bright snowflakes

I put up a simple tutorial for paper snowflakes up on windy today. We had a lot of fun making these yesterday, as school was cancelled and we were footloose and fancy free.

mini wallpaper

ferm living blog has printable mini wallpapers from their collection to download and print for a dollhouse + a tuto. Ferm patterns below: In the Rain, Rush hour and Dotty.

Snufkin hats

Snufkin, the vagabond and philosopher, arrives each spring to Moominvalley to set up camp, fish, and comfort the small creatures of Moominvalley. He is always wearing a green hat, sometimes decorated with flowers and sometimes with feathers.

If you would like to make your own Snufkin hat, you can use this Pilgrim's hat template, using green paper instead of black. Then decorate. Instead of gluing the headband, we cut notches like this.

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.

The pineapple bird

Ooh, ok, I think this is a pretty good one. We found a video on youtube called Jim Henson on Making Muppets, 1969, from Iowa Public Television. Jim Henson shows children how to make puppets from household objects like socks, potatoes, spoons and tennis balls. It is great!



Augs and I watched it together and then gathered up some materials and made a handful of puppets and little movies.

The dish mop lion, Auggie was very excited to make a pink scarf for the lion because "he was cold".

Wooden spoon puppet.

The pineapple bird. I put on the eyes and Auggie did the nose with a sharpie. By the way, he was horrified by the feeling of his finger in the potato, so we poked a pencil in the bottom and he could  hold that instead. I don't have a picture, though — this is my finger. The pineapple bird is the only one who received a name from the Augs, he is special.

Birthday Party

I tried to set up Easter crafts a few times this week, but it just didn't take. Auggie is not yet too interested in Easter anyway, and our last session turned into making a birthday party for Trudy (as we are in the middle of a long birthday craze around this house). This is Trudy.

We spent a lot of time making party hats for the guests. Hats are a pretty forgiving sort of shape, so it was a good craft to practice cutting. Putting on pom poms was the most exciting part and led to a lot of running around and discussions about our favourite colours. One of our guests, Bulldog, turned 32 the day after Trudy's party. (Trudy turned 2).

Next it was time to choose the present. A zoo train full of pom poms. We were going to wrap it, but then Auggie decided against it. We then a fun time surprising Trudy with almost every toy in Auggie's room.

And the party food. Well, every good party needs something to go wrong to laugh at later. I earned the nickname "Silly Mama" for putting out ice cream cones for the guests. Auggie found this hilarious and could not believe a body would think of ice cream cones for a party. Once they had been safely cleared away and replaced with a bulb of garlic and two eggs we were ready to carry in the cake and sing happy birthday.

As I am not a talented photojournalist, I couldn't photograph and play at the same time, so I just grabbed the guests and photographed them while dinner was on. By the way, we found this great washable neon paint at Michael's last month, which we used for the hats. And we also had an impromptu wheel painting session midway through the party planning.

Textile crafts from the Brooklyn Children's Museum

Kente cloth, Adire and Adinkra are different types of patterned textiles from Africa. Kente is woven. The colours of Kente cloth have different meanings (image Kaylor Jones via pinterest).

Adinkra (left), from Ghana and the Cote d'Ivoire, is patterned with symbols. Adire is resist-dyed with Indigo in Nigeria (Adire cloth, c. 1950, Joss Graham).

The Brooklyn Children's Museum has Kente colouring pages, an Adire tutorial, Adinkra symbols, and other textile activities (colouring pages are on page 20).

Auggie trying out the Adinkra stamps at the Brooklyn Children's Museum.

The child-scale grocery store they had there was fun, too.

The boy in the hat was so cute and so nice.

Lanterns

This weekend we'll be at attending the annual New Year's parade. And we're making classic lanterns for the house.

There a many good tutorials online to make paper lanterns. It couldn't be easier. We didn't use a template, we just folded and cut. It doesn't matter if the cuts are perfectly straight or even. Ours were very uneven and wonky, but you can't really tell at all when they are folded.

the school of things

This summer we visited an exhibition of Lee Ufan (Marking Infinity). It was very relaxing. I loved the rocks on cushions (Relatum) and the repetitive paintings and prints. If you are interested in this type of thing, you can find out a bit more about the movement that Lee was a part of, Mono-ha, and see a video about Ufan here. Mono-ha may translate to "the school of things". This is apparently not a very good translation, but I like it. It seems very vague and inclusive. I feel like I belong to the school of things.

Anyway, I came across our tickets from the exhibition while I was tidying my paperwork today and we decided to do some Ufan-inspired paintings at the kitchen table with the Augs.

Rock Frogs & Toads for Leo Lionni

Last week we took a copy of Leo Lionni's It's Mine out of the library, published by Dragonfly Books. The book is about "three selfish frogs [who] bicker all day long. A bad storm and a big brown toad help them realize that sharing is much more fun". The book comes with a craft idea called make your own toad.

Here is photo workbook of a simplified version made with felt and googly eyes. We made three frogs: Milton, Rupert, and Lydia, and the kindly big brown toad. To make a frog, you will need: rocks, paint, googly eyes or buttons, felt or construction paper, children's glue and scissors.

We started with some rocks and washable poster paint.

While the 3 frog rocks were drying we came across a perfectly toad-shaped rock. He was already brown, so we didn't paint him.

Next, we glued on some googly eyes, using children's craft glue.

Then we cut out felt arms (skinny rectangle with one slit cut at the ends) and legs (thicker rectangle with two slits at the ends, then pulled apart a little) and a lily pad.

Then we glued on the legs and placed each frog and toad on a lily pad.

Shoelace Sewing

Simple shapes with pre-cut holes that your little one can use by sewing around the edges (this isn't a practical sewing project). This activity was originally inspired by a 5-year old boy I spoke to. His kindergarten class has a wooden sewing set which is very popular with the children. Here are instructions and templates so you can make your own sewing set.

This is great for the 3-5 set and is a surprisingly easy craft project to set up.