Very Tiny Blank Books

I made these tiny books out of paint chip samples today.  They were quick and easy, and I'm sure that our toy house will be full of them before long.

This is all you need:

Cut out your covers and score them lightly along the edges of the white line:

Cut strips of paper that are slightly shorter than the covers:

 

Cover the whole back of the paper with glue:

Then just carefully re-fold the paper and stick it into the cover.  If you've got a steady hand, you can write on the cover with a very fine point permanent pen before you glue them together.  I used a .005 on this one:

I want to make one with a family photo album printed on the paper inside!

These are very simple five-minute miniature books, but if you want to see some incredible tiny artists' books, check out my friend Elsa's book blog.

Tin Can Memory Game

Do you remember when I mentioned that we got a can opener that removes the lids without leaving sharp edges?  Of course, I've been saving all of our lids for future projects, and now we have a lot of them.

So, we used stickers to turn them into a Memory Game.

We made several matching pairs, and we play the game like this: 

Turn over all of the lids,

Take turns turning over two at a time and trying to find the matching pairs.  If you find a pair, put it on your stack and go again.  If you don't find a match, it is the next person's turn.

There is something extra fun about playing a game that you have made, so we've been using this one a lot.  These metal lids are really nice to handle and stack, and the boys have found all sorts of other creative uses for them.  They've also made some fun sticker combinations that are waiting for more lids, and they get very excited about expanding the game each time we cook something from another matching can.

Some Tips and Tricks:

If you're playing with someone under five, you can make it easier for them by making one big stack of the pairs that all of the players find, or you can let them turn over three lids on each turn instead of two.

I think this game would be so fun (and a great gift for a 1-6 year old) if you made it with your own photo stickers using pictures of the faces of friends and family.  I will definitely try this some day!

Use matching cans that don't have a rubbery coating on the inside.

Do not make this game with can lids if you don't have a special can opener!

Mobile

I made this mobile last weekend for one of my little friends for her first birthday:

It was more fun and challenging than I expected, but I am so happy with how it turned out.  It was not easy to make each piece spin freely without ever crashing into the others, so it took a lot of careful adjusting.

I added some nature treasures that I had gathered and enjoyed over the years, and it was so gratifying to see them in this new way.  I spent a lot of time thinking about the textures and weights and how to make them balance both physically and aesthetically.  This is one of my favorite parts:

The crow feather is so light that it catches every small puff of wind, and it spins more easily than the other elements.  I put a small metal weight on the tip in order to make it hang horizontally.  Here's a closer look:

I've had the abalone shell for many years, and have always loved how rough and dark it is on one side and pearly iridescent on the other.

I wanted some other shiny elements to catch her little eye, so I wrapped some sections of the apple branches with pieces of wire that used to belong to my grandmother.

The smooth, dark branches were gleaned from our favorite apple ranch, and the others are fallen sycamore branches from trees in our neighborhood.

Now I want to make another.

Weaving

Tin Man

If you listen very carefully, you can hear a rusty voice barely whispering, "Oil me!"

Ruben made the hat with one of the parents at his school out of a paper plate, tape and aluminum foil.  He taped the cans and lids to his shirt.  (We have a nice can opener that removes the lids of cans without any sharp edges.)  I love how the big tomato cans fit right over the tops of his cowboy boots.

It is non-stop Wizard of Oz around here!

Make Your Own Kid-Sized Clothes Hangers

Here are some free and easy wire hangers that I just made for our dress-up area:

Watch out when you cut.  My wire end went flying!

I am hoping that the electrical tape wrapping will make these more durable and will keep any sharp wire safely inside the cardboard.  It's time for me to teach them to hang up their own capes!

Sheet Pans and Oobleck

I use aluminum baking sheets (aka sheet pans) as work surfaces for a lot of our projects.  They keep glue off of the table and keep small parts from rolling away, but above all, they make it easy to move the project aside for a few minutes or hours and then bring it back without a lot of disruption.  I often wish our art area (dining room) had one of these.  I'm pretty sure I'd put warm cookies on mine, too.

You can see the kids using sheet pans for playdough just a few posts ago.  Sometimes I have the kids finger paint directly on the pan instead of on paper, and then just rinse the pan when they're done.

These pans are perfect for oobleck, too.  If you've never tried making oobleck, PLEASE do:  2 parts cornstarch + 1 part water = non-toxic, mind-bending Non-Newtonian fluid.  Fun if you're 2 or 20 or 100.

Plain white oobleck is wonderful, but you can have lots of fun with color mixing, too.  For mesmerizing color, you can't beat adding little flakes of dry watercolor paint, which dissolve slowly, leaving color trails, but adding drops of liquid tempera or food coloring works, too.

Oobleck is a shear thickening non-Newtonian fluid, which basically means that pressure makes it more solid.  If you punch it, it's hard, if you poke it, it's soft.  Squeeze it and it breaks, let go of it and it drips.

Here's an amazing video of oobleck on a vibrating surface.  I can't wait to try that!

Playdough Plus

The boys got very enthusiastic when we added some feathers, sticks and beads to our playdough.

This is Argus Panoptes or Argos, according to Diego.  (For those of you who don't happen to live with a 6 year old, Argus is a mythological Greek monster with 100 eyes):

I loved this creature that Ruben was making:

It just kept getting better...

