Contact Paper is Awesome

So what do you do when you catch your girlies drawing on the window with markers?

Well, you tell them to go get the vinegar spray and a towel and clean up their mess, and then----um, you let them draw on the window with markers? If my kids weren't such rascals I'd never have thought of this cool idea--look how translucent and bright the marker becomes on textured watercolor paper when it's taped up to the window.

That's how you trace embroidery patterns, too, I've heard, although all my embroidery tends to be freehand machine-stitched. I envy embroidery-by-hand people, and intend to be one of them some day.

In a break from mischief, the girls and I used up the rest of my Contact paper making ornaments for our Halloween tree today. I had them paint with thematically-appropriate colors on paper that was also of a thematically-appropriate color, then I cut out two matching shapes from their artwork (with their permission), stuck them back-to-back, and covered them with Contact paper:I also let them color a few small seasonally appropriate images that I found on the Internet (the ban on coloring books is slowly being relaxed, you see, although my intellect remains stiffly against them). I cut around the images, bordered and backed them with patterned paper, and covered them with Contact paper (sensing a theme here?):I made an especially lucky find in this page of leaves, labelled. Willow has put together the concept that the color the leaf turns is based on the type of tree it is, and in a happy homeschooling moment she had me do a Google Image search for each of the labelled leaves to color, so she'd know which color birch, and sweet chestnut, and alder turned. Alder, we learned, can turn yellow:And so basically, yeah, we covered in Contact paper anything that would stand still long enough, then we punched a hole in it and hung it on the tree: I did promise the girls that sometime later this week we could drag out the power drill and drill holes in everything else that would stand still long enough--hickory shells, acorns, birch bark, sleeping Daddy--and hang all that on the tree, too, but the next two big projects that I probably NEED to do are cleaning and organizing the study so that I no longer feel shame at its appearance (a sort of mental housecleaning there, too, you see) and making tied tutus for all the wiggly little children in my life--there are a lot of wiggly little children in my life.

I think Sydney's drawing on the window again: