Christmas count down calendar for slackers

We never got our act together early enough to make advent calendars for the whole month of December, even though I still have last year's and all I'd have to do is cut and glue more tissue paper over the cups. Total slackers!

So I figured we'd just wait until a week before Christmas to have a count down calendar. At least this way the frenzy is compressed, and with schools out either yesterday or today around here, it makes a nice post school count down, because for most kids the holiday season starts in truth when winter break kicks off.

I had a few random sweets and little cheap toy things that I'd collected and with them being all different shapes and sizes it wasn't going to be easy to find containers that would fit them all, so I decided to make sort of calzone from paper plates to put them in.

I popped the treats in the plate, folded it over and stapled it shut. I drew the number for the date on it with a sharpie and when all seven were done, I set the kids to work colouring them. I left all but the 24th blank so that they could draw thier own pictures on them, but they demanded that I draw and they colour, so we ended up with lots of random christmassy stuff coloured in on them.

The good thing about using paper plates rather than just circles of paper was that the lip of the plate made a nice space inside to fit treats, and they were sturdy enough that the kids could colour on them without squashing the treats hidden inside.

I hole punched a corner of each and threaded string to hang them, then banged some tacks into the fireplace. The kids hung them up in the correct order.

Yes, that's a green snowman you can see there. Hey, at least it's not a yellow one.

We openned the one for the 18th and the kids nommed the treat inside. Now you can see that I stuck a wee paper doily on the inside of the plate and wrote on it "7 more days to go". This way they have a little reference hanging there, and the openned pate looks kind of pretty still hanging there like a snowflake. I only had little black plates, but if you had green and red plates it would look very Christmassy.

For any of you missing the LEGO posts, there is a DUPLO themed post from my partner in crime, er, I mean parenting, over on his blog, Fangletronics. He's hacked together a very sweet little traffic light for the kids to use with thier toy cars, and it fits neatly into a little DUPLO brick housing.

Homemade wrapping paper printing with laser cut felt

Ages ago we made some wrapping paper with foam stickers and a rolling pin. The drawing robots from ages ago made pretty cool wrapping paper too. Anyway, I only had five foam snowflake stickers left over from the advent calendars that we made last year though, so we weren't going to be able to use that rolling pin technique this year unless I went out and bought more.

Instead I figured the kids would have fun just stamping them one at a time, especially if I made a couple of really big stamps.

This post is more about how I made the stamps than the finished wrapping paper, because I know a lot of people have blogged about stamping wrapping paper in other places around the interwebs.

Big awesomeness discovery of late has been this simple little hot wire foam cutter. I picked it up for $1.50 at Daiso, and have used it to cut up loads of old polystyrene that was tucked away in the garage for various projects. It's so easy to use and so flippin' cheap, and I love the flexibility and recycle factor in being able to cleanly cut shapes from

old polystyrene. I'll post about some other cool stuff that we're been able to make with this little tool at some point. Can you tell how excited I am to have it? Hubbins was all geared up to make me a foam cutter from guitar wire and a model railway transformer, but no need!

If you don't have a Daiso near you then I'm pretty sure this is something that could be hacked together with magnet wire/guitar string, battery and other random stuff, providing you are careful not to burn the crap out of yourself in the process. Mind you, then you would look like you had tres sexy catering scars like I do (turns out broccolli and stilton soup is the culinary equivalent of napalm). Where was I? Oh yes... I may persuade Fangletronics man to put together a tutorial to make one, because most of the ones that you can buy are the big table top foam cutters rather than this hand held, compact and cheap version. Feel free to harass, er, I mean *encourage* him in the comments ;)

So I stuck the foam stickers onto the polystyrene sheet and then cut around them with the foam cutter to make little stampers. You could stick them on anything though, bottle lids would work pretty well too.

The big stamps I made using some laser cut felt tree ornaments that I also found in Daiso. They were $1.50 for a pack of three trees or three stars. I liked the idea of using these as stamps, because the felt would soak up the paint well. I've seen packs of flowers and hearts made from laser cut felt in the Dollar Tree before now. They were a little bigger and would be great for making valentine or birthday wrapping paper with!

Anyhoo, the other component that worked rather well for making these stampers were the plastic ends from rolls of catering foil that we got from Costco. The smaller rolls of foil don't have these supporting end pieces, but the heavier duty foil that comes in the whopping rolls does, and I'd saved them thinking, "cor they are an interesting shape. I wonder what they will be handy for."

I pushed the plastic ends into the foil to mark the shape to cut out with the foam cutter, then hot glued the foam shape into the plastic thingummydoodle.

Then I just took off the hanging thread and bead from the ornaments and hot glued them to the foam. Voila! Giant Christmassy stamps for the kids.

Big bit of brown paper, paper plates with kiddy paint, and off we go. They did a pretty darn good job! The felt stampers worked way better than the foam snowflake ones, but it was good to have the snowflakes, because the kids went around filling in spaces with them. They could get about four stamps out of the felt stampers before they had to reload them with paint.

Later that evening I got a sheet of brown cardboard that we'd got from between the rolls of kitchen paper at Costco, and stamped some more trees and stars to use as gift tags with the wrapping paper.

here's the finished stuff. Looks pretty tidy for being done by a five and a three year old! We'll definitely be making more with the Dollar Tree felt hearts and flowers!

I'm sure you can find appropriate bits and bobs in your recycling bin if you don't have access to the plastic ends from the catering foil. a big mayo jar lid with a smaller lid glued to the back of it?

We could even try it with regular craft felt cut into shapes. It's thinner than the laser cut stuff, but I reckon it would still work. There's no way I could cut out anything that detailed from it though. Maybe simple shapes like a bubble car and a truck that you can draw little windows and wheels on with a sharpie when it was dry?

LEGO car and DUPLO truck cardboard printables

Lego cardboard car printable.

So, you can buy the small LEGO wheels at the LEGO store by weight. We got one of the smallest tubs a while back. I think it was $7.99 and you could easily get 30 or more wheels in there.

I thought it would be nice to make a little cut out, punch and colour car to use with them (actually it works with our larger 1980s LEGO wheels too). I deliberately made the drawing of the car a simple shape that younger kids would find easy to cut out, and left the details on it minimal so that they could be creative with how it was decorated (I really want to glue sequins all over one, but then I kinda lurve art cars ;)

Anyhoo, here's the thumbnail that links to the full resolution image for printing. It prints on US letter sized paper and you just need a regular hole punch to make it work. 4 cars to a page.

