Cheapskate cardboard canvas wall display

I know I only just mentioned a couple of posts ago that we still have our leaf rubbing mural from 2009 up in the kitchen, and really this is the right season to have it there too I suppose, but for some reason the urge struck yesterday to change things up a little. Maybe it's because it's getting darker and gloomier out and we are craving a bit of extra vibrance around the house, who knows. It had been a good few weeks since we'd got out the pots of sloppy paint too, and that was a travesty that needed to be put right.

I've got a few of these corrugated sheets of cardboard from inbetween the pallettes of toilet roll at Costco. Actually, I've always got at least a few of these handy, but shhhhhh. We needed something big to fill the white wall space above our kitchen table, so rather than getting the girls to collaborate on one big piece, I thought we'd try a lot of smaller "canvases" that could be put together to make a larger one.

I've always loved seeing posts that other people do where they use proper artists canvases and let their kids paint them and give them to grandparents as gifts or put them up in their own homes, but several factors have meant that we've not gone that route ourselves. Firstly, those lovely stretched canvases are kind of expensive, even if you get them on offer, and especially the larger ones! Secondly, we rent and so putting lots of holes in the walls to hang big things is not really going to happen. Thirdly, and I think this is really the biggest reason, but maybe it's all in my head, is that it seems like a lot of pressure to put on someone. Giving them a canvas. A proper big blank artist's canvas, and saying "go for it. Paint whatever you like". I would have been frozen as a child, torn as to what I should paint, worried that I only had the one canvas and didn't want to waste my chance or mess up what I decided to paint. I think I'd be somewhat like that now as an adult too if you gave me a nice big proper canvas and said I could use it to paint something big for our home.

In an effort to get the effect of having canvases hanging rather than the paper taped to the wall that we've been doing up until now, but not have the kids feel any pressure or have to spend any money, I decided to chop up some of that corrugated cardboard and cover it with butcher block paper for them to paint.

Because we had seven canvases that were all going to be displayed together, I asked the kids if they could explore with colours and shapes, rather than painting people or objects. They were really open to the idea of just playing with the paint, rather than trying to make a representation of something. Honestly, I was expecting a bit more of a push back against the idea of going abstract on this project because both girls are heavily into drawing comic books at the moment, but they always surprise me with the varied directions their enthusiasm allows us to go.

We had a couple of hours in the back yard before the sun packed up for the day and happily, the bairn was very contented to sit and watch her sisters paint, which meant I got a few photos.

Paint, shoot a bow and arrow, go back to painting, it's the creative process right?

Today I put the paintings together to go on the wall by taping two lengths of string to the back of each column of canvasses and tying the strings together at the top. I hung each of the three columns on a single thumb tack, which meant we have this large display with just three teensy thumb tack holes high up on the wall. The cardboard and paper was light enough that we could have hung more from a single thumb tack if we'd wanted to. If our home had stairs then I'd really want to use this method to have artwork all up the stairs.

I have a feeling I'll be making a lot more of these "canvases" in the future, because the children got a kick out of being presented with the various sizes and dimensions to work on, and they could really be free and uninhibited with their painting, because they could see that we could make more easily and very quickly so they could just keep going with it until they felt done. The hallway is likely to get a similar treatment soon I think.

The bright colours in our kitchen came at just the right time, because today was so rotten and rainy and dark that we had to have the lights on in the house ALL DAY! Blergh. I've talked about some of the abstract paintings that the kids have done in the past:

One post about easle painting here
and another one here.

My oldest daughter was especially prolific with these, and I think I was missing the ones we used to have up in the kitchen. They are very proud of how it all looks hanging up like this.

Halloween 2011 chuckles

I wanted to post a couple of photos of our Halloween antics for you, because I'd mentioned plans to make costumes that the kids had requested and also I wanted to show you the decorations they helped to make for the front yard.

