Rockstars Come In All Sizes

He’s a natural. Little W can make a stage from anything and knows how to create drama.

FYI He’s rocking out to the Small Potatoes.

Advertisement

An Experiment: for the little guys

I said yesterday I took my boys to the the playground. I mentioned that they gave me a flower.  What I didn’t mention was that my 3 year old decided to pick ALL of the flowers growing in the park.

My 1 year old also decided to bring me flowers. Just like his big brother.

Anyway, I decided that since the flowers had been taken we had better put them to good use.

We divided them into 4 glasses of water coloured with food colouring and waited to see if they would take up the colour. I added a few white roses from the garden as I knew they would take the colour and wasn’t sure how well jonquils would go.

We waited.

Several hours later we noticed a slight change and got all excited.

The roses were taking up the colour faster than the jonquils.

We left them over night and this morning we had a rainbow!

The boys were very excited their experiment had worked! Hopefully we have instilled in them a desire to be curious and inventive for life!!
…well its a start.

Mum used it as an opportunity to take photos of course.

Fascinating.

Happy to be removing the stinky jonquils from the living room.

Kid’s Craft: Christmas Decoration Tutorial

And now to confuse my photoblog followers!

DIY Rainbow Ball Christmas Decorations

With Christmas around the corner as a mum I am looking for things that my 3 year old can make with some level of ownership. These Christmas decorations are so easy to make and look pretty effective.

You could also make them larger by using A3 card and could even make them outdoor proof by laminating the card used. You could make them elegant by limiting your colour palette and adding subtle sparkle or design. You could light them by running solar fairy lights onto them. The options are endless. This is the toddler craft version.

Here’s the How To:

First Things First, To make a medium sized ball

You will need:

• 8 strips of card per ball approximately 2cm or 1 inch wide and 20cm or 8 inches long (I used 8 different colours) Note: you can use any width or length strip and any type of card, old Christmas cards would work if you didn’t want to decorate the pieces

• pencils, crayons or textas to decorate the strips
• stickers, glitter etc also to decorate the strips
• 2 split pins per ball
• string
• tinsel
• something to poke a hole, eg stanley knife, scalpel, scissors, skewer etc
• stickytape

Instructions

1. Let your child loose on the strips of card. I asked my 3 year old to first colour in, then stick stickers on the strips. Depending on your child’s capability level you can decorate these in any way you like. If your child is young remember to REMOVE the strips from them before they colour right through the paper or destroy them in another way! (wink)

2. Unfortunately from here the construction is an adult thing. Take the 8 strips of card and arrange them in an order that is pleasing to you in a pile. (don’t do like I did and forget that I had a green on the top AND bottom of the pile so that when they were fanned out they were together!) Using something sharp poke through all eight pieces of card  to make sure that the holes are in the same place. As a guide, about 1cm in from the end and centred from either side. Repeat at the other end.

3. Starting on the coloured in side push a split pin through all eight cards. This is the bottom of your ball. Open the split slightly, but not fully yet.

4. Tie the end of the string tight around the slightly open pin and trim the end.

5. Completely and firmly open the pin over the knot securing it. At this point I cut the string at about 20cm long (a generous allowance, but you could also do it by leaving a long string (half a metre) and tying knots or using clamps at the other end, I will leave that to you.) This tutorial will cover what I did in this instance.

6. Take the new end of string and tie it around the other split pin. This is FIDDLY you may need to tie it, then slip it on and tighten it.

7. Poke the split pin with the knot through the card at the other end starting from the decorated side and push it tight to secure your knot. Then take the string from the first split pin and tie it around the slightly open split in the same way that you did before. This string should now pull taut and the card should form an arc. You can estimate how long you want the string by how you want your arc to look. Once you have tied your knot, completely and firmly open the pin to secure the knot. Trim both loose ends of the two strings neatly. You should now be able to hold your decoration by the hanging string.

8. Fan out the card pieces evenly to form a ball shape. (Note: you may notice as you start to fan that the card forms a teardrop shape, once fully fanned out this will disappear and become a ball.)

