) the kids can decorate their baskets with stickers or sharpie pens.

I need to find more little plastic bottles, because they all want one of the little necklace versions now!

Milk Jug Dragon Mask

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:16:00 +0000

St David's Day at school went well. The kids loved the school eisteddfod and enjoyed wearing their Welsh costumes too. Ffion was happy to wear my old traditional Welsh costume from when I was a kid, but Tomboy Carys was hell bent on being a welsh dragon, so we had to make her costume.

Have you ever wanted to make a dragon mask? Sure you have. Yeah, yeah, you can say you haven't, but I know you have. You'd be mad not to want to make one. So, because you DO have a burning desire to make a dragon mask, and because you are obviously a sensible, frugal individual, and not afraid of a big old mess (because if you are afraid of a big old mess I have no idea why you are here), let me bombard you with a few too many photographs showing you how to make a kick-ass dragon mask out of two milk jugs, some tin foil and a newspaper. Has there ever been a more useful blog post in the history of the internet? No. I'm fairly sure that's what you are thinking.

I hope that there is someone out there that might actually find this a little bit useful, because although we were sort of making it up as we went along, there are squillions of photos.

First of all, you will be needing two of the British style 4pint plastic milk jugs that you have cleaned out and dried. They look like the ones below. The reason that I used milk jugs to make the base of this is because they durable, flexible, easy to cut with scissors and get a stapler through, and they are just sat there in the recycling bin, so, Freeeeee!

We have made plenty of stuff from the US Gallon sized milk jugs while we were living in California, like the Storm trooper helmet and the batman masks. I bet you could still find a way to use the US ones to make a similar design, because they have a larger surface area, so you've actually got more plastic to work with on those.

I started with the first milk jug by chopping off the neck (you'll need to keep this because it'll be used later), then I chopped off the base, and the handle section.

The large piece is going to be the main part of the mask (the sides and top). The smaller handle piece has to be cut and stapled to make the dragon's nostrils. The collection of photos below shows from several angles how we cut down the handle and pushed it together to staple it into a shape that looked like it would work for the nose of the dragon. I think this is the hardest bit to explain in words, hence all the pictures.

Next I used a staple or two on each side to attach the nose to the rest of the head.

Now you want to get your second milk jug, and cut off the neck again (save this one for later too). Cut off your handle, and cut off the lower half of the jug (again keep that to use later) This is the piece that you're left with.

This is going to be stapled onto the back of the mask to complete the back of the head.

You still have the handle section from the second milk jug, and that needs to be cut right down to make a piece that can be stuck on over the tip of the nose to make a nice dragony point to it and to cover the front parts of the nostrils that you've made. Here's a series of pictures showing how I got that little bit from the handle.

And here you can see how it fits onto the end of the dragon's nose to complete his face.

You still have the bottom half of the second milk jug, and the sides of that are going to be used to make the little wingy ear bits that go on the side of the dragon's head. I'm not well up on dragon anatomy, so I don't know if these have a proper name. Anyhoooo, here's the picture of the bit you cut them from and how they look before you attach them.

Here they are tucked into the seam where the back joins the side of the head and stapled on. You can see now how useful the curve in the side of the milk jug is to make the ears stand out from the head.

The final part of the milk jug masacre is to use your two neck pieces to make sturdy places that you can have your horns coming out of. I cut the neck pieces right down and used a pen to mark on where I wanted them to go, then I used a pair of nail scissors to cut out the circles and push the neck pieces into place from the inside of the mask. A good squidge of hotglue held them securely.

So, here's what your finished underlying milk jug structure should look like. Lightweight and sturdy.

Out of the two milk jugs that you've used, all you have left are some offcuts and the two bases!

Now for some tin foil and hot glue fun! This is the least documented section of the project, because all it is really is squishing large sheets of tin foil onto your base to make the dragon have the features you want. We used the tin foil on our mask to flesh out the nostrils, to add some head ridges, to add a couple of facial horns, and to sculpt the side of the dragon's mouth. We also added a couple of spikes to the back of his head and most importantly, we twisted up some tin foil horns and stuck them through the necks of the bottles that we glued on the top of the dragon's head. We used lots of hot glue to smoosh the sections of tin foil onto each other, so that there weren't a load of loose bits sticking up when we came to add the papier mache layer. The top image is after three sheets of foil have been added, and the bottom picture is when all the foil has been added (I think we used about five or six strips from the roll that were about a foot and a half to two feet in length, so not that much foil really.

The beauty of using tin foil to do this part is that you can add volume really quickly and easily and it adds very little weight to the mask, and when the tin foil is compacted on it is very sturdy and easy peasy to papier mache over.

The kids really got stuck into the papier mache part of the project, and my job was really just ripping up the newspaper while they stuck it on. The horns would have been harder for them to do with bits of paper, so we wrapped them in crepe paper from a streamer roll and then pasted them with the flour and glue mixture instead. To make it easy for the kids to get at, we sat the mask on top of a ceramic jug, so the back of it was raised slightly off the table.

All of the project up to here was done on a Saturday morning, but once the papier mache is on, you have to wait for it to dry, so that's going to take about 24 hours before you can get painting and decorating your mask.

Here's a few pictures of the mask with the dry papier mache, before any painting was done.

My older daughter loved the papier mache part the most, but my middle daughter was really into the painting part. I had a tester pot of red paint from a hardware store that I'd planned to paint something for Delyth with months ago and hadn't got around to, so we used that to give the dragon a base coat colour that we could decorate on top of. It gave really good coverage and you couldn't see the newspaper print through it at all, so we only needed the one coat.