I think maybe I'm an unorganised blogger, because often our seasonal projects are very last minute and I don't get to post about them until after the holiday is over, so too late for readers to really do anything with the idea other than bookmark it for next year if they like it, but in my defence, I do try and do a round up of previous year's antics before the holiday, so I'll likely mention anything we did this year for Halloween, just before Halloween 2012. We were so last minute with our yard decorating that it got done on the afternoon of Halloween itself. We enjoyed the frantic putting it together though and the girls thought it was really funny.

So, I ended up making Carys the Ms Frizzle costume that she had requested, but like I usually do, I left it until the night before, so I was up quite late trying to make the dress. I used an old kid's white shirt and a white knitted dollar tree earwarmer/headband thing for the cuffs of the dress. I would have used the shirt cuffs, but it was a VERY old shirt and the cuffs were too small! The material I got for it was outerspace themed cotton print that I think was likely quilting material. It worked really well though and I sewed some satin type quilt binding around the bottom of the dress. To make the pattern for the dress I used a shirt dress that fitted Carys and just approximated the pattern pieces from that. One thing that was very helpful though was a post by LiEr over at Ikatbag, showing how to adapt a sleeve pattern piece to varying styles of sleeve, whilst making sure that it's still going to fit well. Thank you LiEr! By following her advice I was able to make the slightly puffed top sleeves that Ms Frizzle wears. Very clear tutorial that even me at stupid o'clock at night could follow :)

Kiddo wore a tutu under the dress to make it nice and full and we glued a sun and moon cardboard decoration to her dress up shoes. The finishing touch was just luck really. The local thrift store happened to have a really ratty looking auburn wig for $2, but after a bit of a clean and brush I was able to tie it back into a Ms Frizzle style hairdo and her costume was complete. It nearly didn't work at all when I realised that I hadn't taken into account if the dress would actually fit over her head with the buttons undone, but a tab of velcro on the front placket of the dress fixed that. Phew.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that Ffion had decided to be Rapunzel, which was really easy because there was a princess dress at the same thrift store that we got the wig from for just $3, so all I had to do was shorten it a bit and make her a fake frying pan out of foam sheets from some of computer packaging and a roll of black craft from from the dollar tree. Yay hot glue funtime!

I also talked about the idea of dressing Delyth up as a lizard to be either Pascal to Ffion's Rapunzel, or Liz to Carys's Ms Frizzle, and a couple of readers gave some excellent suggestions as to how we could pull that off, but, well, we saw a frog costume at the thrift store and it was very cute and snuggly and only $3, so we figured it was close enough and she was lovely and cosy in it while we trick or treated.

The thank you cards that we made from Carys's drawing were a big hit with our neighbours and Carys did enjoy giving them out almost as much as she enjoyed the candy that they gave her, so we'll definitely be doing that again next year!

Now for the last minute yard decorating. My kids caught the bug for the game "Plants vs Zombies" from some friends of theirs a while ago. They dont' really do much in the way of computer games, but this one really caught their attention and I kind of like it because it's funny and silly but does involve a bit of strategy and a bit of math. Our front yard is in a similar style to the one in the game, so for Halloween the kids wanted to decorate it with the plants and gravestones from the game. I just grabbed a few of the polystyrene gravestones from the dollar store to use and then I drew out some of the plants and the kids coloured them in. We taped a BBQ skewer to the back of each one to stand it up in the lawn.

Last touch was a zombie mask that Ffion was insistant must be a girl zombie, so she could reinact the game. I'd love to have gone all out with this and made more masks and more plants and maybe even a cut out of Crazy Dave to go on our porch, but we just had enough time to get those few bits done and that was enough to please the kids.

By the time we were done with all the sewing and chopping up paper and cardboard, the kitchen looked like someone had thrown a grenade onto the set of Project Runway, but it all worked out in the end. I've been pretty lucky so far with the kid's requests for Halloween costumes. The last two years only one kid has asked for a costume that you can't find an approximation of at a thrift store.

Last year Carys wanted to be Darth Vader, which was great because a mate of mine had a costume from her son and it was Ffion that needed the custom approach because she was hell bent on being Cindy Lauper from the music video of "Hey Now". Given my habit of leaving everything until the last minute, I'll be in big trouble if they ever decide to both ask for something awkward one year. I know I'm not the only one that gets unusual requests for Halloween costumes, because this year a reader wrote to me about her son wanting to dress up as a chair. Hooray for kids with oodles of imagination! Have any of you had to accomodate unorthodox costume requests? I'd love to hear about them if you have.

Hope you all had a lovely Halloween!

Trick or treat thank you cards

Just a quick fly by post today. I have a lot of sewing and drawing and cutting out to do this afternoon! I've talked before about how we try to give something in return for the treats that we get at Halloween, just to offset the feeling of trick or treating being a grabathon. In past years we've taken cookies around with us to give to neighbours along our trick or treat route, but this year Carys wanted to make them a Happy Halloween card, so she drew this spooky picture and I scanned and shrunk it for her so that we could print out four little thank you cards to one sheet of paper.

They are just black and white so that you can print them easily and colour them if you want to. I think she's just going to write "thank you" on the inside of the cards and give one to whoever is handing out candy at the doors we knock on. She's very proud of them. If you'd like to print some too then just click on the thumbnail image below to get the full size image (which fits on US letter sized paper). Or if you have time let your kids draw their own.

Happy Halloween!

Colourful skull and monster cookies

I've just written up a little Halloween project over at Alpha Mom about using cookie dough as playdough and baking it into nomable 3D monster and skull cookie sculptures. We had a lot of fun doing this one and as you can probably tell, it's not something that you have to limit to Halloween. You can make any cookie your imagination can invent with this technique. I'm quite tempted to get a bunch more dough made and make a cookie solar system or a cookie self portraits. Endless possibilities and when you've got more than one kid and only one rolling pin and hardly any cookie cutters, this is a great alternative to conventional cookie baking! so pop over to Alpha Mom to read more and see some more photos too.

We have had fun with cookie dough and food colouring in the past here as well, making giant cookies and pizza cookie here, plus candy cane cookies last year and cookies that you could lace with too.

Hope you've all got your Halloween costumes ready. We haven't! Carys only told me a couple of days ago that she wants to be Miss Frizzle from The Magic School Bus series of books, which I think is a totally awesome choice, but does mean that I need to do some sewing over the next week. At least the princess dress that Ffion wants to wear just needs the length altering. Any ideas for a really easy baby costume for Delyth? I thought maybe I could make her a lizard costume, so she could be either Liz to Carys's Miss Frizzle, or Pascal to Ffion's Rapunzel, but that seems like a lot of work right now!

Halloween and other people's projects

I want to post about the birthday gift that we (me and Paul) made for Carys this year, but it's going to have to wait because it ain't done yet! Arg, bit off more than I could chew in the time available, but she's a cracking kid and totally understands that it's nearly ready and I just want it to not be a rushed mess because with any luck this gift will be something that lasts for many years. I'll be excited to show you some pics when it is done though.

She had a few little gifts actually on the day though, so she was happy. One that really went down well was the "birthday coupons", which was a totally last minute thing scribbled on some index cards at almost midnight before her birthday. She's actually using the ice-cream for breakfast one tomorrow morning, at least that's what she said before bed anyway. Have any of you tried this? I think we're going to do it for every birthday from now on (maybe even for me and Paul!)

This post is mainly to give kudos to some people that have tried out some of the things on Filth Wizardry and made their own versions and also to give a bit of a round up of anything Halloween themed or fall themed from the archives for any of you that are new here and won't have seen them because they are burried in the depths of my badly tagged posts.

I got into the habit last year of doing round ups every now and again to share other people's versions of our projects, but I let that slip and I'd like to start doing those round ups again. Unfortunately, even if people did email me about their takes on our crafts over that period of time, I'm not going to be able to find them easily in my chaotic inbox, so this little round up is just a few things that have been brought to my attention over the last week or so. In the future I'll try to be a bit better about putting emails in the right places and not getting burried under them.

