Chalk and water painting

This happens a lot at our house. The kids never seem top get bored with it. We just keep running out of chalk. I had a delve through my photos and found pics from a few different occasions that we'd done this to post.

All you need to do is wet the floor outside (we have a concrete yard, which is great for this) and then give the kids some sidewalk chalk and some brushes. The colours are so vibrant when the chalk is wet that the kids just love it and it washes off with a quick hose down so easily.

It's a good way to teach colour mixing too. Letting them create blobs of colour next to each other and then using the brush to mix them on the floor.
We are super classy here and my kids love to splash about and paint each other with watercolour blocks in an under the bed storage box. I did briefly entertain the idea of getting an inflatable paddling pool until I realised that it would last approximately five minutes after the two hours that I would spend inflating it, and they are more than happy with the storage boxes anyway (we actually had eight kids playing in and around two of these boxes full of water today with the chalk).MaryAnne of Thrifty craft mama posted about using these storage boxes with the lid as a dinky and thrifty sand pit, so we got ourselves set up for the summer with one of those this weekend too. It's great! I chucked in a load of treasure (beads) and a couple of seives and the kids are happy as Larry. Hopefully the lid will prevent the local cats from leaving us their little bum trinkets. I just have to remember to put the lid on it now. This I suspect is the weak link in the plan.

Underpants pockets

Well, here it is. This is the post that will determine whether you think I am resourceful or nuttier than squirrel poo.

So, my youngest, who turned three about a month ago has some very cute 2 year old underpants that we can no longer crobar her butt into. Nice, not very worn out Dora the Explorer ones, so obviously no one is going to want used underwear, so I thought it might be kinda fun to cut the character panels off the fronts of them and sew them onto dresses as little pockets.

I've said before that my kids just love to have pockets on their clothes. There are just too many things, small things of great importance that must be stashed about oneself you see. There has to be a place to keep the polly pocket hat while you are rollerskating and a place to hide the last candy corn from your sister and a way to make sure your mum is always accidentally laundering crayons and tissues and small rocks and beads and rubber butterflies and real snails. Urgh, anyway...

Here's the wee one in a dress we got for free because it was ripped (easy to fix though) with a little pants-pocket and pants-applique. She likes them. I like them too.

House rule, number four thousand and eighty two: The pants pocket can only be worn by the original owner of the pants.

House rule, number four thousand and eighty three: It is not cool to shout out at people in the supermarket "Look at my pants!", even if you are ridiculously excited about their new pantspocketness.

Tea towel shorts

Dollar Store Crafts posted a link to the tea towel skirts from a few days ago along with a tutorial on making baby shorts from a tea towel. I mentioned at the bottom of the skirt post that I'd like to try making some bloomer/shorts, but I've always been a little afraid of sewing patterns. I adapted the dollar store craft pattern to allow the back to be a bit more roomy than the front of the shorts (bigger section cut from part of the tea towel that's going to be the butt seam). Below you can see the tea towel cut and ready to sew.

I sewed each of the two pieces up along where the inside leg seam was and then pinned and sewed the two pieces together along the one seam that runs from the front, under the crotch and up the back of the shorts. All this was hand sewed, because I love being able to listen to music or watch tv late at night at the same time, without the noise of the machine, and I like being able to finish it all by hand in a way that leaves no raw edges on the inside of the pants (I don't own a surger). The last thing to do was sew the hem of the waist over and thread the elastic through for the boingy waist band.

Here's the little lady looking rather pleased with her shorts. She's a tall 4T and I reckon these shorts would be fine up to about 6T if you made the waist band a bit looser. The author at Dollar Store crafts mentioned that her shorts turned out a little too small for her two year old and were more suited to a one year old or infant, but I think these tea towels were bigger. They measured 20 inches wide by 26 inches long.Now I have to get the wee lass (3 years old) to choose the colour she wants her shorts to be out of the other three matching dollar store tea towels I picked up. I think I'll also sew some cutey applique designs on one of the legs of each pair when I'm done making them too. I love how cheap it's turning out to be to get a nice stash of summer cotton skirts and shorts ready!