Here's Mr Dragon with his snazzy paint job. You can see the structure of the mask really well with the plain paint job, so I took a few pics from a few angles.

Here's a pic of the inside of the mask (you can see that we made the papier mache go over the edges and onto the inside a bit). You can also see the tin foil smooshed ends of the horns on the inside of the mask too, which helped keep the horns anchored while you're papier macheing them.

We used another couple of bits out of the recycling bin to decorate the finished mask. For the teeth and eyes we used a bit of cardboard from a school shirt package and the white polystyrene from a pizza package.

Again everything was stuck on with hot glue. We happened to have a load of red hot glue sticks that a friend found at a charity shop in the US and gave to us last Christmas, so those were perfect for this! and we had some red heart sequins that got smooshed into the glue to add a bit of bling around the eyes.

Our mask at this point was ever so slightly front heavy, so we added a winged cape and dragon tail to the back of it, which weighted it perfectly and also meant that our costume was complete with just the one item.

Extra decorating included painting on some darker red paint and gluing more sequins on, plus hot glue and glitter scales in places. We weren't too neat about it, but the results are pretty good.

The material all came from two 60p bundles that we found outside a fabric remnants place not far from here, so this has to be one of the cheapest costumes we've made.

Here's the back of the mask where the cape is attached.

and here's how it all looks from the back with the cape and tail...

The fabric bundle also had a little bit of red fleece in it, so I lined the mask with that to make it really comfortable to wear (again it was all hot glued on).

Here's kiddo rocking the finsished mask.

She's so happy with it! And very proud that she was so involved in it's creation. I know this is is ridiculously involved and detailed tutorial, but I'm hoping that there will be some people who find the techniques we used useful in building other types of masks on the cheap, for example it wouldn't take much alteration to make this be a horse mask, or a unicorn mask, and with a change of underlying plastic milk jug structure and a bit of imagination I'm pretty sure you could make any kind of mask you want in this way. There we go, that made me feel a little less like a nutter for posting all this. We had fun making it, and I think that's the important bit!

Welsh cake recipe and printable

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:18:00 +0000

Happy St David's Day! Or Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant. I have another post for you over at Alphamom today. I've mentioned St David's Day on this blog before a couple of years ago, in this post. We do try to do something little to celebrate each year (partly to try and share some traditions from home with the kids while we were in the US, because they only really saw St Patrick's day being celebrated there), but this is the first year in almost a decade that we've actually been back in Wales for March 1st! and for the kids it is their first St David's Day in the country!

We made Welsh cakes for the family this year, and I have written about it over on Alphamom.com, where you can find a free printable recipe that is very kid friendly, along with a lot of photos and tips on changing up the recipe if you want to suit your family's tastes. Del can't get enough of them! I love them because they are delicious, so quick to make, and freeze really well too. There's also an example of a savoury "not really very welsh cake" that my kids love too.

Check out the old St David's Day post if you fancy making some kitchen paper leeks for your imaginary grocery store.

I'll be back very shortly with another post, because we just made a dragon costume out of two plastic milk jugs, tin foil and newspaper. It's way cooler than I thought it would turn out, and the kids were really into the messy papier mache and painting. I was making it up as I went along, so hopefully I have enough photos that it makes sense when I write up how to do it. In the mean time, here's a picture of a little Welsh baby in a Welsh field with a bunch of Welsh sheep.

Last thing... Exciting for everyone here...Ffion lost her first baby tooth last week and we had a visit from the tooth fairy again (you can read about the first tooth fairy visit for Carys in this post). This was our first UK tooth fairy experience, and Ffion decided to make her a little Lego chair to rest on, with a little drinking fountain, after she'd dropped her miniscule tooth into the box of Lego and freaked out that she would never find it ever (we found it).

Weirdly, the Conwy Tooth Fairy Co-operative use the same stationery as California Tooth Traders Inc. I went with a reader suggestion from the last post about tooth fairies and Ffion's fairy's name was Enamelie. The pixie fire stone mentioned was a tiny pendant that I've had for years and never worn. Ffi thinks it's awesome. It was so small that it could be taped to the bottom right hand corner of the letter and folded up in it, and the letter is only two inches wide.

We've got a total of four wobbly teeth in the house at the moment, so I have my work cut out! Anyway, hope you're tempted to try cooking a few Welcakes :)

Hershey's Kiss Lighthouse Valentines

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:20:00 +0000

I've designed you a printable to make these sweet little lighthouse valentine favors. You sit a Hershey's Kiss in the top of it as the light and then, if you are my kids, you make a "SQUEEEEE!" sound because they are "so tiny and cuuuute!" The message reads "You light the place up!"

You can find the free printable and easy instructions on how to put them together over here at my post on Alpha Mom. Each printed page makes three lighthouses.

Hope you have a lovely love day!

Decorations from recycled holiday cards.

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:21:00 +0000

OK, so this is a bit late for a Christmas craft (or is it just very very early for a Christmas craft?), but I just wanted to post it in case you had cards left around from the holidays. I remember making these with mum when I was about eight years old. Mum would take down the Christmas cards after the holidays and stash them away with all the decorations so that the following year we could make these globe decorations from them in the run up to the holidays.

They are pretty simple to make. You need twenty identically sized circles cut from your cards to make each one. The circles have their sides folded to make triangles. The shape that results from sticking together these twenty triangular sides is an Icosahedron. If you want to, then it is possible to make smaller ones in the shape of an octahedron very easily with just eight circles, which would work better if you had smaller kids that wanted to join in too.

We used a roll of sticky tape to make our circles because that way we could see well to center the design that we wanted. It would work just as well to use a glass to draw around, but my kids are less likely to smash a roll of sticky tape!

