Clothes pegs and foosball

This has turned into a bit of a crazy long epic post, but bear with me, I'll get to the Foosball bit!

We had some hanging out pretend laundry fun quite a while ago. Coincidentally, the same day that Michelle over at Her cup overfloweth was playing with clothes pegs with her kids too. Clothes pegs are a great tool for preschoolers to faddle with. They love them because they are something that grown ups are seen using often, and you can do so much with them. Lots and lots of people on the interwebs have used clothes pegs as clip on markers for various matching and learning activities. We tried out a matching the colours version of these sorts of activities with paint chips a while back around Christmas time, and the kids liked it.



The clothes peg game that we played a while back was just cutting out clothing shapes from paint swatches that we'd pilfered from Home Depot. I tied up a clothes line and provided two different sized clothes pegs and that's about it really. It did provide a good hour or so of entertainment and inadvertantly a lot of fine motor control practice for my three year old. She wanted to put up a clothes line in the little play house that we put together (and takes up half their bedroom). She ditched the paper clothes and opted to hang out the baby doll's clothes instead.











While we were doing this, a few clothes pegs pinged apart and looking at the shapes of the wooden pieces got me thinking. Lorraine from Ikat Bag posted some beautiful rocking chairs that her father made for her children's dolls, out of clothes pegs. I really want to try and make two of these very soon, because I'm making two rag dolls that would look feindishly cute sat in them.

The idea that I had though, was to use the clothes pegs to make little foosball guys. If you put the clothes peg parts back to back then they look remarkably like the players on a foosball table!

My brother in law and his girlfriend are champion foosball players and travel abroad to compete, so when we went to visit them in London last year the kids got to play on the tables (yes, that's tables, as in plural) in their house and LOVED it! I thought a wee kidlett sized toy version would be a cool thing to try and make together.





It seems that the pegs I had fitted snuggly around a bamboo skewer. I'd dyed the bamboo skewers green for another project though, so we used some dowelling that was the same size that I had left over in the craft stuff.







The kids painted up the players in red and blue just with normal kiddy paint. I may varnish them to make them waterproof though.











I was originally going to just use an old cereal box to make the toy, but then I realised that we had an old wooden cd crate that might make the toy last a bit longer. This gave gadgetboy the chance to drill holes and jigsaw goals in the garage.





There are several ways to lay out players on a foosball table, but we didn't really have the space in the box to use any of the normal layouts, so we opted for one goal keeper, two defenders and three attackers. I used wooden beads from the kid's sewing/threading misc as handles for the game, and we painted a thin bit of scrap wood to be the green base of the box.









We need to do some alterations to it though, because when we first made it, we only had a proxxon with a teeny drill bit to make the holes in the CD crate, so we had to use the spinddly dowels. Clearly from the enthusiasm levels my kids exhibit, we need to drill some bigger holes and use some more study dowels!

Giant homemade subbuteo

Did Subbuteo make a big impact in America? I have no idea. I come from the generation in the UK that were young kids in the 1980s, and so pre decent video games, Subbuteo ruled supreme. If you aren't sure what I'm on about, here's some hokey British daytime TV segment on the history of Subbuteo and here's an old advert for the game. Yep, it's just flicking some glorified weebles around on a rug in an attempt to have an interactive football game (soccer for you yanks). The stadium was like a doll house for boys back then ;)



The real Subbuteo stuff is more suited to older children, because it's rather small and fiddly, so I thought we'd see if we could make a larger more preschooler freindly alternative from stuff around the house. For the bases I ended up trying some salt dough crammed into teeny little bowls that had been greased up with vaseline. I was going to use the egg trays from our fridge, but what do you know, they had vanished. Do let me know if you see them. I suspect they are hidden somewhere quite secret and are likely full of Polly Pocket shoes, but I digress.

You can see our salt dough in this post from Xmas last year. It's just one and a half parts hot water, one part salt and four parts all purpose flour. I snapped lolly pop sticks in half and stuck them in the dough as little posts that we could attach our footballers to. Then I took out the sticks and squelched the dough out of the little bowls and baked the resulting hemispheres in the oven for about an hour on a low heat until they were rock hard. Stuck the sticks back in them and they were ready for the kids to decorate.

I figured the easiest thing to do would be to draw some footballers that the kids could colour, cut out and glue onto the sticks, so I drew a little soccer girl and scanned her. I'd love to have had the time to draw a load of different footballers in different poses, but the kids were wanting to get making stuff, so it was one quick sharpie sketch that got scanned and repeated many times. Here's the template sheet if you'd like to do this yourself. I left the jerseys blank so that you can draw your own numbers on them. Just click on the thumbnail below to get to the full resolution image that you can print out.



