Kid artwork soft toy/cushions.

I've been meaning to do this project for a while because we still have a load of spare bed sheet left over from the kiddy glue batik project. It was a disastrously rainy day today and we had 8 kids over, so this seemed like the perfect time. They all got pretty into this project, boys and girls equally. Age ranges were 2 to 6 years old, but I bet kids up to 8 or 9 would enjoy it too. Lots of pictures for this post, so be patient.

I taped some ripped up bed sheet onto cut up cardboard (that we have a never ending stash of courtesy of Costco raids) to make kind of easy to draw on canvases that wouldn't let the pens bleed through onto other stuff. The kids then drew whatever they felt like onto the sheets with permanent markers (coloured sharpies). The four and six year olds did a great job drawing dinosaurs, trains, robots and all sorts, and the two year olds just had at it with scribbly patterns and a couple of smiley faces.

In the photos you can only see five of the kids that were over, because by the time we had all 8, I no longer had a spare hand to take a photo, especially with magic markers in the equation. Surprisingly no one drew on anything or anyone they weren't supposed to, so that's a good day right there!
Once they had finished their drawing, they tore off the tape and fabric and I pinned the pictures to a yellow bed sheet and cut them out and hemmed them with the sewing machine, leaving a small gap to turn them inside out. The kids then filled the toys/cushions with stuffing (this took quite some time, because it was also very fun just to play with the mountains of fluffy stuffing).

Finally I hand sewed up the hole for them and they took their little creations home. My four year old daughter still has hers left to finish, because she wanted to cover the whole canvas in intricate robot flower type things. All in all we managed 9 of these little toys and the kids were quite proud of them. They should wash without fading too I would have thought. I think a few might be going to grandparents this Christmas. I just wish I had got a photo of the dinosaur one, because it rocked so hard!

If I can get some cheap white pillow cases from Goodwill then I'll let my girls do one of those each too at some point. Maybe I can get them to make their own Christmas stockings this way.

Preschooler sewing kit

You've probably noticed from the previous post that I enjoy sewing. Well, the kids always want to "help" or join in, so usually any sewing I do has to wait until they are in bed. I just figured out putting together a little kit for them to sew along with me. They are only just four, and two and a half, so I'm not at all prepared to give them needles, even the larger plastic ones I have for my knitting, because they have an extraordinary ability to do illogical things with the wrong tools that would test even the most robust health insurance.

With that in mind I cobbled together a load of stuff that they could sew/weave, without maiming themselves or each other. Lots of this stuff was found in Goodwill and Savers, but a lot was also random stuff from around the house. The lovely wooden teddy/fish/dog threading panels were a present from one of our friends back in the UK. The plastic punnets that you get berries in work well too for weaving and a random odd jelly shoe (no idea where the other one got to). Bits of rags, shoe laces, ribbons, pipe cleaners. It all fits nicely in the plastic tote, that can also be woven (50c from Goodwill! I love Goodwill).

It's been a big hit and a really really cheap present for them that they can play with together. I was going to save it for Christmas, but we've had 2 weeks of illness in our house and quiet time play things were badly needed.

Hawaiian shirt dress

I guess this isn't really a kid craft, but it is a gift for my girls and it's a craft and it's recycling, so to some extent it belongs here.

I saw a lovely little tutorial showing the cutest toddler dress made from a man's button up shirt. My husband had an old hawaiian shirt lurking in the closet that hadn't got any time in the sun for quite a while, so I decided to masacre that.

The dress I ended up with wasn't quite the same as the one in the tutorial, but my youngest daughter thinks it's great and you can see a few pics of her busting a groove to Harry Belafonte in it below. Click to see it bigger.

I just took off the sleeves and collar, used the yolk of the shirt as the chest panel like in the original tutorial and the button front as the back of the dress, then cut down and reatached the sleeves and added a couple of cute little straps made from the bottom part of the shirt. Oh, and I repositioned the pocket, so it was on the front of the dress. My kids love pockets on things!