I've made a little printable so that you can easily mark on your circles where they divide in thirds, because this part needs to be reasonably accurate if they are going to glue together nicely with no gaps. If you click on the little thumbnail image of the print out below then it should bring it up full sized for you to print out.

To use it, you line up your card circle within the nearest sized circle outline and then use the three lines to mark three dots on the edge of your card circle.

You can then use a ruler and something like the back of a butter knife to score between these dots. This will get your little triangle shapes folded neatly and evenly.

I suppose you could stack up all your pre-made circles and pop them in with the holiday decorations like that, as a ready to glue together holiday project come December.

We put ours together though, so that I could photograph it to show you. The easiest way to construct the icosahedron is to start off by making a panel out of five pieces like in the photograph below. We used regular white glue to do this, but it probably would have been a little easier with a glue stick, only we didn't have one handy.

So, with ten of your pieces you make two of those panels, then with the remaining ten pieces you glue them together in a long line like in the photo below..

Then you take your long line of ten pieces and glue it closed into a ring. This is the central part of the icosahedron, and the two other panels now can be glued to the top and the bottom to complete it.

Here it is with just the top panel glued on.

If you're having trouble with the glue not drying fast enough, just put a bobby pin/hair grip on to hold the pieces until the glue sets.

Here are the two that we made, one big one and another that was slightly smaller.

I would love it if we managed to make at least a couple of these each year and eventually we'd have enough to decorate a whole room with multicoloured, recycled, holiday globes! I hope you like them. I think I might be extra fond of them because mum showed me how to do this as a kid. She used to cut her circles out with pinking shears, so they were all zig zaggy edged and that made them look a bit snowball like.

...and with that, I promise that I will never again write a Christmas themed blog post in February ;)

Candy rope friendship knots.

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:58:00 +0000

Happy new year! Am I the last blogger out there to wish you that? At least it's still January eh! Only just though! Anyhoo, I have a printable and craft for the kiddos to make this valentine's day. I know we're in the UK now and over here we don't give valentines in class, but I figured we'd do it for our first year here just as a little novelty (the kids are still very much the yanks in class, and the accents have only faded very slightly after six months).

These friendship knots are really easy to make from any sort of rope candy, and I've made a print out that you can download to make cute little bag toppers with instructions for tying the knots, so that they look like more of a little gift.

The full instructions and printable download are here on Alpha Mom, so pop on over to have a look and see if these will work for your children. Ideal for both lads and lasses, as I'm pretty sure all children like candy and tying things in knots. I know boy scouts sometimes use this knot if they haven't got a woggle handy, but it makes me think of holding hands like this...

I've got another craft here ready to post too. It's something that my mum used to do with me, using left over Christmas cards after we'd taken them all down. Do any of you actually have left over holiday cards lying around anymore or have they all been recycled by now? I guess it's handy to have the idea for next year though right? I'll get to posting that tomorrow!

In the mean time, here are a few links to older Valentine's day projects that we've done here in the past...

Giant lollypop valentines

Toilet roll tube valentine's necklaces

Plastic bag iron on felt valentine's patches

Mini crepe paper roses instruction video

Kanzashi from baby wipes and paper towels.

Paper plate heart hats (and other designs)

Awww, I can't believe that photo above is almost a year old. Del looks so teeny! She's nineteen months old now and is all over the place running and climbing and jumping! Her hair is as wild as she is too :)

I hope you all had a lovely winter break. My epic mission to cater Christmas dinner for both sides of the family worked out in the end. Space was tight, so I did two sittings. Yes, that's right, I cooked Christmas dinner on Christmas day for one side of the family and then did it all over again on boxing day for the other side of the family! Our tiny little oven didn't know what had hit it! Then we started off 2013 with some wild and wooly Welsh walking over by Llyn Idwal. We've had a photograph of Llyn Idwal on our wall in America for years, and this was the first time we had taken the kids there. They have seen that photo pretty much every day of their lives, so it was fun for them to figure out where it was taken from.

Here's hoping that the rest of 2013 is just as lovely!

Paper snowflake fun

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Yule tide festive vibes to all!

Just popping in to give you a link over to my post on making paper snowflakes at Alpha Mom. Folding tips to make an easy six sided snowflake, plus some ideas for using them to decorate. Here's a piccy for you to see how we used a big one to conceal the fact that our table is not really one table, but two folding leaf tables next to each other. Just a big strip of wrapping paper and a snowflake and it looks like a giant present (I can't do table cloths at all at our house because they would get stained immediately or everything would get pulled onto the floor by Delyth).

We popped some big snowflakes made from wrapping paper up on the wall too, as well as the usual white paper ones on the windows. So, if you're interested in upping your paper snowflake making game, pop and have a look at the folding instructions and tips over on my post here.

Happy Holidays and wishing you all a cracking 2013!

Star of treats advent craft

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 12:51:00 +0000

Wow, welcome to December! That snuck up on us didn't it! As usual I'm a last minute kinda crafter and yesterday we put together our advent calendar for this year. It's fabulously cheap to make and you can re-use it next year too, so it may be entirely possible that next year I actually have this advent calendar thing all sorted without the usual night before flurry of glue and recycling. Yay! It's a double sided star with 24 little containers that can be opened and closed again.

I've posted all about how to make it over at Alpha Mom. Here's the link. There's a printable that I made available over there too, so you can print out the numbers to go on it and also the little center circle that the kids can decorate. You can't see the numbers on the photo above because they are hidden in the tinsel (you have to hunt for the number that you are opening each day). You can see the numbers in the photo below before I put the tinsel on.

I'll get to posting some links to a few of our older Christmas/winter crafts in the coming week, but in the mean time, here are a couple of advent calendar posts from years gone by...

