Y'all, I drank some vodka so that my kids and I could make this project. Friends, I am always working for YOU!
It's October. You need a sugar skull candle holder.
There are skull-shaped vodka bottles for sale in liquor stores.
Let's play!
Supplies
To make your own sugar skull candle holder, you will need:
Skull-shaped glass bottle. I'm using empty Crystal Head vodka bottles (hiccup!), but there are other skull-shaped glass bottles around.
Rust-Oleum Paint+Primer spray paint, heirloom white. I don't love spray paint, obviously, because it's not eco-friendly, BUT this exact color in this exact brand is the perfect bone color.
Paint pens. We used both Sharpie and Beric paint pens. I, personally, preferred the narrower tips of the Beric pens, but both brands show up well and don't flake off or smear.
Directions
Clean and paint the skull-shaped glass bottle. There's a neat trick that you can do to paint a bottle: stick a pole in the ground, upend the bottle over the pole, and get the whole bottle, top, and bottom, in one go! I, however, didn't feel like digging around for a pole, so I just turned the bottles upside-down after they dried and sprayed on another coat. No big deal.
Decorate the bottles with paint pens. Have a lot of fun with this! Draw patterns and designs or focus on one big concept; either way its going to look absolutely awesome.
This is a great project for a kid to do if they can treat paint pens respectfully. Teach them all about the Day of the Dead, let them look at lots and lots of images of real sugar skulls, and then let them be as creative as they like.
If you want to seal your sugar skull candle holder with a clear sealant, you can, but in this case, I don't really think it's necessary. I also didn't want to make my own sugar skull candle holder shiny.
The Crystal Head vodka bottle fits a standard-sized taper candle, and I'd recommend cutting a cardboard circle out of recycled food packaging to fit around the candle so that you're not in any danger of wax dripping onto your beautiful creation.
But whereas the 1970s craze was all about making a string art owl from a kit (which we had), or a string art sailing ship, also from a kit (which we had), you can now do quite a bit better.
A lot of the imagination that you can bring to string art now comes from how simple technology is to use. Can you imagine what my aunt could have created if she'd had access to clip art and a printer? Google Images? A Cricut?!?
Because I promise you that designing your piece is by far the hardest part of making string art, and even that isn't hard. I know you've got access to Google Images and a printer, after all!
So no more kits for you! I'm going to show you how to make string art the completely DIY way--from scratch, by hand. It's going to be awesome. Here's what you need:
Tools and Supplies
Wood, cut to size. I can always find some scrap boards to cut down over in my Garage of Mystery, but other good sources of wood are Craigslist, Freecycle, or your local Restore. Maybe you'll be lucky enough to score a finished plaque!
Nails. For this particular project, I'm using 1 1/4" ring shank underlayment nails. They're a little thicker than you need, but I'm doing this project with kids, and that extra width helps them keep their grip. Feel free to use whatever nails you like and have on hand.
Embroidery floss. This is another supply that you might just find that someone you know would LOVE to give you. There are a surprising number of people in this world who've given up cross-stitch!
Directions
1. Prepare your wood. This step can take a lot of different forms, depending on what wood you choose and the tools you have available. You can use everything from a pre-finished plaque to a pallet board, but whereas that pre-finished plaque is ready to go, but also pricey and unsustainably sourced, something like pallet boards or scrap wood might need to be cut to size and sanded down, but they're free and keep more resources out of the waste stream.
If you're preparing your own wood, don't skip sanding it--if this is one of your first woodworking projects, you'll be surprised at how much nicer your wood looks after it's sanded. My secret trick is to round the edges of the wood piece while I'm sanding it. It won't replace the services of a router, but just sanding all the edges makes the finished piece look more professional.
Staining and sealing the wood is optional, but if you choose to do so, remember to use water-based stain and sealant.
2. Create your template. Create a template for your string art on typing or notebook paper. You can draw freehand, of course, but Google Image is also your friend, and I love using my old-school Cricut. I mean, it can draw me a parasaurolophus at the size of my choosing! How AWESOME is that?!?
