Paper and Wood and Felt

The kids spent the entire morning together playing, coloring horse pictures, and guzzling yogurt, leaving me with no other excuse than to spend all morning doing some really nasty, disgusting cleaning. I excavated out a few layers of dishes in the sink, organized the basement playroom, did a million loads of laundry, vacuumed, repaired the vacuum cleaner, cleaned out the refrigerator, found the missing library CD, picked up clutter, etc., while the kids just carried on taking turns and sharing and entertaining themselves, cruelly not rescuing me from such misery. Unfortunately, unless you had a "before" photo to compare the house to, it's still so messy that you wouldn't actually be able to tell I'd done anything at all. But I feel all gross and depressed now, so I guess that's something accomplished!

I'm not one to collect a ton of stash--honestly!--but when a craft store does offer a big sale on an item that I know I use a lot, I do like to stock up. Thus, Joann's 40%-off sale on felt-by-the-yard has had me going there TWICE to buy basically a yard in every color. It's not wool felt, but made entirely from recycled plastic bottles, which I think is absolutely terrific. Sure, wool felt is natural, and it does shape a little better, especially with a steam iron, but I'm opposed to factory farming, and organic wool felt is WAY out of my price range. Anyway...felt made from recycled plastic bottles? Awesome!

I've written before about making felt food with the kids, and next week we're going to make our felt board for the big playroom with lots of felt cut-outs for it. I mostly want to make geometrics and math symbols for them, but I've got enough white felt that the kids can draw on it with markers and cut out their own felt pieces, and I'm thinking about experimenting with my Bubble Jet Set to try to run some felt through the printer--I could print scanned characters from their favorite picture books, perhaps...

Another project the kids and I have been into this week is making animals from these old library FormWild CD-Roms. It's a set of 5 CD-Roms with pdf images of animals--you (not the kiddos--this is one of those projects you do out of their sight because it's way too fiddly and exacting) print them onto cardstock, fold and glue them according to the instructions, and you have three-dimensional stand-up full-color realistic-looking animals to play with! The best part is that there is about any animal that your kids would be interested in, from insects to dinosaurs. We're systematically checking the disks out of the library, and so far we've made every single fish stand-up, two of the horse, and the dinosaurs are in the works. I like to use them to tie into whatever subjects the kids are interested in exploring at a certain time, so I haven't shown them the insects, farm animals, or endangered species yet, and we haven't yet checked out the birds or mammals--but we will! The super-coolest thing, though, is that since the images are pdfs, they expand to scale. The web site says you can print these babies up to eight feet wide and they'll still look good and be constructable. It's been years since I've been to Kinko's, but it's got me thinking--how cool would a set of eight-foot dinosaurs made out of foamcore board be? So cool.

Another so-cool thing? This Web shop, Casey's Wood Products--I've seen it mentioned on more than one blog, and yes, it is so, so cool. The whole site just consists of little wood thingies to buy--die-cuts in a million shapes, pegs and spindles and spools and blocks, game pieces, beads, buttons, wooden fruits. Seriously! Unfortunately, the die-cuts are just made from "plywood" (whatever that REALLY is) and most of the turnings just say "wood"--I would have preferred a definitively eco-conscious material--but the options are really awesome. I could possibly splurge on some of these dinosaur die-cuts for the kids for Christmas--they'd love to color and play with them. But how awesome would these game pieces be for making up your own board game? And bowling pins? And these are turnings you can paint as little people!

Finally, here are a couple of Christmas gift ideas that I'm sussing out for the little kid:

• a learning bike like the one I want for her sister


• a non-plastic dollhouse


• enough colored pencils to last two kids for an entire happy childhood


• cool alphabet tiles that also have braille

Or, you know, 90% of the stuff in my Pinboards or my etsy favorites are stuff I really want for my kiddos. It's weird--I don't even remember what kind of stupid junk I wanted before I had kids. Plastic 1980s-era action figures, probably.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!