Tissue paper and condiment cup advent calendar from 2008 (first saw this idea by Brenda Ponnay as a November calendar on Alpha Mom, years before I started writing for them, Brenda still writes for Alpha Mom by the way, and did her own advent calendar craft for them this year as well, link here)

Last minute count down calendar for slackers (see, I don't even manage to get my act together for Dec 1st some years!)

Happy Holiday planning you guys! Now that we're back in the UK, this will be the first Christmas that we can have our parents and siblings over to our house for the holidays and I can't wait! There will be grandmas and grandpas and aunties and uncles and cousins. Question is, can I rise to the challenge of Christmas dinner for all those people? Place your bets!

Free pharaoh's mask and collar printable

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:38:00 +0000

We're gearing up for Halloween here. It's not such a big deal in the UK as it is in the US though, so sadly there will be no parade in costume at school for the kids. We'll likely do a minor amount of local trick or treating though, and I'm sure the kids will be excited to embrace the UK tradition of Guy Fawke's night five days later, what with all the fireworks and toffee apples!

This year what we needed was a costume that captured the kid's current fixation of ancient Egyptian mummies, and allowed them to get involved in creating their own costume at a very low cost. So I set about making a 3D Pharaoh's mask and collar from paper that we could combine with a lot of toilet roll to jazz up the classic, low effort, loo roll mummy costume. The head dresses were just improvised by sticking a long sleeved t-shirt on our heads with the arms hanging down in front. Easy peazy lemon squeezy.

The kids loved it, and I've written up a tutorial with photos and all the print outs for both the mask and the collar, available as either A4 size, or US letter size pdfs over at Alpha Mom. If you think your kids would also get a kick out of this then pop over there to read the post and print your own copies. They are black and white line drawings, so that the kids can colour them any way they like and it is low on using up printer ink too.

I'm hoping that some home schoolers might find them a useful resource when studying ancient Egypt too (you can probably tell that I based it heavily on the mask of king Tut) Interesting fact: According to Wikipedia, on November 4th it will be 90 years since the day that Howard Carter's team discovered the steps leading down to Tutankhamun's tomb! I may put on a suit and a stick on moustache to be Howard Carter when going trick or treating with the kids. Maybe I can get Paul to go as zombie Lord Carnarvon with a tiny piece of bloody tissue stuck on his face. Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.

While I'm posting about halloweeny/fall/autumn type things, I thought it would be useful if I put a few links in here to some older posts in the Filth Wizardry archives, that might be useful for either costume making or just plain crafty fun on the theme.I'm sure there are more if you go digging, but these are the ones that sprang to mind.

Costume posts:

Halloween/Fall/Autumn craft posts:

Hope there's something in those lists that will be useful to you this year. If anyone does make the storm trooper mask or Egyptian mask or the X-wing helmet, any of it really, I would so love to hear about it or see photos! The idea of people out there embarking on similar projects with their kids as a result of us blogging about our antics is such a lovely thought!

Have a lovely Halloween, and here's one last link to the Alpha Mom post with the Egyptian mummy mask, so that you don't have to scroll back up ;)

Autumn woodland treasure sculpture

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 21:21:00 +0000

Thought I should post about this project we did over the weekend, because the kids had a lovely time doing it, and the gift recipient (Grandma) really liked it too, so a win-win!

The making dragonflies using maple seeds and twigs appeared in Family Fun magazine a month or two ago, credited to a Shanti Nordholt. Here is the link to the originals (that also have glass bead eyes). As you can see in the picture below, we didn't do the glass bead eyes. I think we might have some somewhere in the shipping, but right now, a craft that we can do with just hot glue, paint and stuff we found on the ground on the way home is where it's at!

We had a couple of different sorts of seeds, so maybe one type was maple and one type sycamore? Not sure. We also picked up a load of twigs, and a small dead branch and a few conkers and leaves.

The conkers became the centers for the big flowers, with the sycamore seed petals hot glued around them, and the dragon fly bodies were a twig that had a natural little Y shape at the end to be the antennae. We used more twigs to make the flower stems and glued fallen leaves onto those too. We ended up cutting the lumpy seed bits off of the sycamore seeds with scissors to make gluing the wing bits onto the twigs a lot easier.

The kids painted them all up with acrylic paint. Some of them came out absolutely gorgeous, which is always an unexpected happy surprise when you've got little kids making stuff. I was kind of expecting that we might have really odd, crushed and weird looking insects and flora, but nope, it came out great.

All we did to give it to grandma was stick the twig in a glass full of rice to hold it. If you've got a vase and some proper floral glass nugget things it might look a bit classier, but given that it's made from hot gluing together stuff that fell out of trees, I think the glass of rice works just fine.

We are so making more of these, because I want one to stay in our home too! Something about it sort of reminds me of the victorian fixation with things like fire screens that hold stuffed bird displays or butterflies made out of feathers, or even the weird gluing seashells together to make freaky looking animals. I really do like it though, and because the seeds are so very thin, the light shines through them in a lovely way. It would also look much classier if it was done just in it's natural fall colours, but painting it all crazy was at least 50% of the fun.

Talk Like a Pirate Day Printable

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 21:12:00 +0000

Hello again! Dust is settling around us as we unpack our shipping here on the UK side of the Atlantic. It was a busy couple of months, but we're just about catching our breath now, and although everything isn't exactly unpacked or even in the room that it should be in, we are somewhat settled. More on all that later though. Right now I'm popping in to give you a link over to a post I just wrote on Alpha Mom for "Talk Like a Pirate Day", which is supposed to be September 19th, but really, honestly, any day is a good day for pretending to be a pirate, right?

