Crafting and kids.
We gave Kate her very own sketch book a few months ago and she loves it. Michael also has several sketch books and she really enjoys getting to draw with him. We encourage her to use one page at a time and then put the date at the bottom. She usually ends up using it once a week or so and I think it will end up showing her progression quite nicely. Plus, it makes me feel a bit less guilty about throwing away the approximately 3000 other pieces of art she creates a week. 🙂
So as may of you undoubtedly know, Halloween in pretty much my favorite holiday. I am so excited to start some spooky art projects! I also get the feeling that Kate is supposed to start learning to use scissors and glue, thus this project was born. 🙂
First I cut some strips of orange paper and drew lines on the to show where Kate and Abby should cut.
Abby, who just turned 4, totally got it. She cut apart the strips and glued them in the pumpkin shape.
Kate clearly needs some more practice with the scissors. It seems like her hands are still too small for them. No problem, she ripped up the strips and I cut out some squares for her. She was all over the glue stick though. 🙂
And here are the finished masterpieces!
I’ve decided to get back on the blogging bandwagon. We’ll see how long it lasts this time. lol. I have a lot of fun stuff to put up, I just need to actually write the posts.
Here’s a scrapbook page a made a few weeks ago. I’m so in love with these little letters from October Afternoon. 🙂
I bought this glimmer mist (it’s like spray glitter) forever ago and I’ve never used it. I decided to try it on a layout this weekend and I’m in love. Like I might have to go and buy 15 or so more colors this weekend. 🙂
Long time no blog. What can I say, we’ve been on vacation. 🙂 I do have something fun to share today though. I decided to make Kate a quiet book. What is a quiet book you say? As far as I can tell, it’s a reusable activity book. There are tons of cool quiet books on Pinterest and this one even had free printable templates. Sign me up! I finished my first page last night and I’m really happy with it.
The directions called for fusible interfacing, but I just hand stitched everything. I actually attempted to use the fusible webbing on another page but everything about it made me crazy. I’ll post more about it later once I figure out how to make that page work for me. I think that it also called for velcro for this page, but I went with snaps instead as it seemed like velcro would snag on the felt.
Oh and the flower pot doubles as a pocket to hold the petals. How cute is that. 🙂
We decided to meet some friends downtown today to go to the Children’s Museum. The plan was to meet up at 10:00 when they opened and then get lunch after letting the kids play for a bit. What’s that you say? They don’t open until noon on Sunday? Curses! And of course we’ve already parked in the garage downtown and have to hang around until the museum opens to have our parking validated. Le sigh. For once, I was glad we were running late. We headed over to a coffee shop to grab a snack.
As we were walking to the coffee shop, I noticed some more cows. Have I mentioned the cows? They are all over Austin right now. There are something like 47 of them. So far, we’ve stumbled across three of them and taken pictures. It’s like a sickness I tell you. If I see one, I must take a picture of Kate with it. Luckily she’s a pretty good sport.
After wasting as much time as possible in the coffee shop, we still had 45 minutes before the museum was set to open. Luckily there were a lot more cows!
This one was in full sun. When the high is 109, full sun is not your friend.
Luckily this cow was in the shade. And since we’re in Austin, there was live music. 🙂
I think this cow may have been their favorite. They really liked the grass.
Moooo.
Michael put his foot down here and said that there was no way we were crossing 1st St to take a picture with a cow. Fair enough. I’m counting it anyway.
All in all, we added 9 new cows! I actually think Kate had more fun walking around finding cows than she did at the museum. To be fair, she and I come to the museum a few times a month and we rarely go hunting for cows. 🙂
I was working on a cross stitch project the other day and Kate decided she wanted to try it too. Obviously she’s too little for that, but I thought she might be ready for one of those lacing cards. After all, she’s pretty much mastered stringing beads. I was going to look for one on Amazon, but then I figured, why not just make one? I covered some chipboard (I have tons from packs of page protectors) with some paper. Then I cut out some shapes and drew a reverse outline (?) with a sharpie marker. Punched a few holes with my crop-a-dile and we were good to go!
Oh, I used a yarn needle from my knitting stash and some yarn as the thread. I tied the thread to the needle on one end and the paper on the other. I realized afterwards that I could have just as easily had her use one of the shoe laces that came with the bead lacing set. In fact, the next time I get around to knitting something I’m totally going to switch them out. 🙂
She loved it! She still needs help to do it, obviously, but she had a lot of fun getting to “sew” like mama. 🙂
Michael and Kate turned the packaging from our new mattress (which is totally awesome by the way) into a shack awesome playhouse. Michael says the secret to cardboard construction is this tape. I must say, I was a bit skeptical when they first started, but the playhouse is fantastic. Kate loves it.
Michael drew her raptor logo on the facade, then we let her go to town with some markers.
She’s a big fan of the windows. I expected her to destroy it within the hour, but she’s been happily playing with it for over a week. Honestly, I’m shocked that it’s still standing. That tape really is incredible.
I made another set of felt letters for a friend of mine a few weeks ago, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about them yet. Here’s a tutorial I did on how to make them.
I actually “made up” a new embroidery stitch. I say made up because I am quite sure that I am not the first person to come up with the idea. 🙂 You can see it on the B and the R. I really like it.
For the numbers, I put the same number of stars as the number. (So 6 had 6 stars.)
It’s not too soon to think of Christmas. 🙂 I can probably only finish 2 or 3 sets in time for Santa to drop them off. Those elves are just not as quick as they used to be. If you would like a set, leave a comment or email me at highfiberfoods@gmail.com. They are $2 per character.
Yesterday was kind of a cheater post, so I decided to throw in a bonus post today. Last night I made a scrapbook page inspired by the layering video. All in all I was pretty happy with it! The best part? I was looking through some old paper to make something for Kate (more on that later) and I “discovered” my stash from last summer. Cute stuff! And I’m not sick of it anymore. 🙂
These are the pictures from our rice sensory box. I decided to put 6 of the pictures along the edges and then treat the middle part as a single 12×12 page for design purposes. I think it turned out quite nice!
I inked all of the edges before adhering them to give the layers a bit of pop. I think next time I’ll add even more layers, but I didn’t want to overdo it right out of the gate.
I made a really simple title with some letter stickers, some rubons and a scrap of paper.