Archive for July, 2009

Junk Challenge

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

A month ago, or so, I signed up for Rhoda’s Recycled Craft Challenge, and this dressing table is what Rebecca and I made.

Junk Table

You can see more of what other people made at the Flickr group. It was a nice little low stress quick project, and now Rebecca’s little people have some more furniture. We can’t really agree whether this is a throne or a mirrored dressing table, but I don’t see why it can’t be both.

I have about five other projects to post about, but they are just going to have to come when they come. This here is a no apology blog. :-D Also, we did container painting (see here and here) for art group on Friday, but it seems unlikely that I’ll get around to posting that. I’m not sure I even got a good picture! Couple more weeks until baby#2 (Which do you think, Penelope, Margaret, Guinevere, Ginger, Elizabeth, Marigold? I could keep listing names, our list goes on… Rebecca says if it’s a girl she’s going to call her Monica, and if it’s a boy she’s going to call him Pit, so maybe it doesn’t matter what we think. Although she has agreed to lollipop as an adequate nickname for Penelope.) comes, and I’m trying to do a little less.

One Yard Wonders

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

badge-oneyardwondersSo, hey, last year I submitted a pattern to One Yard Wonders, and several weeks ago they released the cover image, and GUESS WHAT??? Do you see that green 3×3 compartment box at the top left of the cover? That’s my project. I think it is so cool that it’s on the cover. The book is supposed to be coming out in October, and it looks pretty fun, so I’m excited to get my copy. There are a bunch of preview photos on their Facebook page too if you want a peek inside.

Also, Storey Press is having a sweepstakes, where you will win one yard of fabric every month for a year, which sounds awesome, but I assume that I’m not eligible to enter. But you probably are! :-D

New Little People Figures

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Ice Cream Shop is Closed

Once upon a time we bought Rebecca an old school Little People Main Street playset at a garage sale for $5, but it didn’t have any people. We’ve slowly been fixing that. The first little person was a two inch section of wooden dowel with some tape wrapped around it, and a face painted on. (See the figure on the left.) I made a few of them, and they ran the show for a long time. We’ve slowly been adding ‘nicer’ figures to them, although, I really don’t think Rebecca cares what they look like, it’s more for mom and dad who also have to play with them.

Jesse turned two new wooden Little-People compatible figures, oh, months ago! I finally got around to my half of the deal, painting them. Of course it had to be a joint project with Rebecca, so she got to re-paint two of the figures we’d done before. (Can you tell which are which?) I think they came out pretty well, I’m getting much better at painting tiny faces, you should have seen the first couple. Luckily Rebecca has re-painted them, destroying the evidence. Whee!

Ice Cream Shop is Open

Ice Cube Painting – Art Playgroup Friday

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Ice Painting

This was fun, but would have worked better outside, because the ice cubes would have melted faster. Instead we hurried them along by getting out a bowl of water to dip them in. I tried two different kinds of paint popsicles, frozen (washable) tempera paint, and water with food coloring. MaryAnn Kohl’s First Art suggests liquid water colors, but we don’t have any. (Shocking, we seem to have everything else between Rebecca’s art supplies and mine…) The water and food coloring definitely worked better than the tempera paint, the tempera paint was squashy and crunchy and globy, and didn’t really like being frozen I think. The water and food coloring melted onto the paper much more gracefully. I saw the water and food coloring suggestion most recently from Chasing Cheerios Painting with Ice Cubes post, I think that was our inspiration anyhow. Which I’m needing more and more of! There will probably be somewhere between 0-3 art playgroups before we have a new baby, and then we’ll just be having playgroups for a while. I already can’t remember what I did this morning, and my writing is deteriorating! And then comes parent participation preschool at the end of September. Things are going to be changing around here.

Activity Blanket

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

quilt

I have such a hard time taking pictures of quilts around here. It would be nice if I had a lovely blank wall to tack them up against, but usually the best I can do is spreading it on the floor, and climbing up on something precarious to shoot a picture straight down. But I’m not really up for that right now! Not that this is even very recent, I made it, oh heavens, two months ago now! It’s been sitting in my to-blog-about pile for quite a while I guess! Must have been a lazy day. Really, looking at the colors on this now makes me a bit cross-eyed, hopefully the baby likes it.

This was a pretty quick project, I made it in a couple of days I think. The robot has stretchy arms, and felt buttons and a needle felted head. I was going to leave the head as something floppy to play with, but the felt was too heavy, and was always looking at the ground. The felt was great for fast applique because I didn’t need to worry about ironing it, or edging it, and it won’t fray. The arms have elastic in them, they are tubes with the elastic atatched at each end. I think I should have sewn down them too, because the fabric wants to slip down over the hands. Hrm.

DSC_4138

When I first decided I was done with this there was nothing behind the door/windows on the house, they were just floppy shapes to play with. But Rebecca informed me that that was NOT acceptable, and there needed to be something behind the doors. Duh mom. And she’s obviously right, I was just in lazy denial. So I needlefelted some felt shapes into faces with the eye shape mirroring the head shape. And that was much better.

For the third lazy of the day, for the first time I bought quilt binding. I don’t think I’ll do that again, because I didn’t realize it wasn’t cotton. So that’s a bit icky if you ask me. I did add a loop at the ‘top’ so it can be easily hung up or dragged around.

There are probably lots of busy-book sorts of activities that you could turn into a blanket, that would be pretty fun. I think blankets with activities built in would be good for stroller blankets. And park blankets. Quiet time blankets, but not naptime blankets. Which is okay, because they are kind of lumpy anyway.

Yo-Yo Painting – Art Playgroup Friday

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

SplatI saw this great idea for active painting at The Snail’s Trail, yo-yo painting, and I knew we had to try it with our group. I thought it was a lot of fun!

The idea is to make a ball of beans at the end of a nylon leg, get paint on it, and smack it into the paper. When you first start out the beans are clean, but as you go along they start to pick up all the different colors and your splats start becoming more speckled rather than single colored.

The ‘yo-yo’ is pretty impossible to control, but I thought it was lots of fun. This activity might have been more popular with the moms than the kids. The kids enjoyed it, but they were done with it after an average of 1.5 paintings.

yo-yo painting