Crafty Goodness

Explore all that Fall has to offer with even more ideas over at the Crafty Crow
This project was hauntingly good and was a nice bit of family fun for one of the first really cold nights down here in the South. ( yes we do consider 42 degrees cold here!)





Our next adventure is going to be in making marbled paper for some holiday gift cards. If you would like to try this...


Materials:
Large cookie sheet
Cheap white shaving cream. NOT the gell type
Assorted craft type paints ( Apple Barrel and the like).
Popsicle sticks or bamboo stick
Paper towels
White card stock paper
cardboard to use as shaving cream squgee.



Spray the shaving cream on the pan and spread it about a half-inch thick and slightly wider and longer than your paper.
Place a few drops of food paint over the shaving cream 2-3 colors that work well together. With the popsicle stick, swirl the colors together and make a fun pattern. Not too much or you get mud!
Press the paper into the shaving cream, making sure the cream touches the entire surface of the paper. Carefully lift the paper from the cream.

Now wipe the shaving cream from the card with a strip of carboard. Your paper will sport swirls of color in a marbled pattern.
Let your papers dry completely before using for a further project.

Crafty cuteness

We are going to be doing a project from the Crafty-Crow tonight.. but in the mean time I thought I would leave you with a photo of the little birthday candle holders I painted this past weekend.

Lost in time

Sorry folks. A death in the family has turned my life upside down and I am just now coming up for air. Hope to be back into the swing of things really soon. I have some really great educational felt projects in mind and want to remind anyone else who is working with Wool Felt this Fall to check out the WOOL FELT links on this blog. There is no place better!!

Maddie

Houston, we have a problem

A quick note via my new lap top.. seems my old lap top has Alzheimer's and can't quite find any file I might need so I am in a funk/panic that I have lost most of my work. Lost as in.. it's in there.. but where? I suspect that I am going to have to do my whole set of instructions over again and it makes me want to put my head in my over.. the only bright side being is that the photos are still on my camera and I have a hard copy of my work to refer to.

Climb Every Mountain

I wish I could say that I was done, but I am not. My proof reader went out of town and sure as shootin' if I publish without his eagle eye I will end up making a fool of myself in print. I do it often enough in real life. So just hang in there, ... we are so close and to reward those who have waited I will be hosting a give away of one of the kits and a few other wool goodies.

Thanks for your patience.

Soooo soo close.. and a little peek

We had some great weather today despite two rather impressive bursts of rain. Between the storms the sun and the sweet birds singing all but made up for my wet basement. The sunny break also gave us time to get out on the front porch and get some photos of the kids in action working on my newest pattern for introducing quality crafts to children. I strongly believe that children should be crafting with the same quality products available to adults and that their projects should have the goal of being just as beautiful as well as useful.

The Vintage Scissor Keeper pattern meets those goals and was inspired by our homeschool reading about the pioneer and Victorian women who cherished their scissors as precious positions to the extent that they often wore them on a Chatelaine or at the very least kept them in small pouches to protect them from harm. I hope to install in my children such reverence for the tools that they use. A start to that was creating a special holder for their 7inch student size scissors.

Above is a peek at one of the "keepers" that my boys made today with more to come along with the pattern in PDF format. I will also be drafting a pattern for standard size adult sewing scissors and a pattern for small "stork style" embroidery snips.

This project fits into multiple different kinds of lessons.. early tools- including the history of scissors or perhaps you are working on measuring? This project has a strong emphasis on correct measurements as a way to assure pleasant and reliable crafting results. History? why of course! Scissors and sewing have played a strong role is history, after all, Betsy Ross didn't weld the the flag did she?.. no she was all about the needle and thread and you can be too! So check back in the next day or two, we are sooo close!

What a cut up!

One of the biggest boons to the creativity of our homeschooling has been getting the Sizzix Die cutting machine. While not cheap it was far less than some curriculum I have bought and I did get it for 50% off with a Michaels coupon from the weekly paper!.. I use the other weekly coupons and watch the sales to buy various dies since they go on sale at least 1x per month.

This month I picked up the little peek-a-boo booklet die and it's been great to use. In this example(from Sammy age 6 ) we used it to show all the types of Native American homes that we learned about this week. They are small but turn out of be just the right size for many small images and multi-stage process lessons ( stages of a frog.. egg.. tadpole.. etc)

If you have a die cutting machine give it a try!