Talk Like a Pirate Day Printable

Hello again! Dust is settling around us as we unpack our shipping here on the UK side of the Atlantic. It was a busy couple of months, but we're just about catching our breath now, and although everything isn't exactly unpacked or even in the room that it should be in, we are somewhat settled. More on all that later though. Right now I'm popping in to give you a link over to a post I just wrote on Alpha Mom for "Talk Like a Pirate Day", which is supposed to be September 19th, but really, honestly, any day is a good day for pretending to be a pirate, right?

I put together this single page printable that you can colour and cut out to dress up your soft toys and give them some piratitude. Ffi and Carys had a lot of fun dressing up their toys and Del had a lot of fun undressing them and sticking the eye patches on her legs (whatever floats your boat matey).

There are also instructions on how to make the nifty little removable pirate hook hand covers for your toys too, so, pop on over to the post (here is the link), download the free printable and have half the toys set sail in the laundry basket with some pillow case sails! It's available as an A4 size or letter size download for ease of printing by pirates from all corners of the seven seas.

Nothing says piratitude quite like a one eyed, golden toothed, bearded Pikachu brandishing a cutlass! Yaaaarrrrrr!!!

If you're interested in more piratey posts that I've done, these are from Talk Like a Pirate Day 2011 and 2010.

Make your own cloth pirate maps.

Pirate girl bandana shirt and rolled newspaper swords.

Transatlanic mayhem

Oh my goodness me! So much I wanted to find the time to post about, but long story short- we're moving our family from California back to the UK this week! So so so much to sort out. We've been planning the move for nearly two months, but well, it turns out if you've been living in the same house for nearly seven years and you have the same sort of making stuff out of things lifestyle that we do, then there is a whooooole lot of sorting out that needs to be done before you can emigrate. I've been a little wild eyed and panicky the last couple of weeks and have been making a few too many jokes about throwing everything out on the lawn and setting fire to it, but as we get closer to the day we fly, it is actually coming together thank goodness!

There's been garage sales with friends and lemonade stands:

There's been plenty put on Craigslist. After a year of taking photos of Del in our rocking chair, we sold that a couple of days ago too.

There's been a lot of stuff to donate too. We're in luck that not far from us in San Francisco there is a fabulous school that does a lot of this open ended making and inventing and experimenting malarky with their students, so we've been up there with a couple of car loads (another couple to go this week too). Brightworks has been open for a year now and I hope they will grow and grow and allow many many more children to have this sort of experience, because it's lacking in the world today. Makes me happy to know that our tools and glue guns and soldering irons and low tech light table and paper and all manner of other makey things will be used and enjoyed some more by children. Here are the big 'uns enjoying the creations made by last week's group at Brightworks, when we popped in at the end of the day to drop things off. It was lovely to have Ellen and Justine be as excited about things like our elderly leaf blower as we were when we first picked it up at a garage sale and thought "Yes! Giant Bernoulli effect demo with a soccer ball!" Back to ping pong balls and hair dryers for us!

If you want to see more of what the kids at Brightworks get up to, Josh writes a blog daily for them with lots of great photos. They were building a harmonograph last week! Harmonographs are cool! We gave them the weights from ours, but their set up is much bigger and capable of more degrees of freedom, like the one at the Exploratorium. I'm kind of hoping that it will still be up when we call back next week to drop off the last of our tools and things.

So, things are winding down here. I'll still be posting here on Filth Wizardry in the future and I'll still be writing posts over at Alphamom.com every month once we get settled, but for the next few weeks we're going to be hopping about and kind of nomadic while we get rid of the last of our belongings here and then attempt to re-accumulate the important ones on the other side of the Atlantic. Oooh, and for those of you that are interested... After several years of staying up and being lovely and colouful, the tissue paper stained glass window came down really fast and easily without leaving any mess or damage to the window. Yay! Here's a pic I took with it all half peeled off. It was sad to see it go, but the peeling was fast and fun to do.