I put together this single page printable that you can colour and cut out to dress up your soft toys and give them some piratitude. Ffi and Carys had a lot of fun dressing up their toys and Del had a lot of fun undressing them and sticking the eye patches on her legs (whatever floats your boat matey).

There are also instructions on how to make the nifty little removable pirate hook hand covers for your toys too, so, pop on over to the post (here is the link), download the free printable and have half the toys set sail in the laundry basket with some pillow case sails! It's available as an A4 size or letter size download for ease of printing by pirates from all corners of the seven seas.

Nothing says piratitude quite like a one eyed, golden toothed, bearded Pikachu brandishing a cutlass! Yaaaarrrrrr!!!

If you're interested in more piratey posts that I've done, these are from Talk Like a Pirate Day 2011 and 2010.

Make your own cloth pirate maps.

Pirate girl bandana shirt and rolled newspaper swords.

Transatlanic mayhem

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 02:19:00 +0000

Oh my goodness me! So much I wanted to find the time to post about, but long story short- we're moving our family from California back to the UK this week! So so so much to sort out. We've been planning the move for nearly two months, but well, it turns out if you've been living in the same house for nearly seven years and you have the same sort of making stuff out of things lifestyle that we do, then there is a whooooole lot of sorting out that needs to be done before you can emigrate. I've been a little wild eyed and panicky the last couple of weeks and have been making a few too many jokes about throwing everything out on the lawn and setting fire to it, but as we get closer to the day we fly, it is actually coming together thank goodness!

There's been garage sales with friends and lemonade stands:

There's been plenty put on Craigslist. After a year of taking photos of Del in our rocking chair, we sold that a couple of days ago too.

There's been a lot of stuff to donate too. We're in luck that not far from us in San Francisco there is a fabulous school that does a lot of this open ended making and inventing and experimenting malarky with their students, so we've been up there with a couple of car loads (another couple to go this week too). Brightworks has been open for a year now and I hope they will grow and grow and allow many many more children to have this sort of experience, because it's lacking in the world today. Makes me happy to know that our tools and glue guns and soldering irons and low tech light table and paper and all manner of other makey things will be used and enjoyed some more by children. Here are the big 'uns enjoying the creations made by last week's group at Brightworks, when we popped in at the end of the day to drop things off. It was lovely to have Ellen and Justine be as excited about things like our elderly leaf blower as we were when we first picked it up at a garage sale and thought "Yes! Giant Bernoulli effect demo with a soccer ball!" Back to ping pong balls and hair dryers for us!

If you want to see more of what the kids at Brightworks get up to, Josh writes a blog daily for them with lots of great photos. They were building a harmonograph last week! Harmonographs are cool! We gave them the weights from ours, but their set up is much bigger and capable of more degrees of freedom, like the one at the Exploratorium. I'm kind of hoping that it will still be up when we call back next week to drop off the last of our tools and things.

So, things are winding down here. I'll still be posting here on Filth Wizardry in the future and I'll still be writing posts over at Alphamom.com every month once we get settled, but for the next few weeks we're going to be hopping about and kind of nomadic while we get rid of the last of our belongings here and then attempt to re-accumulate the important ones on the other side of the Atlantic. Oooh, and for those of you that are interested... After several years of staying up and being lovely and colouful, the tissue paper stained glass window came down really fast and easily without leaving any mess or damage to the window. Yay! Here's a pic I took with it all half peeled off. It was sad to see it go, but the peeling was fast and fun to do.

The kids dug up the purple potatoes yesterday and washed them off. I took apart the planter we made and painted, and the kid's lovely kindergarten teacher (who we will miss very much) has adopted the strawberry plants. Our neighbour took the twelve bags of soil over to his place for more veggie growing, so even in this rush and chaos it feels nice to have this community of help and mutual benefit surrounding us, with very little going to waste. Even the giant geoboard was taken in by my oldest's second grade teacher :)

What else, what else? Oh yes, totally awesome accidental timing on our part, but we are arriving in Manchester only a few days before they are holding a Manchester Mini Maker Faire! Yippie! Will we see any of you UK peeps there? It's Freeeeeee! My favourite price! I'm sad that we will unlikely get to all go to the Bay Area Maker Faire again any time soon though. We had such fun there the last three years. The kids were excited about it for weeks before hand this year.

Right, baby is awake and I've got to do more packing! There's so much more that I want to share. Maybe I will have time to write more when we're back in Wales and still living out of suitcases before any shipping arrives. Hope you're all having a good summer!

Coffee Cup Sleeve printable for your Teacher

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sun, 27 May 2012 04:26:00 +0000

It's nearly the end of the school year here in our bit of California. The kids actually only have three days left of school, which is shocking to me. I'm sure it was last week that Ffion went off to her first day of kindergarten with her "writing arm" in a plaster cast. Here we are though, on the brink of the summer vacations (this year's is going to be a pretty epic and challenging one for our family, but that's for another post). I just wanted to share with you the printable that I made last week to personalize the kid's teacher's gift cards that we got them.

The teachers that my girls have had so far have all been fanbloodytastic. Really really lovely people with a genuine passion and drive for what they do. The kids don't get the issues like the chronic lack of funding and curriculum difficulties, but they can feel the dedication these teachers have and boy do they love them for it! The last couple of years I've knitted something for the teachers, but this year time has been tight (plus all knitting has been directed towards friends and family that have been relentlessly making tiny people that all need cardigans damnit!). So this year for each teacher I got them a Starbucks gift card and made this "Top Teacher" print out sleeve to cover a take out coffee cup that we put the gift card in. Pretty simple, but both teachers this year love Starbucks, so everyone's a winner baby!