...and better!

House Bookshelf

Here's a bookshelf that I made a few years ago to house our picture books.  It is made out of 3/4" plywood, and is very sturdy.  One of my favorite features is the sideways shelf on the right, which holds all of our long books that stick out too far if we put them on the other shelves.

I imagined that we would occasionally empty it and use it like a toy house, but that has yet to happen.  It also has a chimney tissue holder that holds a regular square tissue box.  Here's a closer look:

I want to show you some more of my home made projects, and I was having so much fun taking pictures around the house that I left Julio happily entertaining himself at the dining table.  From the other room, I heard him say, "Cow milk.  Want it!"  And then his big brother call out, "I'll get it for you, Julio!"  I got back just in time to see this near-disaster:

Play Kitchen Stove

We had a lot of fun making this play stove today:

A while ago, I salvaged an old burner grate and put it in our play kitchen, but I always wanted to mount it on a board and give it a knob.  Today, I found an old wood scrap and then we got to work!  We used bent nails to hold it in place, and screwed down a piece of an old dowel with a hole drilled in it for the knob.  Ruben got to use the hammer and the hand drill, so he was thrilled.  He used watercolor paints to make red flames, but when he saw me cooking on the blue gas flame of our real stove, he asked me to paint some blue on top of the red.

A play kitchen is a great thing to have in or near your real kitchen.  The kids love to pretend cook when they are not participating in the real cooking.  You don't need much, even just a low counter space or a box, or some floor space and some small real or toy pots, pans, utensils or dishes.  Ours is an old piano bench in the laundry area between our real stove and the back door.  I hung some hooks on the wall over it, and we've accumulated a lot of accessories over the years.  Sometimes I think it would be fun to mount a faucet on the table or wall, or add a cupboard with a door on it.  I still might, but already this area gets so much play just as it is.

Even without doors and knobs, there are all sorts of delicacies prepared here.  Somebody made me some Apple-orange-radish pudding today, and did you notice the blue play dough pancakes going into the "oven" in the top picture?

Kissing Thaumatrope

A few years ago, I thought that it would be so fun to make Joe a kissing thaumatrope for Valentine's Day.  Like so many of my BRILLIANT ideas, I promptly forgot all about it.

Until recently, when I saw this thaumatrope-on-a-stick on Made by Joel, and it reminded me that I had to try it.  Even though they're not done, I'm showing you my work in progress now, just in case you want to use this idea to make your very own thaumatrope valentines.

Are you wondering what I am talking about?

On one side it looks like this:

On the other side it looks like this:

When you spin the stick, it looks like this:

Movie magic!  Persistence of vision!!!  Kissing!!!!!  Does it get any better than this?

I'm making some for my three little Valentinos, too.  Isn't it funny that no one in my family even asked what I was doing when I said, "Here, stand against the wall and let me take a picture of you kissing something."  They all just did it.

If you do make your own, please send me a picture!  Wouldn't they make sweet wedding invitations or favors?

Materials:  Paper, cardboard, double-stick tape or glue, round chopstick or kebab stick, photo prints or drawings of kissers in profile.  Line them up carefully so that they work together when you spin the stick, and test it out before you glue!

Firefighter Birthday Party

Ever since Ruben's preschool took a field trip to the fire station, he has been very interested in acting out fire scenarios at home.  Although it isn't at all difficult to find a good preschool-sized firefighter costume, we didn't have one, so over the past several weeks I have sorted out a firefighter costume for him with things from around the house.  He wears jeans and a matching jean jacket with yellow electrical tape stripes on it, black boots, and a hat made from: newspaper, packing tape, a piece of red origami paper and the sticker that they handed out at the fire station.  His tools include an axe (spatula), hose (piece of rope wound on an old 16mm film reel), and phone for dialing 911 (stickers on the wall with numbers written on them).  We wave red bandannas to pretend there's a fire and he comes right to the rescue.  When the whole family gets in on it, he LOVES it.

For his birthday, we took it all to the park, and invited two of his friends and their parents to get in on the action.  We acted out the fire rescue scenario over and over, including trips to the hospital (picnic table) where we were treated for broken limbs and smoke inhalation.  He had requested a cake "shaped like a house on fire with snow on the roof," so I made a banana cake with cream cheese frosting and topped it with little people for him to rescue.

Just before serving, I poured some heated rum around the base of the cake and lit it on fire for a little flambé excitement.  (It sort of worked, but would probably have been more dramatic in a dark room.)  It did soak the bottom of the cake with rum, so that part was for the parents, and the kids got the top layer.  I'm pretty sure that Ruben loved everything about his little party.

Little Holiday Toys

I've been having so much fun making tiny toys for our holiday play time.  Here are Santa and Rudolph, made of clothespins, pipe cleaners, yarn & wire:

And here I made the snowman, not the little wooden animals:

He is a part of this miniature winter scene that we all made together.  Can you tell what I used to make him?

It's popcorn!  I stuck together three little pieces with a toothpick, and broke off one end of the toothpick and colored it orange to make the nose.  The snow is coconut, and the trees are little bits of Christmas tree stuck in clay.  We had six (!) kids come visit us today, and our little winter scene was played with by everyone!