The kids dug up the purple potatoes yesterday and washed them off. I took apart the planter we made and painted, and the kid's lovely kindergarten teacher (who we will miss very much) has adopted the strawberry plants. Our neighbour took the twelve bags of soil over to his place for more veggie growing, so even in this rush and chaos it feels nice to have this community of help and mutual benefit surrounding us, with very little going to waste. Even the giant geoboard was taken in by my oldest's second grade teacher :)

 

What else, what else? Oh yes, totally awesome accidental timing on our part, but we are arriving in Manchester only a few days before they are holding a Manchester Mini Maker Faire! Yippie! Will we see any of you UK peeps there? It's Freeeeeee! My favourite price! I'm sad that we will unlikely get to all go to the Bay Area Maker Faire again any time soon though. We had such fun there the last three years. The kids were excited about it for weeks before hand this year.

Right, baby is awake and I've got to do more packing! There's so much more that I want to share. Maybe I will have time to write more when we're back in Wales and still living out of suitcases before any shipping arrives. Hope you're all having a good summer!

Coffee Cup Sleeve printable for your Teacher

It's nearly the end of the school year here in our bit of California. The kids actually only have three days left of school, which is shocking to me. I'm sure it was last week that Ffion went off to her first day of kindergarten with her "writing arm" in a plaster cast. Here we are though, on the brink of the summer vacations (this year's is going to be a pretty epic and challenging one for our family, but that's for another post). I just wanted to share with you the printable that I made last week to personalize the kid's teacher's gift cards that we got them.

The teachers that my girls have had so far have all been fanbloodytastic. Really really lovely people with a genuine passion and drive for what they do. The kids don't get the issues like the chronic lack of funding and curriculum difficulties, but they can feel the dedication these teachers have and boy do they love them for it! The last couple of years I've knitted something for the teachers, but this year time has been tight (plus all knitting has been directed towards friends and family that have been relentlessly making tiny people that all need cardigans damnit!). So this year for each teacher I got them a Starbucks gift card and made this "Top Teacher" print out sleeve to cover a take out coffee cup that we put the gift card in. Pretty simple, but both teachers this year love Starbucks, so everyone's a winner baby!

If you'd like to do the same, you can find the printable download (for free of course) over at Alpha Mom, here.

I also wanted to let you know that the bloke I am affiliated with has written the post he's been meaning to for ages over on his own blog, that shows the birthday present he made for Ffion this year. (he wrote about the house he made for Carys last year here).

In other news... Delyth started walking and is all over the place and into everything. It's very very cute but she's really keeping me on my toes here. I had to tape some wood to the bottom of the ladder to the kid's loft bed yesterday to stop her trying to climb it! No sitting still for pictures any longer.

Back to explain our summer plans when I get a mo :)

A new Easter hunt challenge

I know this is a little late to be of use to anyone for this year, but given that I have the template files to hand from making these on Friday night, I should post them before I either loose them to the depths of my hard drive file structure, or just forget to blog about them altogether when Easter comes around next year. If I'm still around and posting this time next year then I'll try and remember to link to this again to remind folk that it's here.

I've written about how we do egg hunts here before, and we did that again this year, but we added another game into the mix at the last minute. My friend Jennifer had got all the kids a chocolate Peter Rabbit each, so the plan was to have them "earn it". I wanted to sort out some kind of challenge that they could complete in their own time. I had seven kids doing this that were between six and nine years old and I only had the idea to do it the night before, so had to make the answer sheets and bunny clues rather hurredly.

I've drawn these little bunnies in this specific way since I was a kid, and I used to draw them exploding up into the air as if they were farting themselves off the ground like this...

That's how mature I am, and they made my mum giggle, so of course I kept doing it!

I decided to chunk up my "classic bunny" to give enough space to put the challenge clues on his tummy, and remove his signature propulsion system to make little rabbit markers that could be "hidden" around the garden for the kids to find and collect clues from.

The clues I came up with were to have each rabbit have a "clue letter" that you would have to write down next to the rabbit's number to spell out a password to get your chocolate bunny. To make it a bit tougher for the older kids, so that they couldn't just find a few rabbits and then guess the rest of the letters to complete the password, I also put a different famous rabbit on each marker that they had to make a note of next to that marker's number too.