If you'd like to do the same, you can find the printable download (for free of course) over at Alpha Mom, here.

I also wanted to let you know that the bloke I am affiliated with has written the post he's been meaning to for ages over on his own blog, that shows the birthday present he made for Ffion this year. (he wrote about the house he made for Carys last year here).

In other news... Delyth started walking and is all over the place and into everything. It's very very cute but she's really keeping me on my toes here. I had to tape some wood to the bottom of the ladder to the kid's loft bed yesterday to stop her trying to climb it! No sitting still for pictures any longer.

Back to explain our summer plans when I get a mo :)

A new Easter hunt challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:08:00 +0000

I know this is a little late to be of use to anyone for this year, but given that I have the template files to hand from making these on Friday night, I should post them before I either loose them to the depths of my hard drive file structure, or just forget to blog about them altogether when Easter comes around next year. If I'm still around and posting this time next year then I'll try and remember to link to this again to remind folk that it's here.

I've written about how we do egg hunts here before, and we did that again this year, but we added another game into the mix at the last minute. My friend Jennifer had got all the kids a chocolate Peter Rabbit each, so the plan was to have them "earn it". I wanted to sort out some kind of challenge that they could complete in their own time. I had seven kids doing this that were between six and nine years old and I only had the idea to do it the night before, so had to make the answer sheets and bunny clues rather hurredly.

I've drawn these little bunnies in this specific way since I was a kid, and I used to draw them exploding up into the air as if they were farting themselves off the ground like this...

That's how mature I am, and they made my mum giggle, so of course I kept doing it!

I decided to chunk up my "classic bunny" to give enough space to put the challenge clues on his tummy, and remove his signature propulsion system to make little rabbit markers that could be "hidden" around the garden for the kids to find and collect clues from.

The clues I came up with were to have each rabbit have a "clue letter" that you would have to write down next to the rabbit's number to spell out a password to get your chocolate bunny. To make it a bit tougher for the older kids, so that they couldn't just find a few rabbits and then guess the rest of the letters to complete the password, I also put a different famous rabbit on each marker that they had to make a note of next to that marker's number too.

Being extra fancy like we are around here, I used some little bulldog clips to attach the answer sheets to some hard backed kids books we had on the shelf and then used a bit of yarn to tie a pen to each, so that the kids would find it easier to go around gathering and writing the clues down.

The kids did a grand job on this challenge. Everyone completed it and got their chocolate bunny within about 20 minutes, which worked out really nicely. They had twelve bunny markers to find and the twelve "clue letters" when put together spelled out the prize password: "Hot Cross Buns".

If you wanted to make this easier then you could omit the extra step of having to name each rabbit found, or to make it harder you could have the code letters not be in order and they would have to figure out the password like an anagram puzzle at the end. Lots of ways of tailoring this to fit your crowd.

Leave it to Paul to hide eggs in a tree...

I've put a few printables here for you in case they turn out to be useful for someone next year. The first three are print outs of the markers I made for the hunt (they were cut out and taped to popsicle sticks to stick in the ground). I've removed the clues we used so that you can make your own hunt the way that you want it to be. Just click on the thumbnails to get the larger version to print.

Next is the answer sheet for the kids to fill in. The code letter boxes are coloured the same as the rabbits they go with so that the kids can more easily see which is which when reading across from the numbers. Two of these answer sheets fit on one US letter sized piece of paper.

Lastly, I threw together a page of smaller, plain, uncoloured, and unlabelled bunnies in case anyone wanted to use them as gift tags or use them to cut out and make into a card game somehow, like a matching game or something, or just let your kids colour them. Just thought that might be useful.

We had some seriously nice weather for this, which was lucky timing because it's due to start pouring down again tomorrow. Went on a wander with the family later in the day and found the world's best field of daisies for making head dresses with!

Also, I am happy to report that a couple of years later and they are still happily rocking the superhero ponchos I made them and blogged about way back here.

If you've got any of your plastic eggs left over then you might want to make some toadstools with them like these,

Or use them to make R2D2 secret storage boxes, or hang on to them because I have another craft that I want to post about that we did with them too.

Hope you all had a lovely weekend too and that this post might be useful for Easter time next year :)

Tooth Fairy Fun

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 06:35:00 +0000

Squeee! My first kid lost her first baby tooth, and has her first gigantic horse sized adult tooth in her tiny mouth! So I haven't posted the two Easter/Spring type posts I meant to this week because after the kids went to sleep I was instead forging correspondence from the tooth fairy. Kiddo decided she wanted to try and scam the tooth fairy into letting her keep the tooth, but still give her money, because she said "The thing is, I just really don't want to not have my tooth anymore". In response to that letter, she found this letter that I typed up and printed out all teensy weensy...

The next night she left this letter and her teensy tooth for the tooth fairy...

So, I forged another letter from Sparkle Fangs and left it with her $1.02 (an amount suggested by one of my friend's children as a fair price for a baby tooth) If you click on the image you should be able to see it large enough to read...

The dollar bill I folded into a little basket to hold the note, the two cents and some glitter. I used this really nice and easy to follow video instruction I found on Youtube.

I'm looking forward to trying more dollar bill origami as more of the kid's baby teeth gradually fall out. This one to make a ring looks cool.

Maybe they could each have their own tooth fairy from Tooth Traders Inc assigned to them. Not sure how I'm going to top Sparkle Fangs though. Ffion will want a girly named fairy for sure. Enamelina? Flouridella?