3. Nail directly onto the template. Place the template onto the plaque, and then begin to hammer nails right through the paper, following the lines of the template.
Try to keep your spacing and the nail heights even, but don't stress out too much. The one thing that you DON'T want to do is pull a nail out and leave an empty hole. Just work with where you're going!
Watch, as well, for narrow spacing. You can see above how I modified my parasaurolophus, as I noticed while I was hammering nails that some of my spacing--the tail, for instance, and certainly the legs--was going to be too narrow to look nice when wrapped with string:
Try to remember, though, that nobody is going to be looking at your project as closely and critically as YOU are, so roll with any imperfections that come along.
Once you've hammered in all the nails, tear the paper away. I had to get into a few little nooks with a pair of tweezers, but it wasn't difficult.
4. Wrap with embroidery floss. Now for the fun part! Wrapping the nail art with embroidery floss is the MOST fun, and you'll find that even kids who are too young to hammer nails (although don't dismiss their abilities without really thinking about it--you'd be surprised at how young a kid can handle a hammer!) can have a ball wrapping nails with yarn or embroidery floss.
Tie a knot around one nail (secure it with a little white glue to be safe), then wrap the floss around the perimeter of your piece to outline it. Weave in and out of the nails, wrap it completely around some nails, take a break to go back and forth across your piece--feel free to have fun!
Once the perimeter is wrapped, go back and forth across your piece at every angle, with no discernible pattern, to cover the surface area with embroidery floss. After a bit, you'll be able to notice spots that have gaps and you can easily cover those. This takes a LOT of embroidery floss, so be prepared to use at least an entire skein, and possibly more, depending on the size of your piece. Tie the floss off around a nail, and again, dot the knot with a little white glue to make sure it holds.
When you're finished, you can continue to embellish your piece (not everyone I know is as science literate as I am, so I made a label for my string art parasaurolophus), and mount a picture hanger on the back so that you can hang your new masterpiece in a place of honor.
And now you can make another one as a gift for someone else!
For Syd's Girl Scout Silver Award, she wanted to focus on the problem of tweens and teens spending too much time on screens. Syd really enjoys crafts and recipes and likes to follow tutorials to make new creations, so she decided that making a set of craft and recipe tutorials for other kids to follow would be a fun way to encourage them to put down their phones and pick up the cardboard and scissors.
Thus began one of the LONGEST Silver Award TAPs in history. OMG, I had NO IDEA what an involved process this would be, particularly when accomplished by the world's pickiest perfectionist.
First, Syd had to brainstorm and then settle on possible crafts and recipes. Then she had to test each one, discard the ones that she wasn't happy with, and decide on a final line-up. Then she made them all again, sometimes a few times, until she had the perfect process for each one. Then she wrote each tutorial, and went through a few revisions on some of them, because it's tricky to write a tutorial!
Fortunately, tutorial writing is exactly within my very specific skill set.
Syd sent a draft of her tutorials to our Girl Scout troop to be beta tested, and revised some of the tutorials again based on her feedback. As all this was happening, and for the next several months after the tutorials were finished and polished, she was also creating all the art. She went through several drafts to create an original character to model the finished projects, and then a zillion drafts as she drew each of the illustrations.
And, of course, the book needed an overarching theme, both for the illustrations and the cover art and title.
Thanks to the pandemic, the entire book became... apocalypse-themed.
When Syd was FINALLY happy with her illustrations and art, she imported it all into Adobe InDesign and Matt showed her how to do even more edits and make the layout:
When Syd was happy with the layouts, she sent a pdf back out to the Girl Scout troop to proofread, made more corrections based on their feedback, and then made even more corrections after feedback from the MEAN GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION MOMSTER.
Originally, Syd had the idea that she could present physical copies of her activity book to kids, perhaps at day camps or after school programs, possibly with a kit included or possibly in concert with some in-person programming. Obviously that was out, thanks to the apocalypse, so instead Syd created a blog to host free downloadable pdfs of her book, and then promoted it.
Syd still wanted to give out *some* copies, though, so she decided to have a few copies printed and drop them off in Little Free Libraries around town. She wrote a budget proposal and presented it to our Girl Scout troop for the funds, then emailed back and forth with a local printing company to get her order made.