Being extra fancy like we are around here, I used some little bulldog clips to attach the answer sheets to some hard backed kids books we had on the shelf and then used a bit of yarn to tie a pen to each, so that the kids would find it easier to go around gathering and writing the clues down.

The kids did a grand job on this challenge. Everyone completed it and got their chocolate bunny within about 20 minutes, which worked out really nicely. They had twelve bunny markers to find and the twelve "clue letters" when put together spelled out the prize password: "Hot Cross Buns".

If you wanted to make this easier then you could omit the extra step of having to name each rabbit found, or to make it harder you could have the code letters not be in order and they would have to figure out the password like an anagram puzzle at the end. Lots of ways of tailoring this to fit your crowd.

Leave it to Paul to hide eggs in a tree...

I've put a few printables here for you in case they turn out to be useful for someone next year. The first three are print outs of the markers I made for the hunt (they were cut out and taped to popsicle sticks to stick in the ground). I've removed the clues we used so that you can make your own hunt the way that you want it to be. Just click on the thumbnails to get the larger version to print.

Next is the answer sheet for the kids to fill in. The code letter boxes are coloured the same as the rabbits they go with so that the kids can more easily see which is which when reading across from the numbers. Two of these answer sheets fit on one US letter sized piece of paper.

Lastly, I threw together a page of smaller, plain, uncoloured, and unlabelled bunnies in case anyone wanted to use them as gift tags or use them to cut out and make into a card game somehow, like a matching game or something, or just let your kids colour them. Just thought that might be useful.

We had some seriously nice weather for this, which was lucky timing because it's due to start pouring down again tomorrow. Went on a wander with the family later in the day and found the world's best field of daisies for making head dresses with!

Also, I am happy to report that a couple of years later and they are still happily rocking the superhero ponchos I made them and blogged about way back here.

 

If you've got any of your plastic eggs left over then you might want to make some toadstools with them like these,

Or use them to make R2D2 secret storage boxes, or hang on to them because I have another craft that I want to post about that we did with them too.

Hope you all had a lovely weekend too and that this post might be useful for Easter time next year :)

Tooth Fairy Fun

Squeee! My first kid lost her first baby tooth, and has her first gigantic horse sized adult tooth in her tiny mouth! So I haven't posted the two Easter/Spring type posts I meant to this week because after the kids went to sleep I was instead forging correspondence from the tooth fairy. Kiddo decided she wanted to try and scam the tooth fairy into letting her keep the tooth, but still give her money, because she said "The thing is, I just really don't want to not have my tooth anymore". In response to that letter, she found this letter that I typed up and printed out all teensy weensy...

The next night she left this letter and her teensy tooth for the tooth fairy...

So, I forged another letter from Sparkle Fangs and left it with her $1.02 (an amount suggested by one of my friend's children as a fair price for a baby tooth) If you click on the image you should be able to see it large enough to read...

The dollar bill I folded into a little basket to hold the note, the two cents and some glitter. I used this really nice and easy to follow video instruction I found on Youtube.

I'm looking forward to trying more dollar bill origami as more of the kid's baby teeth gradually fall out. This one to make a ring looks cool.

Maybe they could each have their own tooth fairy from Tooth Traders Inc assigned to them. Not sure how I'm going to top Sparkle Fangs though. Ffion will want a girly named fairy for sure. Enamelina? Flouridella?

Both the older girls (who are now six and seven) are quite excited by it all and are keen to lose more teeth so they can write to the tooth fairy again. They did almost bust me though. Carys said "I think maybe you wrote the letter mum", but then when I showed her my smallest hand writing, she was all "Wow, you can't write that tiny at all, so it couldn't be you". Mwah haha haaa! Also, the tooth fairy can only seem to write upper case letter Rs. (and can't spell the word ballast). I wonder if she finished fairy high school? Maybe she just needs a good night's sleep ;)

In other news, the littlest poppet is now nine months old and still no teeth! We were wondering if her first one would make it's appearance as soon as her biggest sister lost her first one, just like Junie B Jones and her brother Ollie had happen, but nope, she's still all gummy and yummy.