Collecting

Are you a collector?  When I was a kid, my three brothers avidly collected: comic books, bottle caps, license plates and banana stickers. 

Look at what I found in the "secret compartment" of Diego's special pencil box:

I've always seen myself as more of an accumulator than a collector, but now I think I'll start collecting these:

So, what did you collect when you were seven and a half?

Tonight in Our Kitchen

A flubber party!

Our preschool teacher told us that hanging flubber in a plastic strawberry basket and giving the kids scissors would provide hours of fun, as this gluey fluid drips and stretches slowly and cuts so easily.  We also blew bubbles in it, made hilarious noises with it, and watched our hand prints melt away.  It was amazing!

Paper Heart Valentine with Pencil Arrow

Here is a quick and easy Valentine that is fun for kids to make and give out at school:

1. Cut red card stock or construction paper into strips.  (This one is 1" x 11".) 

2. Fold each strip in half and staple it right next to the fold.  Bend the ends back until they touch and staple them together to make the bottom point of the heart. 

3. Use a standard hole punch to make holes on each side of the heart for the pencil. 

4. Thread the pencil carefully through the heart and your note.  It should be a little tight, so take care not to tear it. 

5. Add an eraser tip, tape on a paper fringe for the arrow, and you're done.


We are going to make A LOT of them!

Fortunately, Julio is very interested in stapling and hole-punching these days.  Did you see his hand in the top picture?  He really was my photo assistant this time!

Here are some other Brooding Hen Valentine posts that you might like:
Kissing Thaumatrope
Tiny Bow and Arrow (This project wasn't originally for Valentine's Day, but I see that people are using it for little Cupid's arrows.)


Tips and Tricks:

1. You can make this a lot simpler by writing your note or name directly on the heart before stapling it, and by just sharpening the pencil so that you don't need to add an eraser tip or fringe. 

2. You can make them even splashier by using a shiny pencil, a ribbon for the note, a heart-shaped eraser tip, or adding feathers or other decorations as the fringe.

A Gift from Ruben

Holiday decorating is in full swing at our house.  We will get our tree tomorrow, but the halls around here are already decked with many quirky decorations.  Last week, Ruben made this posable paper Santa toy for our front door, and today he asked me to share it with you.  If you want to make your own, you can print this on heavy paper, punch holes in the arms, legs and body, and use wire brads to put it all together.

Ruben's fondness for Santa runs deep.  He pulled out his old hat and pipe cleaner beard again, and I can easily imagine him dressing up like Santa every year from now until his real beard is long and white.

December Leaves

Do you decorate your house for the seasons?  Here in Los Angeles, the reality of our natural world bears little resemblance to our "seasonal" decorations.  Back when the kids were painting Fall leaves in school, outside the trees were green and blooming.  We picked strawberries and went to the beach.

Now that it is December and the school children are making cotton-ball snowmen and construction paper evergreens, the few deciduous trees that show color are giving us their muted reds and yellows, while the chilly winds kick up their fallen leaves and swirl them about.

It won't snow here.  People are just now harvesting the last of their tomatoes.  In winter our hills are green and in summer they are brown, but our seasonal decorations carry on with daffodils, ice cream cones, falling leaves and snowmen as if the whole world was New England.  I don't mind.  I want my kids to know that in December, children somewhere else are sledding and having snowball fights.

But, last week we gathered some of the prettiest leaves on our block and found a sycamore branch that fell in the wind, and I made a Los Angeles style December decoration for our living room.


Falling Leaves Mobile:  Sycamore branch, Liquid Amber & Ginko leaves dipped in beeswax, transparent thread.

A Play Kitchen Made From An Old Bed!

Here is a very special play kitchen that I made out of an old wooden bed frame:

It started out like this:

It was a little dented and scratched and had a broken leg, but I loved some of the details like this "beehive" bedpost finial.

We cut it up and reassembled it:

I had some ideas for it that worked out especially well, like this olive oil can that I cut open and mounted behind the stove.  It is mainly decorative, but it could also double as a magnet board.  I used some painted rulers along the sides to protect fingers from the sharp edges.

The "burners" are lids from large cans.  I used a can opener that pries the lids off without making them sharp, and attached them to the surface with small button top wood screws.

I added some little drawings with paint pens, like this doorway and a small stop light.

Most of this project was made using recycled materials.  The little picture frame was once an electrical outlet cover.  (I taped two photos to a piece of clear plastic and taped the plastic inside the metal cover.)  That funny hanging mushroom is an old chime mounted on a wooden spool.  Just under it is a springy doorstop that rings the chime.  The spinning stove knobs are slices of a wooden dowel, wood screws and bottle caps.

The sink was made with a steam table pan, plumbing pipes and some old hot and cold bathtub knobs.  Joe hand cut a perfect little matching shelf out of one of the leftover wood scraps.  The beehive shape on top of the bedpost inspired me to paint it yellow and draw some tiny bees on it.  I drilled a hole in it and painted the inside of the hole black.  It was immediately used to gather honey for pretend tea!

This kitchen was made as a gift for some very special young friends of ours who are two and a half year old twin boys.  They love to cook and I wanted to make a kitchen for them that they could work and play at together for years.  It was so fun to build and tinker with, but the most gratifying part was giving it to those adorable little guys and watching them enthusiastically cooking! 

I have to admit, as excited as we were to deliver it, we missed it when it was gone.  But then, just a few days after we delivered it, we found another darling little solid wood bed frame with lots of potential, so more kitchens are coming soon!

If you are considering making a play kitchen, I hope this gives you some inspiration, and if you have already made a play kitchen of your own, I would love to hear about it, so please share your ideas and links in the comments below!

The Monster Game

Here's a simple family art game that we think is so much fun:

1.  Get a piece of paper and a pencil for each person who wants to play. 
2.  Sit so that you can't see each others' papers. 
3.  Take turns giving drawing instructions by naming monster parts for all players to draw on their papers. 
4.  When you are all done, show each other your monsters!

Here are some examples of drawing instructions: Draw a square head, add striped horns, make a mouth with as many teeth as you like, draw a long neck, make a fuzzy body, give it feet but no legs, add six arms, draw some eyeballs.

Here are three of our monsters (Diego's, Ruben's and mine) from the same set of instructions:

So far, we have only drawn monsters, but we enjoy this game so much that I'm sure we'll try it with other themes in the future.  It could be fun with castles, cities, animals, robots, or anything that the kids are loving at the moment.

The idea for this game was inspired by a lovely post on The Artful Parent.