Archive for June, 2009

Painting with Stuff – Art Playgroup Friday

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

We got back from vacation Thursday night, and dove into art playgroup Friday morning. Because we wanted to see our friends, not because we are crazy. I think I said we would be doing sponge panting, but in the end, as far as I got was getting out a random assortment of texture painting tools from my art drawers.

Painting

Some crumpled up tinfoil, bubble wrap around newspaper, plastic spoons, wine corks, a clay carving tool, a popsicle stick, and a plastic rolling pin. The rolling pin was a new paint toy, and Rebecca really enjoyed experimenting with it. I’m sorry I forgot to get out the sponges, I think she would have fun with that too since we haven’t tried it before, we’ll have to do it another day. My third trimester energy levels really seem to be going down hill though, I didn’t even manage to get any pictures of the mess making in action.

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Vacation

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

We’re back from our lovely Maine vacation.

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We collected rocks on the rainy beach,

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played with the lovely (and extensive) set of natural wooden blocks that D-Pa made,

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went on walks through the mossy woods with too many mosquitoes,

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collected eggs at the farm,

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took random pictures,

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and had plenty of tea parties.

We also ate a lot of food, visited with family, put some puzzles together, and did a lot of nothing. Usually I want to spend most of my time going on walks and hunting pictures, but this year I guess I was too pregnant, and was mostly content to sit around and do not much of anything. Well, a lot of the nothing this year turned out to be researching the history of automata and mechanical music, and now I want to make some animated music boxes. But first, I really need to get through all of the repair projects and clutter in my work space. This time for sure.

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Patching a Straw Hat

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

patched hatThis straw hat has blown off my head a few too many times, and there were large holes and cracks developing in the brim. But no more! Now it is cute. Or, it is at least me, eclectic! And I don’t need to spend the money on a new hat. More importantly to me, really, I don’t have to throw this hat away. I hate hate hate throwing things away.

If your style is eclectic, then patching a straw hat with cloth is easy peasy. Just slap some patches of fabric down and run your sewing machine backwards and forwards at 3/8″ intervals, or whatever suits your hat. (Backwards because you probably can’t get the crown of the hat through your sewing machine’s throat.) The most important detail is that you don’t want to chew the straw up more than you have to, so set a good long stitch length. If you use a really tiny stitch you will be essentially perforating the page, and your hat will probably crack along the stitch lines. Counter productive. Your hat probably already has a stitched edge on the brim, I guess that’s the cheap way to make straw hats, mine looks like it was stitched at about 4 stitches to the inch. My darned patches vary from 4 to 8 stitches per inch, I’m betting the longer stitch lengths will hold up better, but I just started figuring all this out, so we’ll see.

darn

You could get fancy and turn the edges under, I would do that before darning the patch down to avoid unnecessary stitching on the straw, but I just left the edges raw. They’re random patches from my scrap bag, I think they would look silly if I got too fussy about it.

If you have a really bad hole you can darn it every which way to hold everything together. This hole under the brim was the one that finally drove me to sewing my hat. About 8 inches of the brim was about to fall off.

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But now I have a happy hat again! In time for my two week Maine Island Vacation. We leave Saturday! Hurray! So things may be quiet around here for a while. (Does this count as a tutorial?)

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More Shaving Cream and Paint – Art Playgroup Friday

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

Shaving Cream and Paint

Since we weren’t sick and alone this week we did shaving cream and paint again, this time with all our friends. We managed to use up the rest of the shaving cream I’d bought to make messes with at Rebecca’s messy art birthday, but then didn’t use because there were too many kids who were young enough to think eating it was a good idea.

In terms of preschool art, I don’t think there is anything messier than giving kids bottles of shaving cream to empty and bottles of paint to pour all over it. They mash it around, clap their hands together and spray it everywhere, smear it all over each other, and run around in circles screaming. Okay, they do that last part no matter what art media we’re working with, but they fling paint and shaving cream around the yard when we use that. Lots of fun, lots of squishy tactile experimentation. And then they get hosed off, and all three sets of clothes they went through get dumped immediately in the washer, along with what *you* were wearing!

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DIY Low Bed Loft

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Now that I’m a parent I get to do all the cool stuff for my daughter that I always wanted… And I wonder why she has too much stuff, oh yah, because I like to shop at thrift stores and garage sales and I’m a pack rat. Hmm. I’m working on it. But not hard enough…

Anyway, the extra bonus about this project was I got to do it with my husband. Always a plus. He likes to over build things, I like to under build them, together we try to reach something reasonable.

Lofted Bed

What is this? It’s a starter loft. We lofted Rebecca’s bed a whole 20.5″. With the 8″ clearance the bed had before, it’s not quite high enough for me to sit under. But it’s just the right sized cave for some three year olds.

The basic construction is two low TROFAST bookshelves from IKEA, (like the bed), stabilized with plywood screwed into the back (with a ridiculous number of screws in my opinion) and L brackets and bolts holding the bed to the bookshelves. Conveniently the wrap around velcro feet of the bed tent cover up all the bolts going through the bed legs preventing curious little fingers from trying to loosen them. Bonus! (The bolts going into the bookcase have the bolts hidden in the recessed cavity on the underside of the top of the bookcase.)

With the plywood backing these bookcases (which are also put together with lots of bolts) are pretty sturdy. Really the weakest point of the whole system are the bed slats. I think I could jump up and down on it if I wasn’t worried about going through the bottom of the bed, and it easily passed the 350lbs test of my pregnant self and my husband sitting on it and wiggling.

Now I just have to convince Rebecca that the drawers that slide into the bookshelves are a great place to organize her toys, and are not in fact each a bed for a single doll. Sigh.

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Brown Rice Onigiri

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Onigiri

This is cheating, but if you like to make rice balls, and you like to only cook with brown rice, if you just can’t make them sticky enough, I had an epiphany. I’m sure other people have discovered this before, but I’m still going to enjoy my mischievous flash of brilliance. What is sticky and made of rice? Mochi! What is the easy way of making mochi? Using mochi/rice flour and microwaving it with water and sugar and flavoring. What happens when you add a little mochi flour to the brown rice along with the soy sauce/vinegar/ponzu sauce/sugar/salt/whatever for your rice and then microwave it to make it hot? It gets sticky! Is this cheating? Of course. Does it work? Yes! So now I can make brown rice onigiri that don’t fall apart. Just add a sprinkle of mochi flour to your rice when it is hot and you are mixing in everything else. Magic sticky rice glue.

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