Golden leprechaun cookies

Part of the rainbow collage dealio was that we needed some leprechaun gold to go at the end of it. In kidland cookie dough is more highly prized per unit volume than traditional gold and luckily safeways had some crazy buy two get three free deal on sugar cookie dough.

I put some yellow food colouring in a batch and the kids rolled little balls, then squished them into flat coins and stamped them with either the lower case or upper case first letter of their name.

When they were all baked and cooled, we put them in a pot at the end of the rainbow and the kids got to scarf a few down while they went through them picking out their initialed coins to go in a brown bag to take home.

I might have levied a tax. Burp.

Rainbow collage

I've seen this craft done at two of the blogs that i frequent , "Thrifty Craft Mama" and "No Time For Flash Cards". I had a bunch of preschoolers over on St Patricks day and it seemed like a really good project that everyone could work on together. I had a later craft planned to make gold coin cookies, so the plan was to eat them from a pot at the end of our rainbow.

There was lots of cutting up bits of random craft supplies we had lurking around. Construction paper, tissue paper, bits of felt, a few napkins.

While that was going on I got out one of our sheets of pilfered Costco cardboard from the garage and used a marker and some string like a giant compass to draw out the rainbow.
Once I had cut it out, I labelled each band with the colour it should be, both with the word and in that colour. The kids got their own little pot of glue and paintbrush each and they spent quite a while sticking on all the coloured bits and bobs.
After lunch, when it was dry, the kids played around with it like a tunnel, driving cars under it and crawling through themselves.
Later that evening my two helped me set up a blue fleece and a green towel to make a back drop, then we stuck on white clouds and a happy sun. The finishing touch was the mountain of soft toy stuffing that was liberally thrown around. My kids love to make a mess. It just makes them so happy. Luckily these days they are finally into actually helping to clean it all up afterwards as well. Youngest Filth Wizard claimed to be a "cloud princess".

Happy Gloves

This post is about a totally awesome book that my sweetheart bought for me on our anniversary. It's called Happy Gloves and is by Miyako Kanamori. She has created the most beautiful, cleanly designed and easy to follow instructions for making soft toys out of gloves.

I've only made two things from the book so far, but I'm so very pleased with them that I plan to make many more and although the book only has 21 items to make (actually, that's quite a lot really isn't it), it gives you the instructions in such a way that you can easily take off with the idea and make many more variations of your own.

Here is the gorgeous sweet little chipmunk from the cover of the book that I made for my older daughter (he is made from just one lone glove and a couple of pipe cleaners). I also made a teeny rabbit finger puppet for my younger daughter from a single one of her white gloves (I have no idea where it's partner glove wound up).
As far as creative recycling and frugal gifts from the heart go, these glove toys are totally awesome and I heartily recommend getting a copy of the book for anyone who likes to sew for kids. I particularly love knitted toys, but as yet do not possess the required skill level to churn out more than one scarf every decade. This book has solved that dilemma for me! Awesome spouse for the win!

Grid copying drawings

I found a pack of index cards a while back. I think it was at Goodwill. The cool thing about them was that they were a bit larger than the usual ones and were squared instead of lined or blank.

I drew some templates for the kids of a train, a house, a birthday cake, a robot, a car etc... and then the kids tried to copy the pictures on their own index card using the squares to guide them.

The children were only four and five years old, but they did a pretty good job of it and I reckon this activity would work for kids up to about seven or eight even.

We had a bit of open interpretation of the templates too, which was fun and led onto a much less structured drawing session afterwards.

Gift bag robot costumes

I know we did robot costumes before, but, well, my kids want to be fracking toasters, what can I say? (apologies to non Battlestar Galactica fans).

I saw that the dollar store were doing some silver gift bags that were perfect preschooler head and body dimensions, so I picked up a couple each for my girls.

We cut arm holes and a head hole in the bigger bag and a little peeking out hole in the robot head bag.

They spent quite a while adding loads of "buttons" in the form of cheap sticker dots and then I drew a few panels on larger stickers we had and they coloured those ones in. As you can see from the outfits they had on, they had spent the other half of the afternoon being super heros. It's a hectic life being three and four years old!

Why do they want to be robots so badly? It's a pretty fun phase though. The robot voices and funny walks slay me. I should video them next time they go all toddlerbot on me.

ARGGHHH!!! MALFUNCTION!!!
Here you can see the Ffionator 5000 reading her own user manual...

I did plan on giving them some antenna and decorating the robot head bags some more, but they were all into playing make believe robots by the time we had done the bodies, so I'll leave that for another day.

Cardboard flowers

This craft was kind of a follow up from the heart crowns we did for Valentines day. The kids liked threading the corrugated card shapes onto the straws and arranging them, so I thought we'd try making a vase of flowers in a similar way.

I glue gunned a toilet roll tube to a circle of card to make the vase and then rolled up a strip of corrugated card to go inside the vase, so the flowers could be poked into it.

Me and the hubs cut out a load of cardboard leaf and flower shapes the night before and when the kids came over they painted the vases and the leaves and flowers with kiddy paint, then threaded the flowers onto green pipecleaners (what do americans call them?) and arranged them in the vases. I actually soaked some wooden kebab skewers in green food colouring to use as stems, but the pipecleaners seemed a lot more versatile and a lot less likely to take an eye out when I thought about it.

Some of the flowers we made were a bit too big and the pipecleaners couldn't hold them up proparly, so watch out for that if you decide to have a go at this.

Lastly I made each kid a bumble bee out of a packing peanut, some craft foam for wings and two goggly eyes (I'm not going to rest until the packet of goggly eyes is empty!)
These would make a lovely gift for grandma or auntie, or if there are any dads reading, it would be a pretty sweet mother's day gift too. As usual, the kids really enjoyed it because it involved lots of sloppy paint.