Cut out your car, punch the holes and let the kids decorate them, then glue the tag to keep it closed.

I left the ends open for simplicity and also so that the kids can easily take the wheels on and off themselves.

DUPLO cardboard truck printable.

This one you don't even need a hole punch for, because you just cut out a rectangle for the wheeled base to fit through.

It's more likely that a grown up is going to have to cut and fold this one, but I made the design still simple, so the kids could decorate easily. I modified the print out from the one that you see in the pictures, so that there was a flap to fold up and glue at the front of the truck as well as the back.

We were lucky that we had this perfect little lego bit from a Dora set to use as the flat bed base, but any DUPLO would fit over the top fine.
As with the car template, the idea is pretty darn simple, so you could modify this to make a fire truck or a big rig or anything you fancy very easily. If people are interested and I do make other templates over time then I can scan them and pop them on the blog if you like.

Here's the thumbnail link to the template. US letter size paper again. Hopefully that isn't going to be so wide that it crops off on A4 paper. Let me know if that's a problem and I'll fix another template for people printing with A4.

Have fun and do let us know if you make your own versions. I'd love to link to them!

LEGO, DUPLO and what's in the recycling bin

The kids are still really into the LEGO hacking fun we've been having lately. We had two little friends visit us for a sleep over, and the subject of trains and cars and trucks came up.

In the recycling bin we had several empty raisin boxes that I thought we could make a train out of with the LEGO (no, I'm not shouting at you, I only just found out that it's all uppercase rather than Lego).

We have a couple of different types of lego wheels. Small ones that are quite recent, and larger ones that are from the early eighties (I love that about LEGO. The stuff is indestructable!).



I used a stamp pad like I did in the original post to stamp onto the opened up raisin box where the LEGO knobbles were going to line up. I punched the last two on either end of the box. I think you could do this without that long green piece (and we did with cars that I will put in another post), but I was thinking maybe the green piece would give the carriage more rigidity.





Once the box was punched I placed the box over the knobbles and secured it with two little LEGO pieces.



All that had to be done then was to fold up the box again and glue the long side back together.



I didn't glue the ends of the box because I wanted the kids to be able to open it and swap out carriages with the bases themselves.



I drew up an engine and a circus carriage with lion for them, but left the others blank for them to draw on themselves. My first idea was to just use a few of my hair elastics to join the carriages, but that turned out pretty lame and didn't give the kids the easy option to reorder and reconnect the carriages themselves (they were only three, four and five years old)



Instead I opted to cut some more card and punch some couplings for them to use. These worked really well and although the three year old kids found them fiddly, the five year old kids had no trouble taking them apart and putting them back together.

Here are a few pics of how the couplings worked...

Lots of people in the last post I did were lamenting that their kids were not yet old enough for the teeny LEGO. Don't let that stop you experimenting! Both sizes of the DUPLO can be hacked with the contents of your recycling bin too!

I don't have a hole punch that would work for DUPLO, but the stuff is so much less fiddly that you can just cut a big hole rather than lots of small punches. We used a butter box from the recyling to make a DUPLO carriage in this way.

Just openned up the butter box like I did with the raisin boxes and stamped the shape of the knobbles on the card, then drew around them and cut out the hole so that it was a snug fit around the knobbles on the little cart base we had.





Then put a couple of other bits of DUPLO on top to secure it.



Fold it all up and glue it shut. Cut some windows and doors with an Exacto blade.





This time the hair bobble thing worked well to connect the wagon to the cowboy's car because the DUPLO wheeled bases already have couplings would work with and I just needed to extend it with the hair bobble.





Only draw back to using the butter box was the finish on the inside was obviously treated to prevent grease from damaging it, so my daughter had to use sharpies to colour it in. Most boxes wouldn't have this problem though.



The good thing about the DUPLO wheeled bases is that the wheels do not come above the base, so you are not restricted to using a box that is narrower than the wheel base like you are with the smaller LEGO.



I hope you can find some boxes that you can use in your recycling. There must be infinite combinations that can be made with different LEGO/DUPLO pieces and different boxes combined with different imaginations!

Lastly, the biggest size of DUPLO can just be added to by cutting a circular hole in a cardboard cup.

This lets the kids give any of their toys a ride, rather than just being limited to the DUPLO people and animals.



Have fun!



Printables to come in the next post (It was a very crafty LEGOtastic sleep over)

Promise that I'll post something other than LEGO related messing about after the next post ;) I've just been going with the flow of what the kids are finding most fun and they can't seem to get enough of LEGO and cardboard at the moment.

Festive card hole punching with more Lego

Well, it seems that a lot of people are really excited to try playing with Lego and hole punched card after the last post, so while your enthusiasm is still up I thought I'd make you a printable Christmassy cut out and punch set.



We're starting on making our Christmas dioramas that I mentioned at the end of the last post. Usually I just draw stuff as we are doing it and the kids colour it in right then and there, so there aren't drawings that I am able to scan and share, so I thought I should do a few with a sharpie that I can scan before the kids get their hands on them.

All you need are some card to print on, scissors, hole punch and some lego.

Click on the thumbnail below to get the full resolution image.


If I manage to draw anything else without the kids colouring it in immediately then I'll try and scan it and get it up here for you too. Hope you enjoy playing!

Lego and hole punching card

It's been all over the intertoobs these last couple of weeks. My mate Gary sent me a link (thank you Mr G for keeping me festooned with valuable inspiration) Lego has teamed up with Muji to offer little kits that you can use to hole punch card and fit it neatly between lego bricks to build creatures and other interesting looking bits and bobs.

It's an absolutely great idea. I love the idea. It's got so many posibilities, but the actual kits they are offering are pretty limiting when you consider what you can accomplish on your own with some lego and a hole punch that you already have. Especially if you are in the habit of pilfering paint chips from Home Depot.

Really, this sort of thing is only going to appeal to small kids if they have maximum freedom of expression with it, rather than being limited to putting together small, pre-made kits (never mind that they are only available in Japan at the moment anyway).