My kids are three and just turned five, so there was no need for us to make a full football team to play with. Even five a side seemed overkill, so we just made three footballers for each team. My three year old opted for the blue team and my five year old wanted to be the reds. They coloured in their players and then coloured the bases with permenent markers. I would have got them to paint the bases, only I don't think they would have had the patience to wait for them to dry in this situation.









Cut out and glued the soccer kids onto the posts and then we were ready for kick off





The football pitch was some goals made from lego and towels and blankets to stop the ball from rolling under the cooker or fridge. The ball was a 25c bouncy ball from the local taqueria, and we set up a score board on the front of the dishwaser with some magnets to keep score with.







I was very relieved when they enjoyed playing with the set up as much as they did. The salt dough bases were heavy enough to have a really good weebly not falling down thing going on, just like the real subbuteo players. Being bigger, the kids had to flick them with the whole of the back of their hand, rather than just a finger, but it was the right scale for preschoolers to really get into and not be frustrated with.





It would probably work just as well and look far neater if you used plaster of paris for the bases, but I don't know how well they would stand up to being bashed into each other. The salt dough is indestructable it seems.

I'm afraid the next post that I have lined up is about more football flavoured antics. I'll try and avoid teaching them the Fabrizio Ravanelli goal celebration manouvre of pulling your tshirt up over your face and running about with your arms in the air. My oldest did that for some weird reason when she was two and ran straight into a wall.

Pumpkin carving in the bath and with a power tool

That sounds safe doesn' it!

The kids were the ones in the bath and I was the one using the power tool though, so it's ok and you can put the phone down ;)

We got a couple of wee pumpkins for the kids to make jack o lanterns. They were very excited about scooping out the guts. I didn't have any newspaper to put down, and knew they would have fun getting as messy as possible and would need a bath afterwards, so I figured why no just do the whole thing in the bath anyway.

They thought it was funny to be sitting in the bath in swim suits scooping goop out of pumpkins too.

Once the pumpkins were emptied and the kids had had their bath, they drew faces on their pumpkins with perminent markers. Me and the hubbins carved out the shapes that they had drawn for them. They were very proud of their creations, and I love the wee little happy face that my three year old did on hers.

The night before halloween, one of our mates got us to carve a big pumpkin with another friend's face on it. This is the bit with the power tool. I used a proxxon to carve it out and made as insanely huge mess in the kitchen. I don't know what I was expecting to happen when I brought something rotating at a few thousand rpm in contact with a raw vegetable (it was lots of fun though). Next year I will either purchase a medical visor and wrap the whole room in cling wrap a la Dexter, or I will use lino cutting tools like this smart lass!

Toilet roll bat fun

This crafty doodad was inspired by two people who blog on the intertoobs. The body of the bat was made after seeing the gorgeous little halloween creatures made by Katie Steuernagle from Matsutake. Soooo flippin' cute!

By folding the bottom of the tube in the same way, but perpendicular to the top of the tube you get quite a nice bat body shape for hanging up.
The kids got nice and filthy with black paint, painting up the bat bodies... I think the bat wings were inspired by a card that was made on Makes and Takes a while back. They used some tissue paper to thread through a card to make bat wings, but we didn't have any black tissue paper, so we used black constructions paper. Folded it in half to cut the bottom of the wings into shape... Then concertina folded them up. I cut a couple of horizontal slits on either side of the bat bodies to thread the folded up wings through, and then unfolded them and curved forward the wings to make them nice and full looking. The tip of the top of each wing was folded back to give it a bit of a more batty shape. Red sticker eyes were stuck on and then they got hung up in our kitchen with the rest of the artwork for a few days. Batgirl loves them.
Until Halloween, when we took them out and hung them on the porch to frighten trick or treaters. They made the Happy Halloween sign themselves too and are very proud of it indeed!Because the bodies were made out of toilet roll tube, the ever resourceful hubster was able to put together a little circuit involving flashing LEDs and a battery pack to stuff inside. Voila! Spooky flashy red bat eyes!

If you fancy trying that part yourself then you can check it out on his blog Fangletronics.

I hope you all had a lovely halloween! I'm loving American halloweens. It's such a big holiday for the kids. Sorry to be posting some of our halloween crafts after the holiday, but we're always last minute with such things, and I know that if I don't put these things on the blog now, then I will have lost them by this time next year.