I think I'll be making a few more of these, possibly for Christmas presents, because the local goodwill has an abundance of really cool patterned Hawaiian shirts. Next project is to make a couple of Thomas the tank engine skirts out of a bedsheet, because I'm fed up of all the clothes with the characters my girls like being only for boys!

Pirate-superhero-mermaid colouring pages

As part of the lead up to the party for my now 4 year old I drew some pictures for her and her little friends to colour in. The first one was a picture of what a pirate-superhero-mermaid looks like, because, let's face it, it's an unusual birthday party theme and I thought the other kids might get thier heads around my daughter's notion a little more whole heartedly with some visual aid. I posted the digitally coloured version in one of my previous posts (yep, she's got pink hair like I used to have back in uni)

The second image was a map of pirate-mermaid-superhero island, which was a fantasy representation of the play park that we were holding the party at. We hid the treasure in the hollow part of the tree at the park and the kids followed the map from the play structure that we made into a pirate ship with cardboard, to the batcave (tent full of dressing up clothes), to the captain's table (picnic table with snack food), to the picnic villages (blankets for eating picnic food on), to the mermaid rocks (benches at the top end of the park), to the tree at the very top of the park. The whirlpool at the bottom of the map is actually a really big storm drain that the kids always want to go and peer into and poke at with sticks.

So click on the little images of the colouring pages to view the full size versions and feel free to print them out for your kids to colour too. The sidekick flying pirate starfish is called Aaaarrrg by the way.


























This is what the batcave looked like...



and this is what the pirate ship play structure looked like...

By the way, if you are after some really awesome free colouring pages then have a look at the ones on Louise Elliot's site. She sells printed cloth kits of her own elaborately patterned designs for soft toys and rag dolls. She offers free downloads of colouring pages featuring her animal designs, which are beautiful and my 4 year old has had a lot of fun with them already. Here is the last one she coloured from Louise's site...

Soda bottle fish

Or fizzy pop bottle fish if you're from where I'm from. We made about 12 of these over the month leading up to my older daughter's pirate-superhero-mermaid party. I had to cut the fish out of the bottles with a pair of large scissors and an exacto knife, but the kids all got to paint and decorate them together to make a mermaid tropical lagoon under the play structure bridge at the park.

Here's a photo showing how I cut up the big 2 litre soda bottles (I raided friends recycling bins again for this project, so thank you to anyone that helped source all the pop bottles for me). I tried making a couple of fish out of smaller bottles, but they just didn't work quite as well and it was nice for the preschoolers to have a big bottle fish as a canvas, rather than something smaller and more fiddly anyway.

Simply cut the neck of the bottle out to make the fish mouth. I then glued one of those little paper condiment cups into the hole to make cute little fish lips. Cut the bottom off the bottle and then squash the sides flat onto each other to cut out the tail and fins. Use a couple of bits of tape to hold the tail together.

I cut out a load of construction paper into scale shapes and the kids glued them on, some very tidily and some willy nilly, but when they were all done they made a very cute reef full.

Here's the lagoon under the play structure with the spent piniata.

My kids loved the fact that they looked like the fish out of the book "Rainbow Fish", which is one of thier favourites.

Milk Jug trick or treat pumpkin pots

We did a craft a little while ago using plastic gallon milk jugs that I haven't blogged about yet (it's on it's way though), and we found ourselves with several left over jugs that friends had rescued from thier recycling for us. These, I thought, might make freaky looking Jack O lanterns.

We painted up four of them because I had two of my little girl's friends over at the time. The kids used orange acrylic paint, which I was worried might be a bit harder than the usual kiddy paint to clean up, but it was ok and in the end it was lucky that we did because it looks like trick or treating is going to be a bit rainy tonight.

Once the milk jugs were dry I cut a hole in the back by the handle for the treats to go in and gave the kids some white glue and a load of random bits of stuff we had around to turn thm into jack o lanterns. We had some green pipecleaners, some leaf shapes, I cut out from black eyes and mouths and some green tissue paper wrapped over the lids.

They look kind of cool with torches in them too.

My girls used them this morning at thier preschool halloween parade and they are going to use them again tonight.