The very afternoon that Gary sent me the link to these intriguing kits, me and my filth wizards sat down with our lego, paint chips and hole punch to see what we could create.


They did some cutting shapes and I did the hole punching to get the holes in the right places (our hole punch happens to be a bit bigger than the circular knobs on the lego, so it was fairly forgiving as far as accuracy goes, and I could just eyeball it.



We built a whole load of structures with the punched card and lego. One ended up being a kind of multi storey car park thingy.



Then I wondered if it would be easier to punch holes in larger sheets if I dabbed a stamp pad onto one of our lego base boards to get an imprint of where all the knobbles were to punch. This worked out pretty well, so I made a print out of a letter sized bit of paper showing punching guides that you can just cut out a shape and punch away.


Here's the template to print on some card if you want to try it out. Just click on the thumbnail to get the full resolution, and remember to not scale to fit page when printing, or you might get it printing out not at the right size to fit the lego.

We made some stairs using this...

Then I began to wonder about using the lego to act as a base to stand up cardboard characters for imaginative play and the possibility of making a kind of diorama.

I sat and asked the kids what characters they wanted to colour and cut out and drew them as they coloured. We ended up with monsters, robots, animals, aliens, spacemen and princess fairies, which I hole punched for them and they stuck lego bricks on either side of to stand them up.


Then the kids became interested in drawing their own characters and that's when the fun really began for me. I have a huge love of kid's drawings.




This rather displeased robot that my five year old drew just makes me grin from ear to ear!
My five year old wanted to make a backdrop, so she drew and coloured the hill with a rainbow and I hole punched and legoed it up so that it would stand on the table.
Gradually the kids kept making more and more things to go with the back drop and they all connected together with the lego to make a really cute little diorama doodad.

Yep, that's my two girls in the front there, as drawn by the big one.


We haven't started yet, but the next plan is to make a Christmas diorama in the same way, with santa, reindeer, trees, sleigh, snowmen and all that good stuff. This would also be a great way for kids to make their own nativity scene! The possibilities for them to take the products of their imagination into reality with this technique is very exciting. Probably for kids that are much older than mine (that are only three and five)as well!

UPDATE:

Thank you for all the kind words people have left in the comments. I thought I should pop in at the bottom here that I've scanned some of the festive diorama cut outs that I drew for the kids. If you would like to print, colour and punch them yourself they are right here. Enjoy!

Further Update:

More ideas for LEGO and hole punched card:

Post on using LEGO and DUPLO with whatever is in your recycling.

Post with two free printables for a LEGO car to punch and add wheels, and a DUPLO truck to cut and add wheel base.

Lacing cookies

It appears that the last week or so it was "time to get ill" although not "ill" in the Beastie Boys sense of the word, more "ill" in the revoltingly infectious, night of the living dead, dawn of the dead, day of the dead , mid afternoon and tea time of the living dead kind of way. Bleugh! We're rounding the corner of this episode of the lurgi it seems, so we celebrated with a shed load of cookies.

We didn't have any fall themed cookie cutters, so I thought I'd try using a pair of pliers to bend a round cookie cutter into a turkey shape. It worked pretty darn well. I might have to stock up on a few round cookie cutters that we can customize to our own shapes in the future.

The kids cut out a load of turkeys and circles and even around their own hands with a butter knife to make our sugar cookie shapes. We don't have a surface in our kitchen that isn't tiled, so I have a large piece of plywood that I taped a clear plastic sheet to. We plonk that on our kitchen table to roll out icing, dough, pastry etc. It wipes clean nice and easily and is a piece of cake to stash away because it's light and very thin.





I got out a bunch of plastic letter and number playdough cutters that we found at a garage sale for them to try, but my three year old just wanted to arrange them in order rather than cut dough with them, which was fine and dandy. We did manage to stamp out their initials in each hand print cookie though.



I used a straw to cut out holes in the cookies like we did with our salt dough ornaments last year. I thought that it would make it interesting to try and make cookies that could be used as threading/lacing cards.



I found that once I had baked the cookies, the holes although still there had closed up a lot, so while they were fresh out of the oven and still soft, I just punched the holes again with another straw.





We had a packet of caramel flavoured laces from Ikea that were pretty long and looked like they would do the trick. Red laces would be yum too, although I've not seen those in the US.



The kids enjoyed threading the edible laces, and the cookies were strong enough that they held up to the lacing antics just fine. Then they squeezed some icing on them. It's not every day that mum lets you eat a cookie the size of your head!





The cookie cutter shape I made was supposed to be a turkey, but it sort of looked like a basket too.



Anyhoooo, the ages my kids are, we weren't going to be able to make such a detailed decoration, so they just painted the icing on them willy nilly with paint brushes to make rainbow cookies, so the turkey thing went out the window. It was still good to know that it's easy to make custom cookie cutters that way though. It would be lovely to make a fall leaf shape cutter and then paint on the yellow and red icing. Bet that would be really pretty!









Mmmm cooooookies. Sometimes food? Pah! Your're not fooling anyone Cookie Monster!

Paint on furniture

Unusually, this is not a post about how to get paint off furniture, although if you know how to get oil pastels off bathroom grout, please do let me know! This is actually a post about letting the kids paint the furniture. I have this thing that I want to do when the kids are a bit older. I'd really like to get everyone in the family to decorate their own chair that they sit on at the kitchen table. We have four boring cheap wooden chairs that I think would be very fun to paint all sorts of colours and glue stuff onto. Kinda art chairs that reflects the person that sits in them. I think I'm going to wait until the kids are about seven and eight for that. In the mean time...

Over a year ago we got some cute wooden kid chairs, and rather than paint them up myself I wanted to get the kids involved. They were only two and three years old back then, so it had to be simple. I decided to use the carcass of the old melon box wendy house for them to paint in, as it was too cold outside at the time. I gave them pots of watered down food colouring to use as a stain for the wood. I figured if I gave them only two primary colours per chair, then we'd end up with a nice tertiary colour mixing from them, rather than a nasty brown/grey bleugh. One chair was yellow, green and blue. The other chair was Yellow, orange and red (threw in a bit of pink too for 70's overload).

Earlier this month their dad made a wooden bench and the kids got to paint that up too. This time they used acrylic paint and made one stonker of a mess. They enjoyed it though, and we ended up getting the third combination of primary colours by using blue, purple and red.