Plasticine monsters

I've still got a load of those boggly eyes that we've been playing with and the kids have not grown tired of sticking them on absolutely everything yet, so today we made some plasticine monsters and stuck varying numbers of eyes all over them.

I think it was somewhat an ode to the 1980s TV show Trap Door, that I secretly still love.

My three year old made lots of cyclops worm beasts and skewered them like coctail sausages and my four year old made a hunormous splatty two dimensional dude with lots of eyes and what looks like a rare skin complaint.

I helped them make other monsters that they took apart and reassembled in various weird and wonderful ways. All in all it was rather fun and I could shove it all in a tupperware container for us to play with again another time. Maybe when they are older we can have some fun doing real claymation!

UPDATE.

The kids asked to do this again the next day when their friends were over, so we did and they made lots more funny little dudes.

Tea towel skirts

I saw a post on Dollar Store Crafts about how to make a skirt for your littlies out of a tea towel. The tutorial is from Grace Violet. The dollar store near our house had some cute tea towels that were 100% cotton and really soft, so I picked up two that were the same design but different colours (my kids aren't fond of identical clothing, but like wearing stuff that's similar if that makes any sense) and then sat down yesterday evening to hand sew them whilst watching a movie. I didn't cut down the sides like in the tutorial for the smaller skirt, because my kids are 3 and 4.

Just cut the tea towel in half, then sew the two pieces together into a big cylinder and sew over the raw edge at the top so that you can thread elastic through. Easy peasy.

They were really quick to do and the elastic was from the dollar store too, so they worked out at only $1.50 each. The kids have worn them all day and love the little pockets on them (which came from a mystery bag of sewing odds and ends from a garage sale). Here are my daughters being loony in them. Highly recommend giving these a shot, even if you're like me and are sewing pattern phobic ;) I want to get some more to make gifts and also try and make some bloomer/shorts, but that's getting dangerously close to requiring a pattern ;)

Aluminium foil solar system

My kids and a few of their freinds got to go to a short community science class for preschoolers a little while ago. Part of the class was learning a little about the the solar system. My older daughter was really intrigued. She also loves to look at the pictures in one of my old uni books "the dynamic universe", so while the ideas were fresh in their minds I thought we'd use it to add more clutter, ahem, I mean decoration to our walls.

Unfortunately I didn't have custody of the camera the afternoon that we made the planets, so I can't show you any pics of us doing that. It was pretty straightforward though. I just cut a load of circles out of card and covered them in aluminium foil. I drew a few features on some of the planets, like land on the earth and the red eye on Jupiter, then the kids picked a planet and got colouring with sharpies. While they were colouring we talked about the solar system. It was cute that each kid kind of felt ownership over the planet they coloured. The five year old was very pleased that he got Jupiter, because it was the 5th planet and it was also the biggest, just like him! We also did a section of the sun.

The relative sizes are not accurate unfortunately, because I wanted to the kids to be able to handle all the planets but not have to have something loony like a Jupiter that touched the ceiling. You can tell what order the sizes go in, but really it was all down to what sized plates I happened to have, because I couldn't find a compass. It would be fun to do a more accurate version with older kids to get the scale concept across and maybe cover the various satalites the planets have too. Here are some great pictures to show you what I mean about the relative sizes. Warning, this link will make you feel very small indeed!

The next day when everyone was over again, we pinned up some black material and the kids stuck on the planets in order with double sided tape and we set about labelling them. I cut out a load of irregular white shapes and they glued on the asteroid belt. They stuck on a load of stars on the background too and we talked about how they were really huge and lots of them were bigger than the sun, but they looked tiny because they were so far away.

It seems that in the class they went to the teacher must have got a load of older sticker sets cheap, because they were all asking "where is pluto?", so I went and found a small circle sticker and we labelled wee Pluto as a dwarf planet to keep the peace. Everyone thought the term "Gas Giants" was hilarious.

The stickers we used to label everything started to peel off really quickly, so I got the four and five year olds to write new planet labels and we taped those on with packing tape instead.

I love how the aluminium foil texture and reflectiveness makes the planets look almost luminous. Sorry the photos are all from a strange angle, it's just it's up in our narrow corridoor!