Jello Boats

I wanted to Say Jelly Boats, but well, when in Rome and all that.

This one is in honour (with a u because she's British) of my mate Alice. She made this totally fab dessert for my 30th birthday party. I gave it a whirl for our local community halloween potluck party.

Destructions:

1) Cut oranges in half and scoop out the guts. Fill the orange halves with jello and pop in the fridge to set.

2) Alice used wooden coctail sticks for the masts on her boats, but I didn't have any, so I cut some weeny little red drinking straws in half.

3) I printed out a page of mini jolly roger flags to glue on top and then just skewered a triange of white paper for the sails.

4) When the jello has totally set, cut each orange half in half again and pop a mast and flag in each.

Yay! Beware of the aftermath though. You may need several wet wipes, or a cage and a hose.

...and now make your family drink nothing but fresh orange juice until it starts coming out of thier ears.

Paper Pirate Swords

A while ago I figured out how to make cute little rapier type swords from rolled up tubes of newspaper. I added the revelation to the bottom of another blog post here. Well, we whipped up a few of them for the pirate-superhero-mermaid party.

Each sword is two sheets of newspaper rolled up on the diagonal and folded over and taped to make the handle, then an oval of cardboard for the hilt and a couple of strips of cardboard wrapped around the bottom of the blade and taped to keep the hilt on. I had about half a can of white spray paint and a tiny amount of silver spray paint left over from another project, so I sprayed the swords with what was left to cover up the newsprint a bit. They weren't exactly silver, but none of the kids seemed to care. I decorated each of the hilts a little differently with a silver marker pen.

The kids had a whale of a time with the swords and no one was hurt at all at the party. Paul was somewhat picked on, but he's a big boy and at 32 I think he could handle it. I love the picture of him on the phone trying to give one of our mates directions to the park we were at, whilst fending off a hoard of pirate mermaid superheros!

Homemade non violent piniata

Piniatas are very popular at birthday parties around here and my oldest daughter was keen to have one at her party, but based on past experience, when you have multiple kids and only one wiffle bat and piniata it's hard to keep everyone unmaimed.

I had a look for a pirate/mermaid/superhero themed pull string piniata at our local store, but all the ones with the right theme were the beat the living hell out of it variety, so I made one the night before the party instead.

There was no time for papier mache nonsense, so the body of the treasure chest was made from turning a big big multibag cereal box inside out. Then I attached another bit of cardboard to form the curved lid. The pull string mechanism was cobbled together from a polystyrene plate and the plastic lid of a coffee cup. You can kind of see from the pictures how it's put together.

I cut a hole in the plate, big enough that the cup lid would sit in it snugly, then tied the "winning string" onto the spoon hole of the lid, then threaded it around the plate and back through the spoon hole. All the other strings were taped loosly to the outside of the plate and fed through the spoon hole too, so that only the winning string would pull the plate out and leave a big hole in the bottom of the piniata for the presents to fall out of.

Paul and Jessen had the lovely idea on the day of tying the piniata to the top of the slide, so each kid could choose a string, hold onto it and slide down the slide to pull it, then the winning string made all the sweets and toys cascade down the slide too. Lots of fun!

Milk jug bat masks

My blog posts have been a bit higgldy piggldy this month. You see, we made a family trip back to the homeland (UK), but now we're back in the US and have come to terms with the jetlag, so I have gradually been getting my act together to post about some of the things we did for my now four year old's birthday party that we had a couple of days before we left for the UK.

You might remember from a previous post that the chosen theme was "pirate-mermaid-superhero", or as was pointed out by a mate of mine "PMS". Nice.

So, as part of the superhero bit we made a few batman type masks for the kids to wear. I've seen lots of masks made from plastic gallon milk containers about on the web, but it crossed my mind that if I incorporated the sides of the container and folded them up on themselves then they would make nifty bat ears, so after pestering freinds to save thier milk containers for me, I cut out a load with an exacto knife and then sprayed them black with some plastic spray paint. A bit of elastic to hold them on and Voila!