I think I mentioned in a post a while back that we were trying to make a little wendy house in the kid's bedroom for them (They won't fit in a melon box now) We call them "Ty Bach" back in Wales, which just means "little house". We rent our home and so there wasn't any wall painting or full on building that we could do for it, plus our car is small, so we were limited with what we could pick up from Craigslist or the hardware store. Things did come together though eventually and the kids have been playing in their Ty Bach with their friends for about six months now. It takes up nearly the whole of their bedroom, with the beds squished in the corner, but they love it and I'm so glad that we did this now, before they are too old to really get the most from it.

It started over a year ago when I babysat a friend's kids while she went to some job interviews. When she landed a job at an elementary school and they decided to upgrade their play house kitchen, my friend snagged the whole set of fire truck red wooden sink, stove and fridge for us! I know, way too awesome! Another friend gave us their old white play fridge unit too (thank you Tina and Michelle!) We kinda had a bit of a Golden Gate Bridge thing happen, in that I had plans to strip and paint the kitchen gear, but for weeks I couldn't find the time and then when it came down to it, we'd grown fond of the strange, old, well worn, obviously loved, bright red, so it stayed.

We moved the chest of draws into the middle of the room, so that the back of it could be a wall of the house, then we put together a fake window frame that was attached to the draw unit (this doubles up as a puppet theatre some days). The curtains are just a couple of matching old pillow cases from Goodwill. If you look carefully, you can see that the cardboard pizza is still going strong after all these months.

Yeah, the sink is an upturned plastic footstool, that just fits the hole that was in the play furniture. It's not classy, but it does the job. We keep books in the cupboard under the sink, because the girls like to be able to go and read in their little house. I should tell you about all the secret places we keep books in a post some day, because we're a bit book mad here.

We didn't have many tools, just a Proxxon (like a Dremmel) and a jigsaw, so the back board that forms the wall behind the sink and stove was made using two sheets of chipboard, painted white and hinged together, so we can fold them up if we need to. Hubster jigsawed out a little round window over the sink and a curved bit that flowed into the shape of the fridge unit. It isn't attached to anything, just sandwiched between the footboard of a bed and the kitchen units. It's very stable though.
The carpet was from Ikea and I liked it because it had a bit of red, pink and blue, which helps the crazy coloured kitchen units fit in a little bit, but mainly because it covers up the nasty brown dead buffalo of a rental carpet that fills our home. The American Girl highchair and crib were from a garage sale and the teeny chest of draws that all the baby doll's clothes and gear live in, was from a thrift store, as are the two little shelves that we attached to the back board. The toy microwave next to the little window was from Goodwill, and although the children have plenty of fun with it, I loathe it, because it makes the sound of the hospital monitors when someone goes into cardiac arrest! Who thought that was a good idea?!?! I remember the Ty Bach at my school from when I was six years old very clearly. I hope this Ty Bach helps my kids to make some equally good memories of childhood imaginative play. If you've made a play house area for your kids and have blogged about it, do let me know in the comments, because I'd love to see! I really like the ones I've seen that people have made out of old entertainment centers, like this one on "Making Do with the not so new". If we were able to transport something that big then I think we would have gone that route, because they come up in the free section of Craigslist quite often.

Leaf rubbing and paint mural

Lots of lovely leaves around to make beautiful decorations with! Whooo!

This activity was really easy and I always like the art activities where kids can work on one thing collaboratively. Especially something that is all about the process and not how well you can draw etc, so the three year olds were able to contribute just as much as the five year olds and you can't even tell which bits of the art work were done by which kids. It's just one lovely mural that they all had a hand in producing.

I used painters tape to stick a big strip of butchers block paper to the kitchen floor. I used regular packing tape a while back and had to resort to scrubbing the floor with isopropyl alchohol to get it off, which I wasn't expecting. Here's my older daughter helping me to cut bits of tape.

One that was done, the kids positioned the leaves with the veins facing up. We took our time and arranged them so they filled the paper, then rolled over another layer of the butcher block paper and taped that down too.



A few days ago we made some autumn coloured crayon cakes. Crayon cakes are ace, we've been making them ever since the girls were teeny, because they are so much easier for littlies to get a grip on when they start learning to make marks on paper. They are even better for leaf rubbing!

I haven't done a post on crayon cakes, because I'm sure there are lots out there already. Here's a good one from WhiMSey Love.

The kids had at the paper with the crayons for about 20 minutes, all haphazard with the different colours. The shapes of the tiled floor came through in the rubbings too, but it's not that distracting.









The leaf rubbings were rather pretty just on thier own, but I figured we could get another 20 minutes or so out of this activity, if I watered down some food colouring and let them paint over the rubbings to get a wax resist effect. They thought this was really cool, especially when the yellow rubbings showed through the darker food colouring.








We ended up with what I think are quite wonderful textures and colours. Here are a few close up pics to show you what I mean.











And here is our fall mural proudly in place in the kitchen. I thought about making it into a poster with "happpy thanksgiving" written on it, but really I don't want to cover up any of the leaf rubbings with text, so we'll make a separate banner and enjoy the mural as it is.

Some thank yous and some other stuff.

I've had some lovely people send me blog awards lately and I haven't got my act together to say thank you proparly, so before I ramble on about other stuff, I'd like to say ta very much to these ladies:

Jen from "Creative and Curious kids" gave me the Kreativ Blogger award. I'm supposed to tell you seven things about myself, but you'll make do with just one if it's proper weird won't you? I can juggle fire clubs. Not that there's a lot of call for that day to day at the moment. Might come in handy one day though, I suppose, if I have more than two things that are simultaneously on fire and I don't want them to get on the carpet?!?

Shea from "All Things Shea" gave me the "Neno's Award. As part of that I'm supposed to tell you why I blog. I'm sure the reasons I blog are the same reasons that a lot of mums blog. It's partly to create a diary with photos, so that my young kids will have something to look back on. My memories of being 5 and younger are pretty sparce, so I'd like them to be able to see what we got up to before I forget most of it too. There's about 80 projects on here from 2009, and I'm sure if I hadn't blogged about them then I would barely be able to recall twenty or so by now. The other reason is to reach out and connect with other people that are into the same sort of nonsense. I've met some rather lovely people through my experiences blogging and it's great to hear from other people around the world who have tried out some of the projects on the blog and had fun with them. Yay blogging!



