Archive for May, 2009

Beads and Clay – Art Playgroup Friday

Friday, May 8th, 2009

I saw this idea for pushing beads into clay at The Crafty Crow and we had to try it for our art playgroup.

Beads

First we got a pound of random glass beads, I’m sure they are all rejects from some bead factory, but who cares if they have holes we aren’t going to be stringing them anyway. Rebecca and I started the day sorting them by color. I thought we would do a couple and get bored, but we made it through almost all of them, sorting glass beads is a lot of fun! Um, maybe I’m compulsive or something.

Working

We didn’t try to make bowls, we spent the whole time mashing beads into the clay and pulling them out, smooshing beady clay up, picking it apart… It was great. They stuck with it much longer than most of the things we’ve done recently, usually somebody breaks for the tricycles and then it’s all over. So two thumbs up. Smooshy tactile salt-flour clay and pretty glass beads make a good combo.

Beaded Clay

And then we had naked running through the sprinklers in the back yard – but no pictures of that!

Appliqued Onesies

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

onesies

I made these a couple weeks ago, for the brand new tiny tiny baby in our house. (Not mine, two families, one happening house.) The onesies are old, but I felt like prettying them up for her when I saw this Quick Gifts for the Small post by Angry Chicken. And the whole messy applique kick. Love those fast pretty projects.

May Day – Art Playgroup Friday

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

Maypolerunning

I think now that three year olds are the perfect age for Maypoles. What could be better than running around in circles, bumping into your friends and falling down? And tangling each other up in ribbons? It was great. We may have to put the Maypole up every week in May. If you have a three year old, you have to make a Maypole, ours was a four foot dowel with a screw in the end jammed into a hole in a piece of plywood. It worked great, probably much better than if I’d made it, but luckily I was running late so my husband made it for me. Sweet.

dsc_3916

After running around, tearing the flowers to pieces, eating lunch, and gluing rose petals haphazardly to paper, we made crullers. Recently, after reading about nettle soup on the little travelers I finally picked up a copy of Festivals Family and Food, which has a recipe for crullers listed as a traditional Scandinavian May Day food. So I braved the deep-frying, bought some whole wheat pastry flour, and they were excellent. We only used half the double recipe I made for the group, so I baked the rest, and that turned out pretty good too, although it was really yeasty since it was sitting and rising for about three hours before I got it in the oven when it only wanted one hour before frying.

crullers

Yum, whole wheat funnel cake.

Shirt to Pants

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

pants

I’ve been meaning to do the tshirt to toddler pants conversion and I finally got around to it. I sort of used the directions in SouleMama‘s The Creative Family, and sort of didn’t. But that’s what got me started finally, someone (I’ve forgotten, oops) mentioned using those directions, and I thought, aha! I have that book! I’ll go do that *now*, which is of course the only way I get anything done.

deconstruction

So I got out a tshirt, and made my daughter stand still so I could measure her, because I can’t remember which of her pants fit to use as a pattern. Not very many right now, she’s been growing. And when I laid her measurements out on my shirt, I discovered that I’m only going to be able to use my old shirts for a couple more months, because she needed the whole thing, from waist to shoulder. Which meant that I had to flip the pants layout around and use the sides of the tshirt for the inseam rather than the outseam, and I had to use whatever shape the shoulder seam was for the crotch seam. But hey, the whole thing worked out okay in the end, although it looks like it would have been better if I could have made the crotch seam a little steeper, because it’s a bit baggy there. The pitfalls of using a women’s fitted tshirt I guess. I’ll have to ask my husband for his rags next, but there isn’t a whole lot of shirt left when he’s done, after downgrading them from work to weekends to shop… Frankly these pants started out with quite a bit of wear, because this is a very old tshirt. We all really wear things out around here.

I also added quite generous patch pockets on the hip, using the sleeves, because Rebecca has no interest in pants that don’t have pockets. Sensible girl.