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!

Coral Reef Livingroom

Brace yourself... today's project is a long one!

We have wanted to go to the new California Academy of Science for months and months, well, since it opened, but the insane queues with young kids and the $25 per ticket have meant we've been waiting. On Tuesday we finally got to go with a field trip group for the bargain price of $10 per ticket! Yippieeee!!!

I was quietly disapointed that they didn't let kids younger than six into the planetarium there, because astrophysics is what my masters is in and I was curious and wanted to see the kids geek out with that stuff too.

The kids adored the aquarium there though. I mean REALLY adored it and the fact that the scuba crew were down there cleaning the tank at the same time we were there just blew their little minds. It was great! Sadly the photos are a bit naff because we took our crippled little point and click camera.

So, today while they were still psyched over the coral reef experience I drew out a load of the animals that we'd seen in there with a Sharpie for them to make thier own reef in the livingroom. I scanned in the drawings to make multiple copies.

There are five pages of drawings here that you can print out yourself if you want. Each page has two reef creatures for kids to colour and cut out. Just click on each thumbnail to get the full sized image and remember to check "fit to page", especially if you are printing on A4 rather than US letter size.

Also I've got a page with them all on together for if you have older kids and want to make a smaller tank out of a box maybe.













Finally, a crib sheet for what colours these guys actually are. My lot knew what colour the Blue Tang and the Clownfish were from good old Finding Nemo. We didn't stick to the right colours all the time though ;)

So, I fixed up one of our blue double bed sheets in the livingroom and the kids coloured and cut the reef animals and as they did each one they came through to tape it up with double sided sticky tape.

I added rocks from newspaper and coral from the final left over bits of the dollar store crepe streamers. Then they all spent a while sticking on blue circle stickers as bubbles (I think this was the favourite part for the guys that had just turned three).I cut out some more fish shapes from some cheap adhesive labels and the kids coloured those in however they felt and stuck them on the reef too.The four year olds then told me that we needed a diver like in the real reef tank, so, not wanting to have to draw an entire diver, I just drew out the legs and flippers on some card and they coloured them in and we stuck them on too.
Finally they dragged out any suitable fishy type soft toys to add to the display. Even Spongebob was there. My youngest daughter was adamant about Charlie from "charlie and lola" being on the reef for some reason. My youngest also wanted to go and put on one of the numerous homemade mermaid tails that we have and pretended to swim around with the fishies!
Our livingroom looks mighty interesting now, especially seeing as the rocket ship is still alive and kicking after two months of space missions!

Cardboard Roman Centurion Costume

We're having a lot of fun with the drywall shims. This is another, less girly project we did with them. The kids painted up a few more of the shims with brown paint (to make it look like leather Roman armour) and the back of an old colouring book to use as the chest plate too.

Later i drew out some bits for them to colour gold and cut out to go on the armour as decoration. Once all that was done I stapled it all together pretty much like the streamer dress bodice and again hole punched the two ends of the waist band to add string to fasten it. I added more of the dollar store red crepe streamer to the shoulders and waist.
The finishing touch was stapling together more of the shims and gluing on a paper tube to make the helmet and adding more red streamer to the top.
I need to make another helmet for my younger daughter that's a bit smaller, but my older one I think looks like Marvin the Martian in it!

"where is my Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator?"Any ideas what other costumes we can make with the drywall shims?

I'm definately going to be using them to make some more sturdy robot body panels than the gift bag versions for an upcoming party.

Cardboard streamer dresses

We recently got a load of drywall shims, which have turned out to be massively useful in kiddy crafts. This craft was so easy peasy and the kids loved the end result.

Each one got to decorate a cardboard shim with pens and stickers and then I cut each shim into three pieces (two equal length and one slightly longer). I stapled the shorter two to the longer one to make a kind of pinafore top and then hole punched the to ends of the chest piece and tied on string to make a bow fastening.Then I just cut lengths of dollar store crepe streamer that we had left over from the pirate-superhero-mermaid party back in September and the kids danced around like silly bouncy things in the dresses.Of course eventually they figured out they could pull off the streamers and make headbands and wave them around, but the bodice is sturdy enough that we can keep it and just stick on other streamers another day.

Of course you don't need drywall shims to do this. Any old cardboard will work just fine.