Basia from United Teaching gave me the "Honest Scrap" award (so long ago that it's embarrassing that I haven't said thank you yet!). Not sure what the rules and regs with that one are, but it looks like it might be useful if someone starts shooting at me. Thank you ladies, not nessesarily for the awards themselves, but just getting in touch and taking the time to be friendly like.



You know that I don't do well following the blog award rules and regulations. I do like to take the opportunity to point at something worth pointing at though, so I want to point you at this story that one of our readers emailed me about.

Noah's Christmas.

It's a disasterously upsetting reality that really hits you hard when you take just a moment to empathize. I hope that we can all do something over the holidays, for someone we don't know personally, that needs something extra, whether it's a child in Noah's circumstances, or troops far from home, or people with no home. There are a lot of people out there that a stranger's generosity would really make a difference to. Noah's story reminded me of that, when I was all caught up in making gifts for the people that I know. Now I have some research to do on where I can direct my efforts. Please do let me know if you have anything you plan on making or doing for a stranger this holiday!

To end on a less harrowing note... Do you remember the Wall-E that we made out of recycling a while back? He had his time in the sun with the kids and has gone to be with a group in Sacramento called ReCreate. If you live local to them then go check it out. They are doing a fantastic job teaching children about trash, natural resources, conservation, and personal choices in consumption and waste, then allowing the kids to get creative with a large library of donated junk that would otherwise be sat festering in landfill somewhere.

One of our readers, Amy, sent me a photo of the Wall-E that she made with her children. She has given me permission to show you a picture of him. Isn't he awesome! He's like a cute twin to our Wall-E. Love, love, love that there are people out there with the get up and go to give some of this stuff a try. Props to you Amy!,

Clothes pegs and foosball

This has turned into a bit of a crazy long epic post, but bear with me, I'll get to the Foosball bit!

We had some hanging out pretend laundry fun quite a while ago. Coincidentally, the same day that Michelle over at Her cup overfloweth was playing with clothes pegs with her kids too. Clothes pegs are a great tool for preschoolers to faddle with. They love them because they are something that grown ups are seen using often, and you can do so much with them. Lots and lots of people on the interwebs have used clothes pegs as clip on markers for various matching and learning activities. We tried out a matching the colours version of these sorts of activities with paint chips a while back around Christmas time, and the kids liked it.



The clothes peg game that we played a while back was just cutting out clothing shapes from paint swatches that we'd pilfered from Home Depot. I tied up a clothes line and provided two different sized clothes pegs and that's about it really. It did provide a good hour or so of entertainment and inadvertantly a lot of fine motor control practice for my three year old. She wanted to put up a clothes line in the little play house that we put together (and takes up half their bedroom). She ditched the paper clothes and opted to hang out the baby doll's clothes instead.











While we were doing this, a few clothes pegs pinged apart and looking at the shapes of the wooden pieces got me thinking. Lorraine from Ikat Bag posted some beautiful rocking chairs that her father made for her children's dolls, out of clothes pegs. I really want to try and make two of these very soon, because I'm making two rag dolls that would look feindishly cute sat in them.

The idea that I had though, was to use the clothes pegs to make little foosball guys. If you put the clothes peg parts back to back then they look remarkably like the players on a foosball table!

My brother in law and his girlfriend are champion foosball players and travel abroad to compete, so when we went to visit them in London last year the kids got to play on the tables (yes, that's tables, as in plural) in their house and LOVED it! I thought a wee kidlett sized toy version would be a cool thing to try and make together.





It seems that the pegs I had fitted snuggly around a bamboo skewer. I'd dyed the bamboo skewers green for another project though, so we used some dowelling that was the same size that I had left over in the craft stuff.







The kids painted up the players in red and blue just with normal kiddy paint. I may varnish them to make them waterproof though.











I was originally going to just use an old cereal box to make the toy, but then I realised that we had an old wooden cd crate that might make the toy last a bit longer. This gave gadgetboy the chance to drill holes and jigsaw goals in the garage.





There are several ways to lay out players on a foosball table, but we didn't really have the space in the box to use any of the normal layouts, so we opted for one goal keeper, two defenders and three attackers. I used wooden beads from the kid's sewing/threading misc as handles for the game, and we painted a thin bit of scrap wood to be the green base of the box.









We need to do some alterations to it though, because when we first made it, we only had a proxxon with a teeny drill bit to make the holes in the CD crate, so we had to use the spinddly dowels. Clearly from the enthusiasm levels my kids exhibit, we need to drill some bigger holes and use some more study dowels!

Giant homemade subbuteo

Did Subbuteo make a big impact in America? I have no idea. I come from the generation in the UK that were young kids in the 1980s, and so pre decent video games, Subbuteo ruled supreme. If you aren't sure what I'm on about, here's some hokey British daytime TV segment on the history of Subbuteo and here's an old advert for the game. Yep, it's just flicking some glorified weebles around on a rug in an attempt to have an interactive football game (soccer for you yanks). The stadium was like a doll house for boys back then ;)



The real Subbuteo stuff is more suited to older children, because it's rather small and fiddly, so I thought we'd see if we could make a larger more preschooler freindly alternative from stuff around the house. For the bases I ended up trying some salt dough crammed into teeny little bowls that had been greased up with vaseline. I was going to use the egg trays from our fridge, but what do you know, they had vanished. Do let me know if you see them. I suspect they are hidden somewhere quite secret and are likely full of Polly Pocket shoes, but I digress.

You can see our salt dough in this post from Xmas last year. It's just one and a half parts hot water, one part salt and four parts all purpose flour. I snapped lolly pop sticks in half and stuck them in the dough as little posts that we could attach our footballers to. Then I took out the sticks and squelched the dough out of the little bowls and baked the resulting hemispheres in the oven for about an hour on a low heat until they were rock hard. Stuck the sticks back in them and they were ready for the kids to decorate.

I figured the easiest thing to do would be to draw some footballers that the kids could colour, cut out and glue onto the sticks, so I drew a little soccer girl and scanned her. I'd love to have had the time to draw a load of different footballers in different poses, but the kids were wanting to get making stuff, so it was one quick sharpie sketch that got scanned and repeated many times. Here's the template sheet if you'd like to do this yourself. I left the jerseys blank so that you can draw your own numbers on them. Just click on the thumbnail below to get to the full resolution image that you can print out.



My kids are three and just turned five, so there was no need for us to make a full football team to play with. Even five a side seemed overkill, so we just made three footballers for each team. My three year old opted for the blue team and my five year old wanted to be the reds. They coloured in their players and then coloured the bases with permenent markers. I would have got them to paint the bases, only I don't think they would have had the patience to wait for them to dry in this situation.









Cut out and glued the soccer kids onto the posts and then we were ready for kick off





The football pitch was some goals made from lego and towels and blankets to stop the ball from rolling under the cooker or fridge. The ball was a 25c bouncy ball from the local taqueria, and we set up a score board on the front of the dishwaser with some magnets to keep score with.







I was very relieved when they enjoyed playing with the set up as much as they did. The salt dough bases were heavy enough to have a really good weebly not falling down thing going on, just like the real subbuteo players. Being bigger, the kids had to flick them with the whole of the back of their hand, rather than just a finger, but it was the right scale for preschoolers to really get into and not be frustrated with.





It would probably work just as well and look far neater if you used plaster of paris for the bases, but I don't know how well they would stand up to being bashed into each other. The salt dough is indestructable it seems.

I'm afraid the next post that I have lined up is about more football flavoured antics. I'll try and avoid teaching them the Fabrizio Ravanelli goal celebration manouvre of pulling your tshirt up over your face and running about with your arms in the air. My oldest did that for some weird reason when she was two and ran straight into a wall.

Pumpkin carving in the bath and with a power tool

That sounds safe doesn' it!

The kids were the ones in the bath and I was the one using the power tool though, so it's ok and you can put the phone down ;)

We got a couple of wee pumpkins for the kids to make jack o lanterns. They were very excited about scooping out the guts. I didn't have any newspaper to put down, and knew they would have fun getting as messy as possible and would need a bath afterwards, so I figured why no just do the whole thing in the bath anyway.

They thought it was funny to be sitting in the bath in swim suits scooping goop out of pumpkins too.

Once the pumpkins were emptied and the kids had had their bath, they drew faces on their pumpkins with perminent markers. Me and the hubbins carved out the shapes that they had drawn for them. They were very proud of their creations, and I love the wee little happy face that my three year old did on hers.

The night before halloween, one of our mates got us to carve a big pumpkin with another friend's face on it. This is the bit with the power tool. I used a proxxon to carve it out and made as insanely huge mess in the kitchen. I don't know what I was expecting to happen when I brought something rotating at a few thousand rpm in contact with a raw vegetable (it was lots of fun though). Next year I will either purchase a medical visor and wrap the whole room in cling wrap a la Dexter, or I will use lino cutting tools like this smart lass!

Toilet roll bat fun

This crafty doodad was inspired by two people who blog on the intertoobs. The body of the bat was made after seeing the gorgeous little halloween creatures made by Katie Steuernagle from Matsutake. Soooo flippin' cute!

By folding the bottom of the tube in the same way, but perpendicular to the top of the tube you get quite a nice bat body shape for hanging up.
The kids got nice and filthy with black paint, painting up the bat bodies... I think the bat wings were inspired by a card that was made on Makes and Takes a while back. They used some tissue paper to thread through a card to make bat wings, but we didn't have any black tissue paper, so we used black constructions paper. Folded it in half to cut the bottom of the wings into shape... Then concertina folded them up. I cut a couple of horizontal slits on either side of the bat bodies to thread the folded up wings through, and then unfolded them and curved forward the wings to make them nice and full looking. The tip of the top of each wing was folded back to give it a bit of a more batty shape. Red sticker eyes were stuck on and then they got hung up in our kitchen with the rest of the artwork for a few days. Batgirl loves them.
Until Halloween, when we took them out and hung them on the porch to frighten trick or treaters. They made the Happy Halloween sign themselves too and are very proud of it indeed!Because the bodies were made out of toilet roll tube, the ever resourceful hubster was able to put together a little circuit involving flashing LEDs and a battery pack to stuff inside. Voila! Spooky flashy red bat eyes!

If you fancy trying that part yourself then you can check it out on his blog Fangletronics.

I hope you all had a lovely halloween! I'm loving American halloweens. It's such a big holiday for the kids. Sorry to be posting some of our halloween crafts after the holiday, but we're always last minute with such things, and I know that if I don't put these things on the blog now, then I will have lost them by this time next year.

Halloween Pancakes

This goes back to my first ever post on this blog. Back in May 2008 I started Filth Wizardry by writing a post on the pancake art that the kids loved so much. I think I posted a fish, a pirate ship and a few others.

Putting pancake batter in a baggy and snipping a hole in the corner to pipe it out of certainly wasn't my idea. Many many people have done it for years and years, but I thought I'd write a quick post now to show you the spooky ones we've done. Seeing as halloween is on a weekend this year, taking the time for some spooky breakfast might be fun!

I picked up a couple of mustard squeezy bottles from a thrift store in anticipation, because the kids will be able to make their own that way (the baggies approach is a bit awkward for really young kids) Just make sure that there are absolutely no lumps in your batter or the nozzle of your bottle/hole in the baggy will clog and be very frustrating. I'm guessing if you have the equipment for piping icing then that would probably do the trick too. We're going to add orange food colouring to our batter I think, or maybe purple? Green sounds a bit bleugh though.

I mentioned in that first post that you could write your name in a pancake. Much later I posted an example of that at the end of this post if you are interested.

Marshmallow gun party fun

A while back we made some marshmallow guns out of pvc plumbing fittings with the kidletts. The lovely man that I am affiliated with blogged about it over on his own blog, FangleTronics (his blog is usually about electronics projects). You can pop over to read that post here if you're interested in how to put together your own marshmallow gun.


My older daughter really really wanted to have marshmallow guns at her birthday party a few weeks ago. I was a little bit reluctant seeing as there were going to be about 20 kids there and I had visions of some poor kid getting one point blank in the eye or something horrendous, so I said "we'll think about it". After a bit of a conflab we came up with a plan that would work.

