fuel

If you give a man some pizza, maybe some tea, and another, tinier man, some oatmeal and Reese's pieces ice cream, and they get together at a party (the kind of party where you would find all these things), then this is what you find on the table afterwards.

y.n. rich kids

(I didn't post yesterday because I set this blog up on my web site. I will still post here for awhile.)

You can buy this track for $1.  Watch it after the jump — 

napkin whale

Auggie just sat down and cut this out of a paper napkin. He told me it's a whale shadow puppet. He's taped it up over his bed with purple washi tape. I really love it!

hello, winter

A plate that came home from school this week (the only plate I ever wanted to hug) and a great advent calendar (free printable from mr printable) that my son would love to park a lot of cars around. I don't think I have the time to do it, though ‚ we picked up a playmobil one yesterday as a treat.

bittersweet

There are two things standing between me and seasonal affective disorder in this dumb part of the year (november): a tiny maniac marching around my home with a recorder, and grapefruit. It's grapefruit season! I love grapefruit. Everything about it is happy: it's big and yellow and it sounds like "grateful", but it is also a little bitter. It's not like the sweet orange or the sour lemon. It's a little complex. And it's pink inside. Perfection. 

collage waiting to be picked up at school (not by by my son, by another cute little boy).

endpapers (detail) from Noah's Ark by Miche Wynants —  pinterest via Sarah Edmonds via Stopping off Place. phew.

laurence king

This is Let's make some great art, a website with free app activities from Marion Deuchars from the Laurence King imprint — made as part of "an ongoing desite to encourage creativity, art and design, to as wide an audience as possible." That's what design is really meant to do, I think. 

sparkle

We've been fighting various colds and bugs this week. There is one good thing about being sick, it slows you down. I do some of my best thinking with a cold. Anyway, this cat came home from school to cheer us all up.

I am trying to learn continental knitting, so it's non-stop garter stitch until I get the hang of it. Everyone says it's faster.

Auggie has just brought me a piece of green felt, 2 shells, 3 coins, a plastic wheel a dump truck and a plastic moose. I have to go!

pink crows & fireworks

Leaves and crayons ironed between wax paper

A drawing of fireworks (black dots) and pink crows (upper left)  for my office.

Today in the car, Auggie started chanting In-To Out-er Space! in exactly the cadence of a protest march.  We all joined in. It's a good cause.

shell sculpture

This summer I would find shell arrangements like this one in Auggie's room. This one was on top of his book shelf.

Sometimes he doesn't like me to take pictures of his sculptures, and sometimes he does. This one was ok to photograph. My favourite sculpture so far might be a belt on a window.

auggie & gwen

butterfly by gwen and rock sculpture by auggie.

A slinky go-go

I found this on the floor today. It's a blender cap and slinky sculpture: a "slinky go-go".

ringo atelier

Ringo atelier is a creative studio, and resource, for children and their blog is lovely, too. Lots of their drawing activities have a PDF to print out and do at home. They have loads of pages to colour and develop, like this invent the fruit that goes with this leaf (below; above is Auggie's rainbow fruit), which we tried yesterday during a rainy day

and this construct a city (this one is meant to be for collage, but we painted and scribbled them)

There are also some really great projects that we haven't yet tried, like the à la manière de section, with projects inspired by the work of artists like David Hockney or Sonia Delaunay. I think the David Hockney one is perfect for July, and I will put in a little translation here (find the original project here). Observe water (in your bath, swimming pool, by the sea or edge of a lake...), in the style of painter David Hockney. Have fun trying to reproduce the waves, the reflections, the colour of the water. To do this, use watered-down paint, sponges, tissues and different papers. Look carefully at this painting of a swimming pool (below, left)

The 1 livre—1 book section has a nice library of books, too.

New play-doh

I've been banging on and on about how great it is that spring is here and summer is coming and meanwhile it turns out that Auggie's favourite season is the autumn. His main reasons are the leaves and our autumn birdfeeder. 

We did spend a lot of time this past fall looking at leaves and one windy afternoon we watched hundreds of  bright yellow leaves blow off the trees outside our living room window in big gusts. It made more of an impression than I realized. So we used some leaf-shaped cookie cutters to make autumn leaves and we're also up to page 87 of Moominvalley in November — to be honest I am surprised, it's a pretty low-key storyline, but he requests it every few days. 

This is a good feeling!

Update: I am just using store-bought play-doh — there are only so many hours in a day sometimes —but if you want to make your own, here is a whole web site devoted just to play dough recipes, so whatever you have handy in your kitchen, I expect you can find a recipe there to suit you.

Pom pom collages

Pom poms everywhere:

scraps of felt, too

Easy clean up!

For joy

A few weeks ago we stayed in a little cottage on the beach. The windowsills had lots of shells and rocks lined up along them. On the second day, Auggie began knocking them all onto the floor, one by one. I said, "Why are you doing that?" He said, "For joy." Good point, good point.

A top secret paper picnic by my niece.