Kiddy glue batik. Take Two.

Well, we enjoyed the batik fun so much that the kids asked to do it again and this time I thought I'd try something a little different.

They seemed to enjoy the painting part far more than the glue part, so this time I let them paint a picture and put some handprints on the sheet with the watered down acrylics. I washed the sheets and dried them, then when they were in bed and the sheets had dried, I covered their artwork with glue and that dried overnight. In the morning they painted all over the whole sheet, covering what they had painted before (but it was protected by the glue). We let the sheets dry again and washed off the glue and here's what we came out with. Below you can see the glue I put on over the initial painting.

I love how wild and colourful they are and I love that now we have a dinky little memento of my older daughter's funny smiley face with stick arms out of the side of it's head drawing. By the way, she says the two blobs by it's side are a cave that it lives in and some food.

No sew doll clothes

We went to a garage sale this weekend and the lovely lady that was holding it gave our kids all the barbie dolls she had for free. They were however all stark naked. Sewing enough clothes for five barbie dolls wasn't going to happen any time soon (my sewing machine is lodged underneath a plethera of misc in the twilight zone that we call the guest room).

We did however have a red plastic bag, a few coffee filters, some burst balloons, stickers, pipecleaners, aluminium foil and a few of those little ketchup cups you get at fast food places. Turns out you can make a fairly extensive wardrobe for dolls with this stuff. The kids coloured in and stuck stickers on the clothes and I dressed the dolls for them. I think they like the mermaid best, so we may end up ripping off all the other gear and having five foil mermaids with strategically placed foam starfish before too long.

Kiddie Glue Batik

Gail Bartel just posted a great tutorial on her blog "That artist woman" about how to do batik with kids, but instead of using frightening hot wax and dye baths as traditional batik involves, which is far from kid friendly, she uses school glue and watered down acrylic paint.

Me and the kids gave it a go and it was great fun, lovely and messy and turned out great. I was going to get Elmer's school glue, but Elmer's galactic sparkly glue (which is what Gail uses in her tutorial) was on sale at a quarter of the price, so I got that instead. I picked up a cotton bed sheet from goodwill and ripped it into squares about a foot and a half wide. The kids painted their hands with the glue and then did handprints and I wrote their names, we did some other random spodging with the glue and then left it to dry overnight.

Next day I mixed up some watered down acrylic paint in the egg trays from our fridge and the kids and Paul painted over the whole sheet. Paul you will notice is wearing a white tshirt to do this. Silly Paul, and yes the kids are in PJs with bed head because it was before 9am.

We left them to dry and then laundered off the glue to get lovely finished pieces that I think I'll make into cushions for their beds. We have lots more of the glue and spare sheet, so we can make more and maybe a cool patchwork quilt eventually.

If your kids are a bit older and have a longer attension span then it would be cool to slip a sheet of cardboard into a pillowcase and do both sides.

Recycling Rockets

You will need: a plastic or paper cup, a water bottle, a large paper plate or a left over party hat, a small paper plate and some aluminium foil. I knabbed all the ones we used from a community pot luck event that I stayed behind to tidy up after.

Glue the bottle to the bottom of the plastic cup. Wrap in aluminium foil and glue down the edge. Cut a slit in the large paper plate to the middle and fold and glue into a cone. Stick on the top of the bottle. Stick the small paper plate on the open end of the cup.

The kids decorated these with paint, crayons, stickers and glue and glitter. We added streamers to the bottom of them and after the kids had run about the house a bit with them, we hung them up in the bedroom.

Tetrapack wallets.

There are a fair few tutorials about on the net showing how to make little wallets or purses from used tetrapack containers. My kids love the occasional chocolate or vanilla milk, so I thought it would be cute to make them a wallet each from one of thier drink boxes.

This site sells recycled tetrapack wallets, but you can see the process of how to make them from the little animation on the front page there. It's quite simple and if you weren't in quite so much of a hurry as we were then you could use a little velcro or a snap closure on them instead of the rubberband we used.

I bet you could make a nice grownup scale one with a soup size tetrapack. Might be nice for keeping scraps of paper with recipes on in.

"I'm you!" masks.