We put together twenty marshmallow gun "kits", so that the kids could make and decorate their own marshmallow guns using a simple instruction sheet, and then they could battle it out safely with a shoulder bag of ammo, a paper plate shield and some heinously cheap swimming goggles.

It was a really cute experience to go to Lowes with the kids and find and count out all the bits that we needed to make enough marshmallow guns for everyone. It ended up costing just about a dollar a gun and my daughter had fun counting out and checking off the parts we needed while her little sister tried on the larger plumbing fixtures like bracelets.

The hubster used his pipe cutter to cut up the three long pipes we bought into 3, 4 and 5 inch pieces, and we sent everything through the dishwasher to sanitize it (it was pretty much a full load!)



Here's the kit packed up in a ziplock bag ready to hand out


...and here's the contents of the kit:

• mouth piece
• T-junction
• end cap for the handle
• three lengths of pvc pipe
• instruction sheet
• sheet of stickers (halloween ones because it was a spooky halloween party)
• halloween treat bag filled with mini marshmallows for ammunition and with string tied to be a shoulder bag.
• swimming goggles (these we found for less than a dollar each online and they are pretty good ones that I'm sure the kids will use after the party is over)
• paper plate shield that was just made by stapling a piece of card across a paper plate so you could fit your arm through and wear it on your forearm.
  

The parents at the party helped their kids to put them together and read the rules of combat. Then the kids had fun blasting marshmallows at each other. The shields doubled up as targets for the smaller kids to shoot at too.

Only at one of our family's parties can you expect the party favours to be some pvc pipe and a pair of swimming goggles!

The birthday girl was very happy that her freinds got to play marshmallow gun wars with her and I was very happy that no one got maimed by high velocity candy on my watch.

Here's a copy of the instruction sheet I put together rather hurredly at 1.30am the night before the party. It ain't too fancy, but it did the job and you are welcome to use it yourself or adapt it's contents for your own marshmallowy warfare. Just click on the thumbnail below and that should take you to a full resolution image to save and print. It is US letter size, not A4, so if you want to print it on A4 paper then you'll have to remember to select "fit to page".





Judging by the amount of fun all of the dads at the party seemed to have with the whole thing, I recon it would make a great father's day party activity if you got a load of dads and kids together in teams for some marshmallow gun building and battling. Maybe with targets and games and challenges!

Superhero birthday cake with marshmallow fondant

One of the requests for my older daughter's 5th birthday was a Batman cake. After a day or so she expanded her request to be a batman, spiderman, superman cake.

I posted a while ago about how we like to make the kid's birthday cakes an important, homemade aspect of each birthday. My mum always made me and my sister lovely cakes and it still makes me feel special that she did that for us, so I want to do the same for my girls.

One of the people that posted a comment on that original cake post was Megan from Megleting. She posted a link to some really cute cakes that she had made and the ones that caught my eye were the three layer cakes that looked like cutie mini wedding cakes. I figured the three superheros theme would be perfect for making a three tier cake with!

The next bit of inspiration came from a post by K from Made by K. She made a whole lot of marshmallow fondant for a friend's wedding cup cake tower and shared a great tutorial on the process. I've never attempted traditional fondant, but the marshmallow version sounded much easier, much cheaper and much more yummy.

The marshmallow fondant was pleasantly easy to make and way gloopy and fun (not for the kids, just for me). I made red, yellow and blue for the three layers. I would definately recommend having a go at making this type of fondant. It tasted great.

The cake itself was chocolate brownie with extra egg to make it a bit more cakey, but it was still very moist and dense. The middle of each layer had raspberry seedless jam and chocolate frosting in them. I put a thin coating of buttercream icing over each layer before puting the fondant on, so it had something to stick to and the surface would be nice and smooth.

Last year I stuck a load of superman party favour rings into the pirate-superhero-mermaid cake, so that the kids could lick the icing off the rings while they were waiting for the cake to be cut. That went down really well, so this year I stuck a load of halloween bat rings into the yellow batman layer of the cake.

The blue webs on the spiderman layer were blue royal icing that was piped on with a really rubbish nozzle. I totally should have made my own out of parchment paper, but you live and learn.
It went down pretty well! There were only two slices to bring back from the party at the park!

Jack o lantern pinata

We just had a party for my oldest daughter, who turned five at the start of this month. Last year she wanted a "pirate-superhero-mermaid" party. There are some posts in the archives about things we did for that party, like the mermaid tails and jello pirate boats.

This year she was a little less, um, "alternative" in her requests, which made my life a whole lot easier. She told me a few weeks before her birthday that she wanted "a spooky halloween party with a superhero cake". Actually it started out as a "batman cake" but then she decided she wanted spiderman and superman too (that's for a later post though)

She's never been too interested in the getting presents aspect of birthdays, which to tell you the truth surprises me, and with each year that passes I always expect that the next one will be the year that she has her heart set on some inanimate object that she wants. So far though when people ask her what she wants for her birthday, the usual response is "a (insert weird idea here)party with all my friends", so that's why we make the effort with the parties.

Last year we made a non violent pinata, because the kids were all around three and four years old and weren't too hot with the whole batting thing. This year though I thought it would be ok to try a traditional beat the living hell out of it pinata.

Inspired by LiEr's hello kitty pinata over at Ikatbag, I decided the covered balloon would be the best way to go if I wanted the kids involved in making it.

We blew up one of the giant punchball balloons and covered it with about three layers of newspaper strips and watered down white glue. We did this on a really sunny day outside though and evidently the many years of physics education went out the window when I totally didn't figure that the balloon would expand in the heat and rip the layers of paper we were putting on. Bah! or rather BANG!

It wasn't too bad though. We patched it up and although the top looked a little gnarly, you couldn't tell by the time we had put a layer of butcher block paper on top and painted it orange. When we put the layer of butcher block paper on I used a flour and water mixture rather than the glue and water and honestly, that seemed to work just as well (and was obviously cheaper). Yes LiEr, that is an empty Nutella jar that the paint is in ;)



I drew a wee jack o lantern face on to go with the spooky halloween theme and then cut a couple of holes to thread a hanging rope through. I made the holes a little more sturdy by hot gluing a disposable ketchup cup in them (yes, I swipe ketchup cups from fast food places, sometimes even when people are looking)







After I'd sorted the rope to hang it, I covered the holes with some fake autumn leaves we had around (that little packet of leaves has been used in a lot of crafts over the year. Here, here and here, but now alas they are all gone)



The kids helped me to stuff the pinata with candy and shredded newspaper (the stuff out of the freaky scarecrow actually).



