Filth Wizardry

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.

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.