Thought the kids would have some fun if we made them masks of each other, so they could swap identities and be silly.

It was pretty quick to do. Took a photo, printed it out on a full page, glued it to a bit of cardboard box. Cut it out. Used an exacto knife to cut out the iris of the eyes, so the kids could look through the masks. Gaffer taped a popsicle stick to the back and then to make them a bit more durable I put some strips of packing tape over them.

Here's a pic of my two year old pretending to be my three year old with her mask.

Recycling castle

We quite often make random stuff by glueing together what's in the recycling bin. The kids help with putting it together and then they paint and decorate it and when it's dry, play with it. When the creation loses it's appeal they can pull it appart and put all the bits in the recycling bin outside.

Here's the castle we made and the bizzare game of balancing teaset items on it that was popular for quite some time. Take a moment to notice the toy lion that looks like he's taking a leak on one of the turrets. Nice.

I think this was made up of a couple of cereal boxes, a pancake mix box, a kfc popcorn chicken box (mmm dirty), some yoghurt pots, some toilet roll tubes, some paper plates and a few plastic forks, oh and a couple of sandwich bag boxes.

Fuzzy Felt Friends and Family.

As kids, me and my sister had numerous sets of "Fuzzy Felts" to play with. Shapes cut out of felt that would cling to a roughed up material board by the power of friction alone! Astounding technology, those toys of the 70s and 80s! We loved them so much. I can remember a circus set, a zoo set, a ballet and theatre set and several mismatched odd ones that my mum had picked up at jumble sales too.My nostalgia led me to make my older daughter a personalized Fuzzy Felt set for her third birthday. It was a bit of a rush job, but I think it turned out fairly decent. On the computer I cropped out the heads of her preschool friends and aunties and uncles from photos and slapped on cartoon bodies for a bit of cutesy humor. Some had the bodies of Charlie Brown or Dora the Explorer, but then I started having fun just drawing simple little child like bodies on the rest. I printed these little people out onto tshirt transfer paper and ironed them onto white felt and cut them out. I also made some random birthday themed felts and a few of thier favourite characters like Charlie and Lola.

The boards were made from cardboard with a weird rough mat/felt material stuck to them that I found in a Japanese store completely by fluke. I have no idea what this material was actually intended for, but it works really well for maximum felt friction fun and was dirt cheap. I gaffer taped the edges of the board, but if I'd not been in such a rush making it the night before her birthday then I'd probably have got an old picture frame from Goodwill or something to put it in.

Here is a pic of the kids with bedhead playing with it the next morning.

Fruit Popsicles

My kids are popsiclaholics and with the summer pretty much here I thought I'd try some kitchen experimentation with home made popsicles. I picked up a few popsicle trays from the dollar section in Target and first tried blending up a pineapple. That worked well and adding a little coconut milk makes a mean pina-colada-pop. I'll be trying other whizzed up fruit as the summer progresses, because if they are going to ask me for popsicles every day then I figure at least they can get a portion of fruit in the form of one.

I'm not sure how far I can push this one, but I may try getting some carrot in with peaches or something. I draw the line at brocolli-pops though. One pineapple made 24 popsicles, so with the price of pineapples here at the moment, that's somewhere between 10 and 15 cents a hit.

Silly Putty

A mate of mine had a pretty old book that she got from a garage sale that had a recipe in it for homemade silly putty. Great, I thought, lets give this a whirl. Well, the ingredients are deceptively simple (just equal amounts of white glue and liquid starch with a bit of food colouring to jazz it up), but the reality is a little more tricky. Bear with me here.

After a couple of botched experiements I came to realise that not all white glue is equal and not all liquid starch is suitable either. The ones I found to work were Elmer's Glue-All multi-purpose glue (Not Elmer's school glue) and a concentrated liquid starch called Sta-Flo, when the first brand I tried (Niagara) didn't react at all.

Mixing the glue with the food colouring first is a good idea to get the colouring even, because when you add the liquid starch it makes a big crazy congeled blob and you have to wait five minutes or so for the glue to absorb most of the liquid starch before kneading the resulting putty. Honestly, when you first mix them you'll be thinking, "oh gosh no, that's got to be wrong. Ew", but it does come together into a great silly putty and I have posted a lot of pictures to prove this to you, in case you feel like you may lose hope and bin the gluppy mess before it reaches it's glorious silly puttiness.