The verdict was that with three layers of newspaper and one of butcher's block paper, it stood up to about 20 minutes of pounding by 20 kids between the ages of 2 and 7, which was just right.





It was definately worth making a pinata, because the kids felt a whole lot of ownership over the project and got more and more excited in the build up to the party over making it. Far better than buying one from the store. Thank you LiEr for the hints and tips on making a pinata with just the right smashability rating.

My best mate back home wants one of Frank Sidebottom's head for her birthday. I think we may be up to the challenge.

Halloween is coming!

Our friend Marcie used to sing this to the girls and they still love it...

(to the tune of I'm a little teapot)

Halloween is coming.
I like it the most.
You be a goblin.
I'll be a ghost.

When we get together,
you'll hear us say...
BOO!
It's trick or treat today!

Sorry posts have been a little sparce this month. I've been working with the kids on stuff for my older daughter's 5th birthday party, which is this weekend. I'll have plenty to write and tell you about when it's done and dusted, but until then I remain up to my armpits in either Crisco or papier mache.

Seeing as October is here I thought I'd give you the links to the Halloween related posts from last year (some ones that might help with DIY costume making etc).

Milk jug trick or treat pumpkin pots

Milk jug bat masks

Paper pirate swords

Cardboard roman centurion costume

Gift bag robot costume

Maybe there are more that are relevant back in the archives, but those are the ones that I can remember right now. I plan on overhauling the limited catagories I have for posts in this blog soon, so that should help people to find what they are looking for a bit more easily.

So in the midst of the party prep, I thought it would be fun to print some halloween decorations. I had the idea of printing pumpkin shapes using an apple that was cut in half. The idea seemed so simple and effective that I was pretty sure I couldn't be the only person that had had this idea, so I googled "apple print pumpkins" and found that last year the Crafty Crow had linked to Mom in Madison, who had done this craft idea before. We didn't cut out the jack o lantern face from the apple when we did it. The kids just drew faces on them in black crayon when they were dry. I'll see if I can get a nice pic of them up on the wall when we have put them up.

We also did some frankenstein's monster hand prints with goggly eyes. I didn't have any black paint handy to do the more usual hand print bats or spiders, so we improvised with the green paint for Frankybaby.
Last Halloweeny type thing from this week was making a couple of stencils for my older daughter's teacher. The class needed a haunted house stencil that all the kids could draw around and cut out, so it had to be pretty durable. The really thick cardboard from the back of a large colouring book turned out to be ideal (I kept that cardboard when our colouring books were finished thinking it had to be useful for something). The shape was cut out with an exacto knife and then I put a good thick coat of polyurathane varnish on it to keep it water proof and even more durable. The varnish soaks into the cardboard and so the points of the roofs etc are very hard and will not be easily damaged through use. Hopefully it will last for a few years worth of halloweens.

Two types of homemade balance scales from recycling

We've had a bunch of recycling and craft stuff out in the kitchen 24/7 since the beginning of last week, and so lots of random bits and bobs have been made by both me and the kids. I put my back out and so many things have gone by the wayside the last few weeks, including the blog. Hopefully I will pick up steam again now that I'm feeling better. I think it was Thursday that we experimented with weighing things.

First I used three BBQ skewers, a drinking straw, a cotton reel, two empty pots of apple sauce, four old popsicle sticks, some string, a coffee stirrer, a little bit of styrofoam, a cardboard box, four plastic beads, and a few wooden beads that were lurking around to make a table top weighing scales that the kids could put together and take apart themselves. Here are the parts that I made for the kids to fit together.

The poles go through the cardboard box, with the beads being underneath to hold it steady. Then the two straws with the bamboo skewer glued into them are threaded through the center of the cotton reel. Then the two straws are fitted over the two poles, so that the contraption that is glued around the cotton reel pivots on the BBQ skewer. Then the pots are hung on either side (they are held on by hooking the string over the green plastic beads). I could have made it more sturdy, but I wanted the kids to be able to build it, take it apart, store it flat and build it again later.









We just used what we had handy, but there must be a bazillion different ways to make a simple device that you can compare the weight of two things with. The little red coffee stirrer with the styrofoam arrow made it easier for the kids to see which was heavier when it was a close call between the two weights.

I provided the kids with a bunch of different objects to try weighing, some small and heavy like coins, some larger and lighter like corks. It wasn't long before they went off to find other things they could put in the scales as well, like small plastic princesses and toy animals.

Once they had played with that one for a bit and we'd tried a few different activities with it, we set about making a larger scales that could hang in the doorway. This one was even easier to make. All we used was a plastic coathanger that had hooks on either end, a wooden bead as a weight on a string to always mark straight down. Then I glued on a bamboo skewer with an arrow at right angles to the bottom of the coathanger, so that it would point to either side as the coathanger pivoted. We hung two cardboard strawberry punnets on the hooks at either end of the hanger.



The kids played filling the buckets with various stuff to see which was heavier.



Later that night I figured why not make it into a proper game, so I got out some larger matching buckets to hang on it and drew a little dial that could be threaded over the weighted string that the wooden bead was hanging from. I had to cut the bamboo pointer a bit shorter to read the dial. It wasn't going to be accurate to read for real weight measuring units because the dial was too low for where the scales were pivoting from, but the kids were able to see who's bucket was heaviest and how many "points" they had won. Notice that because the dial is below the pivot point the pointer points to the lighter side, hence colouring the sides to match the buckets, so the kids could see who had won more easily.





If I was doing this again (and we probably will) then I'd loose the wooden bead thread and instead thread a dial onto the string that the hanger was on, so the center of the dial is where the hanger pivots from and have the pointer pointing upwards. That way the pointer would point to the heavier side and also if you had proper weights then you could calibrate the dial (with older kids). Kinda like this...



Anyhoo, they still had a tonne of fun with it and discovered that wooden blocks are infact heavier per unit volume than barbies. Barbie is not as dense as wood! I still don't know whether she is as thick as two short planks though (have I just confused all the Americans reading with that one?)