Oc-Toy-Put or Oct-Toy-Put? Opinions? I was originally going to call it something boring and factual – Octopus Animal Organizer – I guess I try to cram everything into a name that I think someone might want to know. But my friend John came up with this catchier name. (It’s catchier, right?) In case you can’t tell, you hang it up and it lovingly strangles, or, um, hugs, 8 of your other stuffed animals. If you’ve already lovingly made your children too many stuffies, here is your guilt free opportunity to make another one! Or at least it was for me…

Squeezed into one yard of fabric, (barely, I’m all about the barely), for the next One Yard Wonders book. Props to maryanne for guessing that the pic of the pattern sketch in the post-before-last was an octopus!

Penelope loves her new octopus, and was a very patient little model, even when it was eating her.

Needle felting is such a wonderfully simple technique, but so many people seem skittish about trying it. This is a stuffed monster that I made for a friend’s 5 month old, it is a standard two piece turn and stuff construction made out of a felted cashmere sweater. It is SO soft! (If I ran the world all baby plushies would be made out of felted cashmere rather than plastic fleece or fur.)

The point of note is that rather than sewing on felt for eyes I just needle felted all of the features on. It gives everything a soft organic look, and you don’t need to worry about cutting tiny circles out, tiny circles are easy when you are needle felting! To make a tiny circle you just take a few hairs of roving and roll them around in your fingers until they form a loose ball, and then, as everything with needle felting, just stick it where you want it and start jabbing the hell out of it with a barbed felting needle.

When I started needle felting I just bought a felting tool and started using it on everything. I got comments like “You can needle felt acrylic felt?” sure, it has fibers. The felting tool is good for tangling up fibers. It has fibers, especially loose ones, you can needle felt it. Remember the ravioli? I experimented with making those with printed quilting cotton on one side. You can needle felt quilting cotton?? Well, you can felt things *onto* quilting cotton. Tightly woven fabrics are pretty insistent on remaining themselves, but if you put roving or felt on top of quilting cotton, you can jab it through the woven fibers and create a free form applique on top of it. It helps if you then flip it over, you will see lots of fluff sticking through the back side of the fabric, scramble the back around and then jab it back through to the front side, and then back again, then with some fibers making a loopy round trip it will be quite secure.

Would anyone like some basic tutorials on I’ve-never-done-this-before needle felting?

Now I have to go do one of those sidebar widgety things…

I finished my halloween candy hiding witch ball, and I like it. The red imp is coming along too. If you stick a rectangular mini-candy bar the wrapper sticks out her mouth, but I’ve decided that’s just fine. I think the square ones will fit in better, but I don’t have any, and I’m not buying any candy to see or I will eat it!

Since we had a witch finished we worked on /w/ activities. Over two separate days actually, and I still never got to making a big W sheet for our alphabet binder. Rebecca didn’t want to, so we’ll just move on without it. W-whatever.

We wrote W’s with soap on the mirror, then w-washed them off.

We did some w-walrus walking (on your arms, dragging your legs like a tail), and some w-wheelbarrow walking (on your arms with mom holding up your feet).

We w-wiped plant leaves with water to clean the dust off. We didn’t stick with this for very long!

We worked with wire and wire cutters to make a wire sculpture in a styrofoam block, wrapping (not /w/) them around markers and pencils to make twisty springs.

We got our DickBlick order, (yay new paint!) so we got to spray liquid watercolors on paper. Also, duh, “cleans up with water” does NOT mean washable! It means you can clean your brushes with soap and water, you don’t need mineral spirits or turpentine. That was for our tempera paint, now I’m going to have to figure out whether I can make it washable with some kind of soap or not. But, the colors are MUCH nicer, and the washable paint has turned many of her shirts into ‘art shirts’ anyway, so maybe we’ve just graduated to student tempera.

Rebecca drew W’s to make w-waves using w-white crayon on blue paper, and we did a couple ‘w’ worksheets.

Also this was our first week of co-op preschool, crazy times! I think it’s going to be great.

I’ve been feeling like I’ve been falling down with Rebecca’s homeschool activities, and I decided that I would have a much easier time thinking of activities to offer her (our homeschool is strictly voluntary and fun since she’s only 3) if I had a theme to guide me. So today we’ve been focusing on /b/.

Coincidentally I finished making a Bat Ball last night. I want to make a bunch of these little ball monsters with mouths to fill with candy to have a monster hunt, like an easter egg hunt, for Halloween. And if I get them done fast enough then maybe they’ll be my first Etsy pattern. We’ll see if I can get them done by the end of September.

So the first activity of the day was throwing the bat ball around. It’s being quite vigorously play tested.