• Kami from Get Your Mess On (also of Austin Tinkering School awesomeness) posted about the hot glue and wooden stick marble and ping pong ball fun they had after reading our tribute to Scott Weaver post. Love that they got some marble run action going with theirs, because we all got sidetracked into the sculpture side of it and didn't get very far with the plans to make it a dynamic sculpture.
• Eden Folwell and her daughter did some snail painting together. Boy is that a blast from the past for us! Our 2008 snail painting is still up in the kitchen. I am rather sentimental about certain pieces of art that we've made together and that was a very fun afternoon we had making that one!
• Speaking of art that I am sentimental about, Meri cherry over at her blog by the same awesome name posted about the leaf rubbing mural her class made after seeing our one from 2009. This is another thing that we still have up on our wall years later because I love it so much. Seeing the one that Meri's kids made gave me the grins and a bucket full of nostalgia too.

If you have had a go at one of the projects/experiments/crafts/stunts posted on Filth Wizardry then let me know and I'll add your link to a round up in the future :)

Possibly useful Halloween and Fall posts.

With Halloween around the corner, here are a few old posts that might come in handy for last minute costume making or decorating or just fall themed makings...

 

• Halloween pancakes from 2009. This was before Jim from Jim's Pancakes went and put my efforts to shame! Have you seen, he's doing Star Wars pancakes now! Tardis Pancake dude! Make a Tardis pancake!
• Jack-o-lantern apple printing, Frankenstein hand prints and halloween stencils from 2009.
• Toilet roll bat decorations from 2009.
• Milk jug trick or treat pumpkin pots from 2008.
• Jack-o-lantern pinata from 2009.
• Pumpkin carving daftness from 2009.

As far as costume stuff goes, here are a few posts that might help with last minute cheap ideas...

• If you've got a little girl and two little boys, I would love to see someone do Amy Pond, The Doctor and Rory as The Last Centurion. Yes, if the remote controlled Dalek from recycling didn't give it away, I am a bit of a Dr Who fan. Here's our Roman centurion costume from cardboard and crepe paper that you could whip up pretty fast.
• Easy peasy lemon squeezy mermaid tail from some old sweat pants and a flouncy skirt at Goodwill.
• Headband Star Wars masks for trick or treating. With bonus weird photo of our dessicated 2009 Christmas tree done up for Halloween.
• Balloon torch light sabers for last minute Jedi trick or treating.
• The funny looking but beloved old milk jug storm trooper helmet. Also milk jug batman masks.
• Insect antennae for bug costumes. Made from felt and electrical ties.
• Superhero fleece poncho capes for if it's very cold where you are trick or treating.
• Newspaper swords for pirates, muskateers and I dunno, kid's that want to be olympic fencers?
• Seriously last minute panick stricken costume possibilities also include Origami bunny ears and the gift bag robot costume  (Aw, my girls look so little! How time flies) and all manner of weird stuff out of aluminium foil :)

One kid has decided she wants to be rapunzel for Halloween, no doubt along with all the other girls in her class, but she'll be the only one with a Vic and Bob style homemade foam frying pan if I have my way :) The other one hasn't expressed her preference yet and I have no idea what to put the littlest one in either, but we'll figure something out closer to the time.

We're off to have some fun at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire tomorrow. Thought I'd mention it in case any local folk don't know that it's going on and might like to take part.

Back on Thursday with a new Halloween project for you!

Invention kit party bags

Well, I left this until the very last moment! I'm not sure if this is the norm all across America or if it's done anywhere else in the world either, but here locally in the elementary schools, kids bring in treat bags for their friends when it's their own birthday. Carys is about to turn seven and she wanted to make each of her classmates an "invention kit". She's really into making things, totally random things, mind bogglingly weird things with all the bits and pieces of craft supplies and recycling that we have in our home, so it seemed like a natural sort of gift to come from her.