And at long last, Syd had real copies of Crafts for the Apocalypse in her hands!
But only briefly, as off they went into all the Little Free Libraries in town:
I had hoped (and advocated for, and nagged about) the project would be completed and the paperwork submitted before Syd began her public school adventure this week. The paperwork isn't submitted, because apparently none of the brilliant minds in this family are brilliant enough to figure out how to create a multi-page pdf (SIGH!), but the rest of the work is done and the forms are filled out and the essays are written, so perhaps today will be the magical day when the pdf fairy comes down from on high to compile the essays and time logs and forms into one clean and efficient multi-page pdf.
This was the perfect project for Syd, even though it turned out to be way bigger than it needed to be for the Silver Award (the suggested time commitment for a Silver Award TAP is 50 hours; Syd put in over 90, and even then didn't log everything). She got to exercise her creativity, express her love of art and making things, and work through the big challenges of maintaining a giant project independently.
And of course, the fact that her project concluded with a connection to Will's Silver Award TAP is especially sweet to me.
I HATE this pandemic staycation, but it's no lie that it's given me more time to work on Easter crafts, so there's that, I guess...
Also, handwork soothes my anxiety, gives me and the kids something constructive to focus on, and is something fun that we can do together to make some happy memories. So there's that, I guess!
This particular project also fills an actual Easter need that we have. At our house, the Easter Bunny leads the kids on a giant, far-ranging, whole-morning clue hunt that they have to follow in order to finally find their Easter baskets full of treats. To do that, the Easter Bunny likes to use our family stash of container eggs, but the thing is that I do NOT purchase plastic Easter eggs. Instead, I hoard whatever plastic Easter eggs the kids have happened to receive from other sources over the years. But somehow, some of those plastic Easter eggs walk away every year.
This is such a problem, you guys! A few days ago, we got out our Easter decorations and the younger kid helped me sort them. You want to know how many plastic Easter eggs we found?
Five. You guys, five plastic Easter eggs will not keep my kids busy running around on a clue hunt while my partner and I spend the entire morning in bed.
Obviously, we need more container eggs, and we need to DIY them, and they can't take a ton of time to make (I'd make these papier mache Easter eggs again in a heartbeat, because they were so cute, worked awesomely, and lasted for about five years before I finally composted them, but... they ain't quick to craft!).
It took just a few minutes to think up the idea for these little embroidered felt Easter eggs, and not much longer than that to make them!
The vast majority of the time spent on crafting these eggs is in the embroidering, which you don't even have to do if you don't want to. But this is just about the easiest embroidery project you can think of, so if you've got time to listen to an audiobook and hang out with your kids, I highly recommend doing your Easter eggs up all fancy.
Even better, there's an envelope closure on the back that's also quick and easy to hand-sew with your embroidery floss, and it's secure enough to hold a miniature candy bar, a Hot Wheels car... or a piece of paper with a Very Important Clue written on it!
Here's what you'll need to craft these Easter eggs:
felt. Normally, I use Eco-fi felt, which is made from recycled plastic bottles. For special little handicrafts like this, though, I dip into my very small stash of wool felt that I buy here.
1. Cut out one full egg template, and decorate! You seriously do NOT have to have any sewing or embroidery skills to do this. Just knot one end of the embroidery floss, start it from the back, and get to stitching!
If you think your work looks ugly, the trick is to keep embellishing it! Nothing--I promise you, NOTHING!--can look ugly when it's covered in enough pretty embroidery floss.
I did discover that the kids and I had an easier time thinking of cute embellishments when we lightly chalked some curved lines for our stitching to follow. Chalk will rinse right off of felt with a little running water, so it's a good choice for drawing any kind of pattern or template directly onto the felt egg front.
2. Make two more partial egg templates. In the photo below, you can see that I've got one full egg front, and two different egg backs that overlap each other by a couple of inches in the middle:
That overlap is important, because it's your envelope closure. To make it, first pin the bottom egg piece lined up with the bottom of your egg front, then pin the top egg piece lined up with the top of the egg front. Blanket stitch all the way around the egg to make it look like this:
If you wanted to hang this egg, you'd just have to stitch embroidery floss through the top and tie it into a loop.