Both the older girls (who are now six and seven) are quite excited by it all and are keen to lose more teeth so they can write to the tooth fairy again. They did almost bust me though. Carys said "I think maybe you wrote the letter mum", but then when I showed her my smallest hand writing, she was all "Wow, you can't write that tiny at all, so it couldn't be you". Mwah haha haaa! Also, the tooth fairy can only seem to write upper case letter Rs. (and can't spell the word ballast). I wonder if she finished fairy high school? Maybe she just needs a good night's sleep ;)

In other news, the littlest poppet is now nine months old and still no teeth! We were wondering if her first one would make it's appearance as soon as her biggest sister lost her first one, just like Junie B Jones and her brother Ollie had happen, but nope, she's still all gummy and yummy.

Daisy chain toy

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:44:00 +0000

I thought you might get a kick out of this craft for smaller children that I wrote about over at Alpha Mom, seeing as we've just entered spring in the northern hemisphere, and Easter is nearly here. All the things you need to make a nice big set of these work out pretty cheap, and this is a DIY toy that will last a long time, so worth it. I spent just over $5 for all the materials to make enough of these to keep my two girls very busy and give them plenty of options.

The way these work is that you make lots and lots of individual flower sections that the kids can thread into each other and be taken apart again easily to make many different kinds of chains for head dresses, necklaces, bracelets or just long decorative garlands. It would work out to be a really neat fine motor skill activity for preschoolers.

If you'd like to see how to make these then pop over here to Alpha Mom where I have the whole tutorial posted. Bonus Easter points on this one, because they fit into the plastic egg hunt eggs, so that gives me more options that aren't candy for the egg hunts that we do here.

Flower fairy baby Del likes stealing them.

Over the weekend I'm hoping to put together another post about a similar daisy chain craft we did that is more suited to older, grade school kids like my girls. They really enjoyed the pipe cleaner daisy chains, but it was a bit too easy for them as they are now six and seven years old. After thinking about it for a bit I came up with another option for them that would be more of a test of their motor skills and look more realistic too. It's all made and I did take photos, but I need to find the time to write it up for you. I'm hoping that if I get it up here some time tomorrow then anyone that wants to will have enough time to make a set as an Easter gift.

In the mean time, here are a few older FW posts of easter type crafty goings on that might interest you...

Last year's Easter craft I wrote about over at Alpha Mom was the Pysanki on paper eggs. Ours are back up on the walls this year and we're going to make new ones over Spring break.

Bunny ear paper plate hat, with the template also over at Alpha Mom...

Origami bunny ear headbands from last year...

Lastly, here's an old post about how we do our egg hunts. It works out much better for us as a collaborative hunt, rather than the crazed, free for all, seemingly "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" themed event they hold at the local park, that everyone needs padding and pepper spray for.

Hope you're all geared up for some fun spring break times with the kiddos! My best mate from home just sent me a bag of 40 mini Cadburies Creme Eggs. I am ALL SET! Om nom nom!

X-wing flight suit t-shirt printable

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 19:08:00 +0000

The last post I wrote was all about making the x-wing fighter pilot helmets from our bike helmets. This post is to share with you the hoodies that we made for the girls to wear with the helmets. I thought about making them t-shirts, but it was still winter, so we went with something warmer instead.

I made the artwork for it on the computer. It's not totally accurate, but close enough that the kids and most people that have seen the movies will recognize it as the white padded bib and communications device that the x-wing pilots wear. I did look online to see if there was anything that you could buy that was regular clothing and not just halloween costume stuff, but the only things I could find were hoodies for grown ups that were sort of based on the flight suit but again not accurate and rather expensive. Here's a link to a picture of what the real movie flight suits looked like .

If you want to make one like I made for my girls, or a t-shirt, you'll need some printer transfer paper and the artwork that I've included as a printable in this post, plus whatever orange garment you're going to iron it onto. Just click on the thumbnail below to get the full size image to print on your transfer paper. It is designed to print on US letter sized paper, but if you scale to fit A4 when you print it, you shouldn't lose too much of the size. It should be an ok size to work for small and medium sized kid clothing. I'm not sure if it will work out for larger sizes or if you'd have to enlarge the image and print it across multiple sheets of transfer paper for that, which might be a pain.

Please don't use this to make money, because George Lucas will likely use the force to kick your ass.

I made it with a little Alliance logo in the empty space at the neck that can be cut out separately and ironed onto the arm of the garment too.

My first thought was to just iron these directly onto the hoodies, but then I thought that to anyone that wasn't totally into Star Wars it might look a bit like my kids were wearing some sort of bizarre bomb strapped to them?!? In the interests of not having random strangers calling homeland security on us while we're out and about, I instead ironed the bib part onto white felt and had safety pins to take it on and off the hoodie.

They still have their Rebel Alliance logo ironed directly onto the arm of the hoodie, so they can wear them to school but not look like they are "in costume".

I'm hoping to find some orange velcro at some point that I can use to replace the safety pins, but they are working fine in the mean time and being enjoyed by my rebels! If I spot an orange sleep suit for Delyth, I'm totally making her one too! Promise I'll post a photo if I do :) I might have to crochet her an x-wing pilot's helmet to go with it.

My apologies to any of my readers that aren't into Star Wars. I wasn't expecting the last three posts to be all Star Wars themed, and I know we've had minor Star Wars themed marathons in the past with light sabers and storm trooper masks, toys and doll house, and birthday parties, but that's it for a while I promise! Look , look, look though! These awesome peeps have had a go making the R2s and blogged about it. Makes me very happy to see that there are families that are up for the same antics as we are.

