Contact paper is great stuff (other than being made out of plastic…), clear, sticky, fun! My husband has been planing down some boards, with a hand plane, resulting in a lovely pile of silky smooth paper thin wood shavings. We put them together. The contact paper and the wood shavings that is. These photos are awful, the wood is beautiful, it practically glows! (But it was a bit springy, we had to try standing on our collages to squish them a bit flatter.)

If you are not endowed with a hand plane and some spare butternut lumber, try some grass, tissue paper, you know… contact paper collages have been around forever, but the wood shavings are really really pretty! I wish I could think of something else for 4 year olds to do with them! I know there must be something brilliant I am missing. Fairy house roofs? We just made a lovely flower fairy house I need to show you… It has a flower roof though, it doesn’t need wood shavings. Miniature books? It is paper thin, you can just cut it up with scissors. Maybe we could try some of those quilled wood things, but that might be a bit on the involved side? Make-your-own-plywood? Ideas?

What do you do when you have a bunch of potatoes that have gone green? (Well, you *could* eat them, but I think they taste awful and I’m paranoid about poisoning my children. So instead:) Potato stamping! This variation that we did uses cookie cutters for the shapes. Whee!

1. Cut your potato in half.

2. Stick your cookie cutter deep into the potato

3. Pretend you are trying to cut a 1/4″-1/2″ slice off the cut side of the potato. Since the cookie cutter is still in the potato you will run your knife around the potato hitting the cookie cutter with the tip of the knife. The cookie cutter will protect the center part of the potato, creating the stamp shape. (Yes, I should have taken a picture of this step, hopefully you can figure out what I’m trying to say by looking at the result!)

4. Pull off the slice of potato from around the outside of the cookie cutter.

5. Pull out the cookie cutter.

Now you have a nice cookie cutter shaped potato stamp with a round potato handle on the back good for small hands to hold onto.

We also cut some textures into some of our stamps. The (4yo) girls practiced cutting the potatoes in half, putting the cookie cutters in, and cutting around the outside by themselves, with varying degrees of success, and no injuries!

We love paint!

Yes I haven’t been blogging recently, no particular reason. I have a lot of backed up things to talk about though!

This is something I’ve been working on for a while, soft dolls printed at Spoonflower. I managed to fit three dolls into half a fat quarter of organic jersey (which is larger than a fat quarter of quilting weight woven, happily) so I was able to order six little dolls on one fat quarter. I made one rag doll, which was my goal, that I haven’t sewn yet, and then along the bottom I fit two swaddled babies. One is the one above, that I think is okay, but I’d like to fix it up.

The other is one that Rebecca drew – I printed out an oval for her, and she scribbled a face and other bits all over it. Here she is sewing around the edges, and in quite a bit from the edges…

And here you can see her finished doll, isn’t it cute! (along with the second print that she is cutting out.) She did the cutting, and the sewing and the turning and the stuffing! I still have to thread her needles and knot them, I keep meaning to work on that with her, and I had to sew the doll shut for her because she was getting tired. Can you tell, I am so proud of her that she can sew a simple doll mostly by herself at 4?

While playing we found out that our hangers from Ikea make excellent little marble tracks. Rebecca insisted on filling up the whole thing with my marble collection, good work for little fingers, also there was the challenge of keeping them from rolling where she didn’t want them as the floor isn’t flat..

We also had fun doing some wooden puzzles that I cut with our scroll saw. After Rebecca did them right side up she decided to give it a go upside down. They are small enough that it was a pretty easy job. So if you are bored of your puzzles, try them wrong side up. You could even draw a new picture on the back!

Here is a 100% child led activity. I was dragged. Really.

I was cutting loose threads off a red canvas shopping bag that I had just washed and dyed yet another load of clothes pink with, I’m starting to learn, really, although I just did it again with a purple blanket… And Rebecca wanted to make a new bag with the threads I was pulling off. I think she was upset that the bag was loosing threads, and had a hole in the corner. She asked if we could make a new bag, and I grudgingly admitted that *theoretically* we could make a very small bag, but it would be a lot of work. From there I was dragged into helping her set up a tiny cardboard loom, warping it for her and finding a large needle to use to weave the weft threads. From there she wove her little postage stamp of red cloth.

Later when she was helping me make the bed she said, “Wow mama, someone did a lot of work making this big sheet!” So there you go, the last couple months of chaos we’ve become unschoolers.

Not running away, but assembling Ikea furniture, a great activity for little hands. Rebecca loves using the little torx drivers, and putting all the bolts into the holes.