If you wanted to stuff the egg, you'd just have to cut out one complete egg back (perhaps you could embellish that, too!), blanket stitch the two together, and stuff it before you'd quite finished stitching it completely closed.
The kids and I have a few more of these in progress, and plans to embroider some more together later today while we listen to Dracula (we finished Pride and Prejudice a couple of days ago, and now we get to watch the Colin Firth miniseries together!!!).
I hope the Easter Bunny finds them useful, and that none of them wander away...
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!
I must tell you that my child has turned into one of those teenaged YouTubers. She has a channel on which she posts cartoons that she makes, usually music videos or memes.
Here's my favorite of her little skit-thingies:
Anyway, basically what I'm saying is that the kid has her animation hobby well in hand, and there is no technical instruction that I could usefully provide her on this subject.
But technical instruction is rarely my role, anyway. What I do is contextualize. Historicize. Enrich and embellish. Strew, if you will.
So on a typical Thursday afternoon, after lunch and before everyone starts getting ready for evening extracurriculars, you contextualize and historize a teen's YouTube animation hobby by talking about the earliest history of animation together, and then you make and play with a zoetrope!
I'm obsessed with everything Crash Course, so you won't be surprised that to get started, we watch the first episode of Crash Course: Film History. In it, the host talks about the zoetrope and the persistence of vision, a fun little optical trick that we've played with off and on over the years, although usually with a thaumotrope instead of a zoetrope:
To make our own zoetrope, Syd and I used a DIY zoetrope kit that I had squirreled away (for too many years to be proud of...), but it looks like to make something similar, you'd have to consult something like this book, because all the other DIY kits that I'm seeing now have too much plastic:
Like, I think that you're going to have fun with your zoetrope, but I don't think that you're going to love it so much that you're going to be glad that it's made of sturdy, keep-it-forever plastic and not nearly as sturdy, recycle-it-when-you're-done cardboard.
Anyway, the fun part, at least for Syd, isn't so much constructing the actual zoetrope. It's creating the animations!
If you can get it to rotate quickly and at a consistent speed, it works quite well!
We kept ourselves entertained with that thing for a looooooong time...
Syd and I also watched a video of this, the COOLEST ZOETROPE EVER CREATED:
I love that the 3D zoetrope represents such an intense intersection with art and hands-on craft. There's still place for old-school DIY used with tech-savvy techniques, is the take-away that I'm hoping that my little artist/tech-savvy creator took away from our project.
P.S. Here are a couple of other DIY zoetrope builds that you could utilize:
Seriously, all fall and into the winter, when the kid wasn't doing this--
--she was thinking about it.
How do you get a homeschooling kid to think about something that's not her right-this-minute passion?
Friends, you don't. Instead you just... lean into it. That's the phrase we're using these days for just giving into what you've gotta do instead of griping about it, right?
Fortunately, there are lots of ways to sneakily sneak real-world study skills, handwork, knowledge-building, and practical life activities into a kid's Nutcracker obsession, whether she's a tiny angel bringing light back into the world, a tin soldier hardened from a lifetime of fighting in the mouse wars, a deadly assassin/Baroque-costumed child of the Creature Known Only as Mother Ginger, or a young party guest/spy attending a Christmas party and low-key planning to steal a certain magical nutcracker that turns into a real person and controls an army of ensorceled children and fights giant mice for you.
First step: read the book:
It's plenty weird, and there's a LOT to talk about. There's a ton of plot that's completely different from any staging of the ballet that you've ever seen, so you can use it as a reference to compare to all of the further picture book and theatrical productions that you feel like watching.
