Wreath

The old wreath, though lovely in its time, had had it. Time for something new! While walking down the local shopping street, Emma and I had come across a store giving away sample books, and gleefully scooped a few. What can you do with upholstery samples?

Make leaves! The maple leaves were traced from a real, pressed leaf. The oak leaves I just made up as I went along. I like the maple leaves better. The oval leaves are fine, generic leaves, cut with pinking shears just for fun.

Mount them with a hot-melt glue gun on a styrofoam ring, painted brown so it’s not so noticeable…

And ta-dah! A fall wreath for my front door!

It’s a bird, its a…

Well, we’re not quite sure. But they sure are cute, no? Note how one or two have their feathers coming out behind, while the rest are on top.

Feathers, 2 cm foam balls, mosaic tiles, a fine-point Sharpie and a glue gun,

three toddlers… (and Mary for the faces and the glue-gun)…
and you get…

And a whole table of goofy cuteness!

Figure Drawing

“Can I colour?”

It is Anna’s first utterance upon walking through the door. No, “Hello, Mary!”, nor “It’s very snowy out there!”, or even “Get your nose out of my face, Indie!”

“Can I colour?”

These days I keep a pile of paper and a basket of crayons on the table at all times, so Anna can satisfy her obsession. At three and… two months (?), three (?), Anna has moved past random scribbles. She is now drawing with an intention to produce an image.

In her case, faces. Faces and faces and faces. Faces with eyes, nose, mouth, and hair. No ears, yet. As the weeks went by, the faces sprouted arms and legs, and then, in a final burst of anatomical finesse, hands and feet. No fingers or toes yet, and it will be a little while before an actual body shows up. In the toddler world, arms and legs always spring direct from the head.

The steady deluge of a month of faces and people has made an impact on at least one other child. Last week, Emily decided that she, too, would produce a person. A person, mind you, not just a face.

I had an idea. I gave them card stock instead of the usual scrap paper. I sketched out for Emily in general terms what would be required. “First you’ll need a head.” I swirl my fingertip in a circle over the card stock. “A head with eyes and nose and mouth. And then you’ll probably want arms and legs,” stroking, linear motions, “and maybe even hands and feet.” I touch the card at four spots. Then I left them to it.

And here’s what they did:

Anna’s is on the right, Emily’s on the left. Anna’s has eyes and hair, Emily’s is blind and bald. Anna’s is just “a girl, like me.” Emily’s is “a boy named George.” So there.

Why are they cut out? Because these are not just (yet another) drawing. These are paper dolls!

George is a boy, so he, so I was told, needed overalls. I produced them. Anna’s is a girl, and she needed a “long, long dress with buttons and ruffles.”

After all that hard work drawing, they were not interested in colouring in their clothes, so I did that, too, again under direction as to colours.

Ta-dah!

More Hallowe’en crafting

Method:
Take an orange pumpkin shape, add features, and voila! Jack o’lanterns.

To make it Educational, you talk about:

colours — black and orange, the colours of the month
shapes — the children choose from piles of precut shapes for their pumpkin’s faces
emotions — the mouth is a black squiggle, which can be put on to make a sad mouth or a happy mouth, as per child’s direction.

There you go. Emotional awareness, math, art, not to mention the fine motor control necessary to manage glue, and to place the features where they belong.

(The hats were another craft, very simple: pointy witch-hat shapes onto which they put some sparkly Hallowe’en stickers. The tots themselves decided it would be fun if their pumpkins wore the hats!)

Making lemonade

Not too long, one of my parents gave me this:

She’s a research scientist. This book was no longer of use to her, and rather than just toss it in the black box, she wondered if the kids might make use of it in some way. The cover is not what one might term “promising”, is it? I flipped through its pages. Most of them looked like this:

While others looked like this:

Oh, yeah. Just leaps right up screaming “OH! FUN TIMES!!!”, doesn’t it? There were some pages with a little pizzazz something recognizable to look at, as Mom pointed out: pencil drawings of snakes and amphibians, black-and-white photos of fish.

But the ideas, they were not a-flowing. I had NO IDEA what I’ll do with this thing. Short of tossing it in MY black box and keeping Mom’s environmental conscience pure…

Which is exactly what, when I thanked her for her thoughtfulness and tucked the book onto a shelf, I thought I’d be doing with the thing. But, see, while I am not always 100% convinced of the necessity of honesty, I am a kind person. Dammit. Which meant that while I am perfectly capable of tossing it and telling her that I’d lost it, I couldn’t bring myself to ignore the kindliness of her impulse. To sneer at her generosity, no matter how uninspiring its manifestation, would be unkind. And ungrateful. And that, I just couldn’t manage.

That means I couldn’t throw the thing away without at least trying to do something with it.

And, whadday know? We did it!

Creativity doesn’t require huge amounts of intelligence, or even artistic talent. It’s just a matter of looking at things in a playful way…

SPPOOOOOOOKY!

Autumn crafts, again: Leaf belts and seeking more

Here we have our masking-tape belts, all turned into tapestries. The one on the far right is baby Noah’s. He was more interested in crumpling the tape than sticking things to it. The few leaves on it were placed there by the other children, who noted that if they stuck stuff to his back, he couldn’t rip it off. Clever little things, aren’t they?

The belts were not quite so lushly decorated when they were removed from the children, but once displayed on the dining room wall they became much more interesting. The leaf stash in the stroller — there is always a leaf stash in the stroller these days — the stash was raided, and slammed onto the tapes on the wall. Whapping leaves onto the wall was way fun.

Ta-dah! Thanks for the tip, JWG. (JWG’s comment is number three.)

It striked me that with fall here (or on its way for some of you), the time is right for leaf crafts. We’ve done a couple here. I have more, but I’m sure I’m not the only one with ideas!! Let’s open the floor: How about you out there? Any crafts you like to do with the fall leaves?