I saw the cloud dough exploration over at TinkerLab and I knew we had to try it too.

We used 24c flour (two bags), and 3c oil, plenty for the 7 kids we had playing. It was fabulous fun, I thought maybe I could bring it into school when we were done.

At least it was plenty for the first hour. Then the yard started looking a bit snowy.

By the end it was a lot snowy.

We don’t usually get much snow here.

In other news, I survived my spinning class yesterday. It went pretty well, there were a couple of kinders and first graders who needed more hands on help than I could give them, but really everyone managed it, in the end I think there was just one kinder who refused outright to spin, and one first grader who in the end had to hold the end of his wool up while I gave his drop spindle a few mighty spins and we twisted up the whole (3′) length at once. Sometimes you just need to move on to the next project. Out of 23 though, that’s not too bad, I think that means I made my 90% success goal. (We used this method if you’re curious.) It also means that there were several kinders who with a few minutes of personal attention actually did manage to successfully use a drop spindle with pre-drafted combed top. I learned it’s not actually called roving, unless it has some twist. But I need to be further educated there. So many new words! Diz, hackle, noil, long draw, short draw, rolag, woolen vs worsted, drafting, combed top, roving, sliver (rhymes with diver!?) so many words! If you are curious there is a lot of great information about spinning at the Joy of Handspinning. But like the snap of fingers, now I am on to weaving, because that is what I am teaching *next* week. I am learning SO much teaching this class! And weaving, it is so cool! Go read/watch this introduction to backstrap weaving! Now I want to make a backstrap loom, but my living room is currently full of a bajillion different table looms from school that I have to figure out and warp, so I don’t think I’m going to be doing that! At least, not this week.

The verdict for this snack time was fuzzy got eaten. We did not do comparative taste tests.

Texture Blocks. I brought home all these interesting leather samples in different textures and finishes, I think originally I was planning on doing something Montessori-ish, like texture matching cards, or perhaps I was going to make a book. I don’t remember, and that’s for the best, because I came up with something much simpler, that I actually finished!

I have a bunch of wooden craft blocks that I was using to make little houses, which incidentally is where the name for this blog really first came from, (you can get them here) and I cut up the different leather scraps to the same size as a block face, and glued them on with a paint brush and some ModPodge. I could have cut them so that the edges of the leather overlapped, so the block would come out as a perfect cube, rather than a cube with all the corners missing, but I wasn’t confident I could pull that out without it looking like a mess, so I went with the corners-missing ‘style’. I’m a total cheater.

All of the textures are fun to investigate, especially the hairy one. It’s hard to see, but the sides in that black row above is actually covered in stiff, flat, cow hair. That’s the real deal! The other textures are embossed, I’m pretty sure, but still very cool to touch.

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!

So anyway, here are some fun things we’ve done over the last several months that I never got around to blogging about.

We’ve done fishing with paper fish with paperclips and magnets-on-a-string, but this is much cooler. Valerie over at Frugal Family Fun made her fish out of pipe cleaners, which makes them easy, cute, and their whole bodies are ferromagnetic! (I had to look that term up… ferromagnetic materials are the ones that are strongly attracted by magnets and can be magnetized. Now we know.) Since the pipe cleaner fuzz keeps the magnet from directly contacting the wire you need a relatively strong magnet to put on the end of your string to go fishing. We cut our pipe cleaners up into different lengths, and made lots of fish! Now they are living in a fish patterned tea tin on our game shelf.

Here we made a stamp pad out of felt and wet it with acrylic craft paint. Then we stamped Totoro and Hello Kitty all over a pair of pants that were already in sad sad shape. Be sure to clean your stamps promptly afterwards or the acrylic paint will gum them up. Acrylic craft paint is great for painting clothes, you don’t really need fabric paint. This activity is an easy way for little kids to personalize their clothes by themselves. Getting out the letter stamps would be fun too.

Play dough with your feet. Why should hands get to have all the fun? This is home made glitter play dough. More sparkles is better. Rebecca had fun kneading the sparkles in. That may have been where we started using feet, I can’t remember!

If you get a box in the mail and it is full of bubble wrap, put it in the driveway! It is super fun to zoom over. Then you can revert to the traditional mad stomping dance to pop the rest of the bubbles. At our preschool they buy a big roll of bubble pop just so the kids can do this once. The environmentalist in me cries, but the kids loved it.

You can tell I’m tired from the preponderance of short declarative sentences. I’ll go work on that sleep thing now.

Decluttering leads to lots of interesting art materials. This particular Friday I put out a pile of old cassettes for the girls. First they grabbed the tape and ran around the yard, around the car, around each other. Then there was a little bit of screaming and whining. After we untangled everyone and gather everything back up the girls made big crinkly birds nesty heaps and covered them with paint. Big messy process work, and I confess I threw the whole pile away when we were done.

Starting the wee one off with the painting thing. Liquid water colors and fingers. Two months ago technically, looking at the EXIF. Oooh, I’m too busy, aren’t I? Hmm. What to do. I’ll have to think about that one.

Isn’t this beautiful? I’m pretty sure the paper never really got taken out. We started stirring paint around in the pie pans that I use as pallets, and ended with it all over legs and bellybuttons. And oh. No one caught one little girl before she went inside to use the bathroom. Oh my. It is really amazing the number of things that small people bump up against and touch on their way through a bathroom. I could have saved the room as a conceptual art piece about bodies in motion, but, I didn’t.

What are we doing? Making cheese. The easy way – scald milk and add a little acid – lemon juice or vinegar. We got the idea from ‘The Toddlers Busy Book’, which I haven’t used much, but has a bunch of fun ideas. There is a good description of cheese making here, the bare bones section is basically what we did.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this is Rebecca will not eat cheese. I think she wants to like it, but she really doesn’t. She used to adore cottage cheese when she was really little, then no more. Although I think she’s starting to come around, we made this cheese about a month ago, (yes, I am working through my photo backlog, what gave you that idea? Good thing I ‘blog without apology’, or I’d be feeling guilty that I was ‘behind’.) and she ate an entire string cheese last week. I was really surprised.

Anyway, she was very excited to make cheese, and then she couldn’t eat it, too bad! She thought it was awful. But that’s okay, dad thought it was great! We used lemon juice, and it gave it a nice flavor. We did squeeze it much too hard in the cheese cloth though, it came out very dry. And we forgot to add the salt, oops. I think we should try again. It is cute though, isn’t it?

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