Because you should read and watch as many different versions of the Nutcracker as your kid can stand! Syd has gotten progressively more interested in this as she's gotten older, and this year I swear we watched the first act and at least the overture and Mother Ginger scenes from the second act in every Nutcracker ballet available on YouTube--even the desperately amateur productions, bless their hearts. There are a lot of interesting aspects of how different productions are choreographed and staged, and once you've seen a few so that you've got a baseline of a typical Nutcracker production, the ones that have made atypical choices are really fun to find! Did you know that the Bolshoi Ballet casts an actual kid as the Nutcracker doll? There's also a production somewhere in which the mouse soldiers are small children, and some of them get killed during the battle, fall over dead onto their backs on stage, and are then dragged off stage by their fellow mice! It's BONKERS!!!
There's also a production in which the soldiers, including Fritz, LOSE THE BATTLE and are carted off stage in an actual cage. Later during the second act, when the Arabian dance begins, the dancing couple come on stage dragging Fritz by a chain that's attached to a collar around his neck! Because apparently the child soldiers who were captured were SOLD INTO SLAVERY?!?!?!?!?
See? Fascinating stuff!
I also really like these other retellings of the Nutcracker story or the Nutcracker ballet:
Most of those are picture books with beautiful art, and wonderful inspiration to draw your own magical Nutcracker scenes--or perhaps create your own picture book/stop-motion film/shoebox diorama/puppet show/live reenactment?
There are also a ton of backstage, behind-the-scenes resources that can fascinate kids. Syd's absolute favorite ballet book is this one--
--about a kid cast as Clara in the NYC production of The Nutcracker. If your kid actually dances ballet, though, you do NOT want to feed her only on books about the kids who are cast as the lead roles, because only a couple of kids a year get those roles and it's already going to suck bad enough when it's not your kid. Therefore, MY favorite backstage Nutcracker book is this one:
It's about a kid who gets the lousiest part in the whole production, feels lousy about it forever, and then doubles-down into it and learns to find its magic. It's a far more realistic version of what it's like to dance in the Nutcracker, with a healthy, wholesome message.
That being said, it is really fun to watch backstage documentaries. Most do follow the kids cast as Clara, but documentaries often give a more well-rounded picture of the production, so they're not as focused on how great it is to get the great roles. Syd and I watch all of the Royal Ballet videos:
Boston has some crazy sets, so this one is fun!
Here's a video all about the Mouse King, who should obviously be everyone's favorite character!
We also liked this series focused on Nutcracker auditions:
It's related to a bunch of other audition and ballet school and rehearsal videos that Syd also likes. There are a lot of interesting Russian ballet behind-the-scenes videos!
So you've got the story to study, you've got the dance to study... and you've got the music! If you think that the Nutcracker is not playing constantly in our house from October through December, then you... well, you are wrong, because it is playing constantly in our house from October through December. Honestly, it's playing for a good portion of August and September, too, if you count audition prep.
Syd sometimes lets me jazz it up by playing Duke Ellington's version, instead:
Kid-friendly composer studies can actually be challenging to find, because most children's studies don't include classical music. Charlotte Mason DOES, fortunately, so there are some resources around. Here's a good template for a composer study, complete with lots of free handouts, that includes Tchaikovsky.
This video is also interesting, because it takes one song and shows you the main instrument playing at each moment:
This CD doesn't tell you a ton ABOUT Tchaikovsky, but it includes a lot of his music and it's really fun!
So now your kid has studied the story, the dance, the music... but what's the weirdest part of the Nutcracker?
The NUTCRACKER!!!
Seriously, it's a ballet about a NUTCRACKER. My kid doesn't even like nuts, and yet she owns something like sixteen nutcrackers by now.
Mind you, none of them are functional, but there you go.
We like this How It's Made video about the traditional nutcracker form:
And this is an interesting video on the history of the nutcracker and how it all got wrapped up in Christmas, anyway:
And, of course, you know that this would not be a kid-friendly unit in MY homeschool if it did not include a very impractical video of something over-the-top. We are NOT going to be building this giant nutcracker that can crack coconuts for us:
Instead, here are some nutcracker crafts that you CAN build while watching ballet videos or listening to Tchaikovsky!
stenciled banner.I like the idea of a nutcracker banner as holiday decor, and I'm thinking that felt (which I have a ton of) would be just as nice of a penant material as the burlap that the tutorial calls for. You can find lots of nutcracker-related stencils online (I think one that featured a timeline of Syd's participation would be really cute!), but a good art project would be teaching the kids how to make stencils and then getting them to freehand some for this banner.