So there you can see the progression from pouring the liquid starch into the glue, to after stirring and leaving for 5 minutes, to pulling out of the mixing bowl onto paper towel and finally after about 5 to 10 minutes of kneading in your hands.

The last pic I have for you is of some pink silly putty we made that shows you can copy newspaper print onto it, just like you could with the original store bought silly putty and also, like that, it bounces when you roll it up into a ball.

It's one of those things that would be great for older children to make themselves, but I had to make and knead the stuff for my kids because they are only two and three years old. Probably not a good idea for children younger than mine though as I doubt it's snack worthy.

Homemade Stepping Stones

We've just embarked on an mission to tart up our garden for the summer. It's a mission with a strict and small budget. I wanted something that the kids could contribute beyond throwing soil around, so we came up with the plan to let them make their own stepping stones.

We picked up a small bag of quick setting concrete from Lowes and a couple of bags of those flower arranging glass nuggets from the Dollar Tree. We mixed up a batch of the concrete, sprayed the inside of a plastic plant pot saucer with Pam cooking spray and plopped it full of concrete. Then we let the kids squish the colourful glass nuggets into the top of it and let it set in the sun.

When they were dry the kids went at them with cheap kiddy paint that we had about the house anyway and I varnished the painted stones for a bit of extra durability and plonked them in the garden as a little path for them to hop about on.

A few days later we did some more with cement rather than concrete so they could make hand prints in a few. I'll post pics of those up when they are finished.

Frosted Flakes Toddlerbots

I'm always amazed by how much recycling mounts up for a family of four. Seeing as there's usually a stash of various shaped empty containers and cardboard in the kitchen waiting to go out to the recycle bin, we usually play with it a bit before it gets there.

We cut face sized holes and in a couple of the gigantic multi bag cereal boxes, turned them inside out, taped them back together and then the kids spent a good 40 minutes to an hour decorating the "robot heads" with paint and stickers. I rolled up a piece of aluminium foil and taped it to the top of each as antenna.







The Ffionator 5000 and Beedasbot were born and a good afternoon of make believe play ensued.

N.B. I realised after I'd cut the peepholes that if I'd done it with the box the right way up then it would look like they had Tony the tiger's miniture body before we turned the boxes inside out for painting.

Snail painting

You will need: A big sheet of white paper (we used a strip of butchers block paper), a few different food colourings, a few snails and a bit of patience.

The kids dipped the snails from our back yard in the food colouring and put them down on the paper. After the initial shock the snails began to move about the paper and create art for us. The kids had fun putting leaves and grass around the outside of the paper to try and tempt the snails to go one way or the other. The snails seem completely unharmed by the food colouring and we see the "used ones" happily around the place still with coloured shells days later.

The colourful art now has pride of place on one of our kitchen cabinets. From the trails it looks like the snails have all disapeared into the cupboard. Gross.

Rainbow water

One of the mums I know switched me on to this fun game. We have a load of old plastic tupperware containers that have lost thier lids and some empty water bottles that were going to be recycled, so I got the kids out the back in the yard and filled all the water bottles up from the tap and dropped a couple of drops of food colouring in each. They had great fun pouring the coloured water back and forth mixing the colours and when they ended up with brown water we watered the plants with it. No stained clothes from the tiny amount of food colouring either.

Pancake art

Special weekend breakfasts now involve fruit and "pancake art" for us. To create these fun treats:

• mix your regular pancake batter making sure that it has no lumps at all.
• pour into a ziplock baggy and seal.
• snip a teensy hole in one corner of the ziplock bag.
• pipe out the batter into the hot pan fairly quickly and in whatever shape your littlies request.

N.B. Remember that all your art work has to be touching for you to be able to pick it up in one and flip it and you have to work quite quickly so that it cooks evenly.

Extra Skills: If you can pipe your name in mirror image and then wait a moment before flooding your drawing with more batter then when you flip the pancake you will have your name embedded in the pancake and slightly darker golden brown than the rest of the pancake.