My first thought was "How do I make this not look like a bag of bits and bobs of random rubbish?" I personally loved the idea of an invention kit vs the usual plastic party bag misc, but I didn't want her friends to think "Why are you giving me paperclips and string you weirdo?", so I figured a bit of creative marketing might do the trick.

The other reason I liked the idea was that we could put it together quite cheaply for a class of 24 kids. I had quite a lot of stuff around already that we could use in the kits, so it only took $4 spent in Daiso for the bags and candy, plus another $10 in the Dollar Tree for extra bits.

In the bags are:

• Paper (origami sheets and strips)
• Craft foam
• card (coloured index card)
• Goggly eyes
• Rubber bands
• A balloon
• Metalic tie tags
• Paper clips
• Straws
• Glitter glue
• A Magnet
• Popsicle sticks
• Crayons
• Double sided sticky foam pads
• Pom poms
• Adhesive Jewels
• String
• A mini flourescent cable tie
• Foam stickers
• Pipe cleaners
• Modeling clay
• 2 different candies

Quite a lot fits in the little bag! I won't lie, it took a while to divide up all the bits into the 24 bags and make the paper topper for the kit, but it was done in a couple of hours, so not all that bad really.

I put together the label for the top of the bag to personalise the gift and to make it look a bit like a proper craft kit so the kids are more enthused with the notion of an open ended, inventing project. They are just printed on regular printer paper, two to a sheet, folded over and then stapled onto the top of the bag. This is the back of the label that lists the contents.

I actually had enough supplies to make 30 bags, which is great because we have some freinds coming over for Pizza and a movie on her actual birthday, which is Saturday, so they can have a kit each too.

We've been planning and making her birthday present again this year. You might remember the Falcon dollhouse and Star Wars peg dolls from last year, well this year we've attempted something a bit bigger and significantly more ambitious, so with a three month old also in the picture, it'll be interesting to see if we can get it finished in time. By the way, the aforementioned three month old just keeps getting more and more delicious every day and looks so much like her biggest sister, the birthday girl did at that age!

The photo on the left was taken almost seven years ago! Seven! Brain cannot compute!

DIY cloth pirate maps

Yarrrr! Talk like a pirate day be just around the corner Mateys!

September 19th to be exact. We've been making our own pirate treasure hunting maps over at Alpha Mom this year. It's a very simple project, using things you likely have around the house anyway. These maps will stand the test of time too, because they are cloth and so can't be ripped easily and can also be laundered, providing a keepsake of your child's artwork as well as a nifty play thing.

So me hearties, click over to Alpha Mom to see my post there on how we made these.

Also, if you are new around these parts, you might want to check out last year's Talk Like A Pirate Day craft that I did over there, making rolled newspaper pirate swords and pirate girl bandana skirts for all your feminine swashbuckling needs :)

The technique used to make these maps is one that we've used in the past to make skirts for the kids out of their own artwork, but as you can see, it's such a flexible and easy way to get designs onto cloth, kids can use it to create pretty much anything their hearts desire.

Ooooh, you could even make a pirate map skirt or shorts ;)

"Make Stuff Together" Giveaway winner.

Aaaaaand the winner of the copy of "Make Stuff Together" that isn't covered in jammy fingerprints iiiiiiiis...

Carrie, who was chosen by random.org as the sixth commenter on the thread, and said:
"What an interesting book! It sounds right up my alley."

So Carrie, if you send me the address of your alley I shall send your copy of this lovely book right up it as soon as I can get to the post office :)

You can email me at filthwizardry at gmail dot com.

Thank you to all of you that commented. It's always nice to be able to see who some of my readers are, because I know a lot of you will have blogs of your own and it's nice to be able to click through and check them out. I've got more time to do that sort of thing now that I have to sit down to breastfeed several times a day :) Now I just need to get better at one handed typing, so that I can reply to my emails at a better pace!

For those of you that didn't win the draw but are still interested in purchasing a copy of Bernadette and Kathie's book, here's the link to it's page on Amazon (not an affiliate thing) and I'll have another craft project for you on here tomorrow :)