We got to benefit from other Star Wars crafty people's ideas this valentine's too, because my older daughter made a version of the glow stick light saber valentines we saw here at Stitch/Craft for her class. Ffion wanted to do the lolly pop valentines that we've done before for hers. Thank you to all the fab readers that got in touch to let me know that you'd done our giant lollypop valentines this year after they appeared in Family Fun magazine. It's really lovely to see projects I put up on here being done by other families around the world. The kids get a real kick out of seeing those photos too!

One last thing, I'm behind on replying to my emails, so please don't think I'm ignoring you if you've emailed me asking about something and I haven't got back to you yet. I can read my emails while I'm nursing Del, but replying to them whilst nursing means I can only use one hand to type and that's kinda slow going ;) Here's a photo of a cute baby for you to look at while I'm mashing one finger on the keyboard to write my replies...

Actually two last things! Happy mother's day to all the mums in the UK for tomorrow! If you're reading this mum, I loves ya!

Oh! Actually three last things! Paul just did a post over on his blog about the doll house we made based on our own house for Carys's birthday present last year. The kids love it, and he's said that if anyone wants to make one like it then to get in touch and he'll write out the plans and measurements he worked out to put on the blog. I still have a load of photos of things that are on our walls that I need to print out and stick on and varnish over, but we figure this is a work in progress and we'll add to it as we find the time.

Kid's DIY Star Wars X-wing fighter pilot's helmet

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsey) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:02:00 +0000

Oh my goodness! Let's all stop getting ill ok? Just for a while? This last month has been a relentless torrent of snot and barf and squitty butts! I've just put my back out as well, so although thankfully the ever evolving plague seems to have finally left the house, I am now creeping about like Julie Walters in the "Two Soups" sketch. Can we all agree that April will be super-awesome-not-sick month? Yes? Everyone remember to cough into your sleeve, only stick your fingers up your own noses, and try not to lick each other's eyeballs or any other gross, weird, contagious disease spreading malarky, you dirty, dirty little gremlins!

So, on to the post that I've wanted to write about for weeks!

The kids are still way into Star Wars and playing make believe, so I thought it would be fun to see if we could make some sort of very low cost dress up play version of an X-wing fighter pilot's helmet, so they could play Rogue Squadron with their walkie talkies. As usual with our antics, it's got to be really cheap to pull off, so yeah, it doesn't look like a cosplay prop, and you aren't going to want to rock one of these at Comicon, but if you have little children who aren't fussy about their dress up clothes being made from hot glue and paper plates then this is going to work for you.

The kids were so happy with how it turned out and it was pretty easy to pull off with some stuff that you likely have in your cupboards already.They were enjoying their Rogue Squadron status so much that I decided to make them "flight suit" hoodies, and I'll post the printable iron on decal that I made for those in the next post. This post however is all about making the helmets. Here's all the bits and bobs we used to make them.

The easiest thing to use as a base for this was going to be their bike helmets, but I didn't want to permanently alter them or damage them. The solution was to cover the bike helmet with one of the white trash bags that we use for our kitchen bin. I laid out the bag and wrapped it around the helmet and then used masking tape to tape around the edge of the helmet to hold it on. We just had cheap Kirkland bin liners, but if you had the fancy stretchy ones you could probably make this look really neat and tidy.

Then I trimmed off the excess bin liner, leaving enough so that I could fold it into the helmet and use a few bits of masking tape to hold it down.

Doing it this way means that when you are done and want to use your bike helmet to go out for a bike ride again, you can just peel of the masking tape and the whole x-wing pilot helmet will come off the top leaving the bike helmet underneath undamaged. Now you need a couple of paper plates (These ones I sort of popped the rims over on, but with the other type we used we didn't do that and both ways worked)

The next step was to use a low temperature hot glue gun to glue a white paper plate to each side of the helmet to get the shape right. We used two different kinds of paper plate for our two helmets, just to see which looked better, and I think they are both pretty ok really, so most any type of paper plate should work fine. The really cheap ones with the crimped edges we had to double up to make the card thick enough to be sturdy though.

We also cut and glued on a third plate at the back to make it a full helmet.

For the mohawk section that runs down the center of an x-wing pilot's helmet we cut two strips of corrugated cardboard from an old box and then wrapped it up in some butcher's block paper and glued it on with the hot glue.

I think it might be important to note that we used low temperature hot glue for all of this. I think if you tried it with the high temp stuff then you'd wind up melting the plastic bin liner that you'd used to cover the bike helmet and possibly damage the helmet underneath.

Once all the extra stuff was glued on to get the shape right, we decorated our helmets with pens (we used Sharpie permanent markers because the one type of white plate we used had a sort of waxy finish to it that regular pens wouldn't write on) I also drew the Rebel Alliance logo onto some card circles for them to glue on. Here's a link to a pretty good reference photo of the movie helmets if you want to copy the decals on them for your own helmets.

We didn't have any yellow transparent plastic handy to use for the visors on the helmets, so we used some clear plastic that was in the recycling bin from some random packaging and the kids coloured it with orange and yellow Sharpie pens. That sort of worked, but it wasn't really very yellow and if we were setting out to do this from scratch again then I think I'd try and find maybe a cheap yellow plastic see through sleeve or wallet from an office supply store that could be cut up and used for the visor.

All in all this was fast, cheap, easy, and the kids have got some good fun out of them. They decided that they should wear their dad's DIY safety glasses under the helmets to make the visors look more real, which is what you can see in the photo.

My friend Jordan says that there are actually at least two women fighter pilots in Rogue Squadron! I had no idea because they aren't present in the movies, but I was pretty stoked to find out it wasn't all men as I'd assumed. Very glad that the Rebel Alliance is equal opportunities, even if it was "long ago" and "in a galaxy far far away"!

Next post will be the flight suit hoodies :)

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.