Then we made a big B and little b out of beans, from Apples and Jammies via ABC and 123. Rebecca is working on her lower case letters first, so I did the capital B and she did the lower case, because she wanted to work together.

After the fine motor skills we went outside for some running on a very large small ‘b’, drew lots of chalk pictures of things that start with /b/,

and examined our blue feet.

Then we did some number work, counting and lining up our counting b-bean b-bags, and walking on the resulting number b-balance b-beam and counting up and down.

Then we did some ‘b’ worksheets from some alphabet workbooks we have, and made an alphabet binder to collect work in. Rebecca enjoyed snapping the rings open and shut, and using the three-hole-punch.

For snack we ate blueberries,

and played with the /b/ miniatures from the phonics miniatures that we’ve been collecting.

What a b-ful morning! Luckily /b/ is a really easy phoneme to do this with, because I didn’t do any planning, I know some of the phonemes are going to be much harder!

Maybe I should suggest lacing b-beads next? Next phoneme up I think is going to be /w/. I’ll get to work on the witch ball.

Shortly after Rebecca’s second birthday we got the book “The Monster Show: Everything You Never Knew About Monsters” by Charise Mericle Harper out of the library. Ever since then Rebecca has wanted singing snakes on her three year birthday cake, and we would talk about how it was hard to find the sorts of stores that monsters shopped at to get things like singing snakes.

Most monsters like to have singing snakes on their birthday cakes instead of candles.

We had to buy the book when it had to go back to the library. I think she was starting to forget about it, a year later, but I didn’t forget about it. I thought it was a great and suitably crazy idea. Besides, my husband and I had been daydreaming about how to get it to work off and on all year, we had to do something with all that built up creative thought.

We didn’t actually manage the singing part, which is funny, because sticking an iPod with speakers into the box would have been the easy part. But starting with the hard part is always a good idea, right? We did manage spinning snakes. Here’s a YouTube video, proof!

The original plan called for the snakes to be made out of parachute silk and have a straw with air blowing through them for animation, and sound. What we actually ended up with were cotton snakes on bent pipe cleaners that spun around. There are drinking straws lined up with holes in the tinfoil and cardboard base that feed the pipe cleaners through the cake and down to the mechanism, where they are twisted through axle pivot bits, if that makes any sense. You can see a top and side view of the inside mechanism below. The straws mostly kept the pipe cleaners from getting stuck and icky in the cake and frosting, and we only ended up with minimal cake-crumb-rain down into the gears. The pipe cleaners were great for bending the snakes up and giving them different poses.

The original gear train that I built powered an ambitious 12 snakes, but the motor was loaded enough with six. Overloaded really, on the test cake on Rebecca’s ‘real’ birthday, two of the snakes failed, and we were only using six of them. So my husband and I rebuilt it to be more robust with less backlash. He’s good at over-engineering things, and I’m good at under-engineering them. (I also got Jesse to build the cardboard base and get all the holes lined up, all the icky here is the top and here is the bottom, please build the middle so that it all fits together magically please work.)

From the side view you can see the feet on the bottom and supports on the top that hold the top of the box, and the cake, up. Part of Jesse’s (necessary) over-engineering of the project, I would have been content with the cardboard box holding everything up, and it probably would have sagged and locked the gears. But it would have worked beautifully for at least 30 seconds. Optimism is not so great in engineering.

Next year perhaps we will have a wooden box with built in speakers, and party hats for the snakes (I can’t believe I forgot the tiny party hats!) or maybe we will have moved on to something else. I bet a merry-go-round with fairies riding up and down on cupcakes would be pretty cool too…

This monster is really a crayon drawing.  I was lying on the floor drawing with crayons with my daughter, and I liked the monster I drew, so I cut my drawing out, used it as a pattern, and sewed it up.  I like it!  So does Rebecca.  She was very upset with me when I hid it away.  She thinks everything I make should be for her to play with now now now.  But she’s just going to have to wait a couple weeks.  I almost gave in the next day and let her sleep with it, but it was conditional on her letting me brush her teeth without the awful struggle that is usually involved, but that didn’t happen.  

I hand stitched the whole thing, I love being able to do that, but it did take me two hours, I think.  I noticed that I’d got the fabric pattern upside down as I was finish it, oops, but whatever.  I made another one Sunday night, that I machine sewed with a messier scribbled face, which only took one hour.  But I don’t like that one as much.  Need to take a picture.  But not now.  Maybe I’ll make six more tomorrow, not that I have the time, only the desire.  On the up side I finally mailed off the DVDs of my SIL’s wedding that I shot… over two months ago.  But now I need to start on my brother’s wedding, which was also two months ago.  Poor guy.  That’s what you get with a free wedding photographer who’s also a full-time mom… and easily distractible…