I know I haven’t written for almost a month, things are getting a little more organized around here, I’d say were 80-90% unpacked. That’s depressing. I do have a lot to write about though, I’ve even been doing some sewing! I just need to make Monday blog-ahead day, or schedule some time for it. That’s what I feel like I need to work on the most right now, coming up with a house cleaning, girl educating, mama crafting schedule where everything can magically get done at its appointed time… There may be too much fantasy in there. I’ve started Fly Lady though, which is one step towards such a miracle schedule.

Want to practice your cranking? Rebecca is fascinated by both baby food and the food mill. She wants her own bowl of baby rice cereal at meal times. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but here she is, working on grinding up a quarter of a peanut butter and jam sandwich… Mmmm… She ate that quarter and then ground another one. Whatever floats their boats, right? (Still old pre-move projects.)

Anyhow, here are some awful pictures of Rebecca’s sewing, from two months ago. The next several posts will all be things several months old, before moving took over my life!

Rebecca has been sewing felt recently. For Christmas D-Pa got her a stack of craft felt of her very own. This is a heart that one of us cut out, can’t remember. I think she cut it out… it was for Daddy, went something like: “This heart is for Daddy.” “You’re cutting a hole in it?” “Daddy has a hole in his heart and all the blood is coming out.” “Oh?” “Now I’m taping it up.” “Mom, make a needle for me, I want to sew it to my skirt.” “Oh sure, why not.” “Now Daddy’s heart is stuck to my skirt, and I’ll show everyone at school tomorrow.” Two months and it’s still on there.

Yes, the color on this is awful. We did this at Nenny & D-Pa’s house over winter vacation. Rebecca said she wanted to make a donut, so I cut out two teal circles for her. Yes, she chose the color. First she sewed around the ring in the middle, then she said she wanted to put strawberries on it. So I cut out some strawberries, and she randomly stitched everything together. Then she wanted to stuff it. Sweetie, that’s really the wrong order to do things in, but who’s fault is that really? Sigh. Okay. So I started forcing stuffing in between the front and back between the strawberry stitching, holding the edges shut so that Rebecca could whip stitch around the edges. It ended up plumping up reasonably, luckily she wasn’t very thorough about sewing down the strawberries, because Mama’s always have to make these things work out, right?

By next week maybe I will have unpacked her felt and she can get back to work again. Actually, the biggest stumbling block to that right now: I bought a second hand wood bookcase for craft supplies, sight unseen, or in this case un-sniffed. It reeks of either perfume, incense or ill conceived fake teak scent. Any ideas how to get rid of it? I’m afraid the scent is somehow embedded in the finish and I’m very upset about the whole thing. It looks very nice, but the smell is making my throat raw.

Yes, I realize that the winter holidays are so last month! And frankly, we did this last month, but there you go, right now my house is full of moving boxes and not so full of exciting crafts! Two weeks to go.

The pine cones were a Friday Art Group project, we painted them white and then sprinkled them with kosher salt – it comes in larger flakes than table salt, but not so large as rock salt, and makes reasonable glitter substitute. We have no glitter in our house. Okay, we have one bottle of clear plastic glitter somewhere, but I don’t know where, and if I did I might not say.

The mini tree is a dead bonsai tree my husband gave me… We stuck it in some flour play dough and baked it. Somehow the tree wicked up the salt (maybe it was salt dough, honestly I don’t remember, it keeps a disgracefully long time.) and turned whiter than it was to start with, kinda cool. We hung lots of little mini ornaments on it with tweezers and fingers. It was a great fine motor activity, and lots of fun. The mini ornaments consist mostly of plastic beads and sequins in various arrangements strung on earring wires from the craft store. I have them from years ago, but next year I should find more earring wires (just short wires with a flat bump at the end – you could just twist a loop instead) and let Rebecca make the ornaments. I don’t think that tree is going to make it to next year, maybe we will have to use one of the still-living bonsai, it would be much sturdier too, even if it wouldn’t give as much of the ‘winter’ aspect.

Notice the haircut? That was a christmas morning present. She’s been wanting that consistently for quite a while, and now that it’s done I like it too, surprisingly enough! (I’m firmly in the long hair camp myself.) She slouched quite a lot when I was cutting off her ponytail, when it was off and she straightened up I was rather shocked at how short she had managed to get it without my noticing! Chin length in front, but up above her hairline in back. And so she ended up with a reverse bob, because that was what happened, and it was practically instantly exactly the haircut that she should have had, no getting used to it period, no who’s child are you? And I would have had no idea how to get there if it hadn’t happened by accident!