9. Take a minute to admire your handywork.

10. To hang the tinsel on the inside, just attach either end with stickytape. Move the card pieces slightly if you can’t fit your hand through and readjust them afterward.

You could also add a hanging ‘tail’ by cutting similar width, but longer strips of crepe paper to blow in the breeze. To do this you would first poke your bottom split pin through the tail before the card strips.

11. Hang them where ever you like. My son liked to watch them spin. I hope your kids do too.

Merry Christmas!

If you make these, consider leaving me a link in the comments to your photo so I can see them.

NOTE: This is the first tutorial I have written. If you have any questions or I have forgotten to add something please let me know so I can update it.

Weekly Photo Challenge: wrong

When I saw the challenge this week I thought ‘Oh no! I am going to find that hard!’ Then I thought that was the point! So I stopped worrying and figured something would present itself sooner or later.

Here it is. My son E pretending to be a superhero. I couldn’t get him to hold still and the light in the room was awful. It made for a really wrong portrait. I found it kind of an interesting result though.

Here is the closest I got to right. It had great potential.

Boys Clothing: Olympic Themed Pants

After my son E decided he loved the flannel pirate pants in the pyjamas I made him so much we wasn’t going to take it off, I realised that little kids love colour and pictures. They love them and they couldn’t care less if they are not fashionable. Boys fashion is horrible. Sure they look nice enough, sophisticated toddlers in their navy, grey and brown, but they don’t care about our social construction, they just want to love the pattern and colour on their clothing. So I have decided to make E some pants, in kid’s pattern material. As summer comes the cotton fabrics will be great. I will make pants into shorts and let him love what he is wearing. He can have the rest of his life to conform to society’s norms. As an adult he will be confined to typical men’s clothing and shunned if he dares to commit the worst crime of wearing pink! So while he is little enough to just like what he likes I am going to let him enjoy it.

Anyway!

I made him some pants with an Olympic theme in honor of the London games. I found a brightly coloured fabric with beefeaters in Beatlesque style and throught it was great. I decided in addition I would add a red stripey cuff for good measure (mainly because they were replacing the pyjamas which had a cuff). I procrastinated on these pants. They were half done then I couldn’t bring myself to sew again to add the cuff. I even did one cuff, then took a few days to do the other! In the end the realisation that the games had started and the pants weren’t finished moved me into action and I finished them.

E loves them! (He still wouldn’t oblige by turning around to have a photo though!)

Two days in a row now he has come to me carrying the pants asking to change out of his other clothing into them and he says to me, “Mum, I am going to wear these for a really long time”. “OK, E” I say. And I mean it too. I made them about 2 sizes too big so he can wear them ’til they fall apart!

How did I make them?

I used my favourite boys pants pattern, here. I use the FLAT FRONT PANTS. The pattern has options for both. I think they look better for day wear. Incidentally if you add extra size to the pattern and use the gathered pattern they make good shape pj pants that aren’t bag shaped (perhaps its only me that doesn’t like bag shaped pjs?). I added about 1cm to the outside of the pattern. Added the cuff giving me extra length in two ways. 1. by not hemming the pattern the legs were longer anyway and 2. obviously the extra length of the cuff. The cuff means that I can fold that up until his legs get longer. Coming up to 3, he will no doubt lengthen in the coming months!
I also added extra length to the top at the back as he still wears a nappy and it helps to cover the extra bulk.

Now I just need to make some for W. Poor thing never gets the new pants because E has so many that he has outgrown!

I am…trying not to laugh

My son came up to me this morning and told me he was very busy doing hard work. I thought that sounded pretty good. I asked him what his work was. He told me he was fixing the couch. That isn’t unusual, he and R often ‘secure’ the couch with E’s toy tool set. It wasn’t until later that I found the aftermath of his ‘fixing’. Needless to say the chalk was confiscated and I had trouble not laughing as he was given a ‘talking to’!

And of course, who knew it would make interesting photos?
I call this series ‘Chalk in a couch’ heheh

I am…not sure whether to laugh at E’s industriousness or cry at the idea of cleaning chalk out of the couch.