real nutcracker. We do not have the equipment for this, but if I can ever access it, this is going to be one of the first projects that the kids and I make together!
popsicle stick nutcracker. If you don't have the miniature popsicle sticks that this project calls for, you can cut the larger ones to size.
nutcracker cube critter. These little dudes remind me of the LEGO brickheads, but you cut and assemble them from cardstock.
clay nutcracker and angel. This is a very accessible tutorial, but if you're an able crafter and want to use polymer clay, you can search for some very intricate and elaborate tutorials on YouTube. Or just wing it!
It's strange to think of what a small part of Syd's entire life these childhood Nutcracker seasons will be, considering what a large part of her life they take up right now. Ballet isn't really one of my own big interests, but I never regret the time that it takes, or how deeply I have to dive, myself, to help a kid dive deeper into her passions.
Anyway, now that Nutcracker is over for a few months, it's time for Syd to immerse herself into her designs for our town's big Trashion/Refashion Show. No regrets on this project, either, but just between us, I like Nutcracker more than I like fashion design!
P.S. If you like study resources and weird videos of people making giant nutcrackers and cracking coconuts with them, you'd like my Craft Knife Facebook page!
One of my favorite things to do on stay-at-home holiday days is explore new art supplies and craft projects with the kids. Over Thanksgiving break, we did several hours of origami, for instance, and ahead of us on this peaceful holiday vacation is latch hooking using the supplies that I splurged on this morning (and yes, I DID go to both the big-box craft stores so that I could use both of my 50%-off coupons, mwa-ha-ha!).
We did this even when we traveled for every holiday--I vividly remember introducing the kids to homemade modeling beeswax during one summer visit with my Pappaw, and dyeing dried pasta vivid colors during another Christmas visit a full decade ago. I'd happily give several years off my own life to have Pappaw back, but I will say that it is very, very, very nice to stay home for the entire Christmas holiday now. It's absolutely my favorite thing about Christmas.
On an earlier trip to both big-box craft stores to use another set of 50%-off coupons (Will also needed metallic embroidery floss for her recent obsession with making friendship bracelets, showing that my holiday-break-equals-new-craft-project tradition is passing itself down quite nicely!), I bought a small set of alcohol ink, and then I hit up Amazon for a small pad of Yupo paper, all recommended by this book, Creative Alcohol Inks, sent to me by a publicist:
The day after Christmas, while Will was off reconnecting with her best friend, the public library, after two entire days of it being closed, and Matt was at the gym, Syd and I sat down with a billion supplies and tried to recreate some of the techniques from Creative Alcohol Inks.
Just as with Sharpies and rubbing alcohol, alcohol ink, itself, is a fun process-oriented supply. The Yupo paper, too, is very forgiving, and I was able to goof around with the alcohol ink on a single piece of Yupo paper, then saturate it with rubbing alcohol and essentially wash all the ink off before doing it all again.
At one point Syd looked over at me and said, "Wow, that piece of paper has been through a LOT." Thanks, Kid.
When I was done messing around, I made one of the suggested projects from Creative Alcohol Inks, an embellished porcelain ornament:
My ornament isn't actually porcelain, but a clear plastic ornament coated on the inside with white acrylic paint. Pro tip: that makes it look like porcelain!
While I was playing around, though, Syd was steadily mastering everything about alcohol ink:
We had one mishap associated with the Yupo paper; it's technically a plastic paper, and apparently shouldn't be combined with long blasts from the heat gun that we were using to dry the alcohol ink (because I'm the kind of person who knows where her heat gun is but not her blow dryer #nOtLiKeOtHeRgIrLs).
You can see in the below photo how the corner of Syd's paper is warped from the heat gun--oops! Fortunately, short blasts worked fine, so I did not, in fact, have to go hunt down the blow dryer:
I have a new phone, which was my Christmas present from Matt (OT Question: How many presents do you and your partner exchange? Is it one? Is it five or more? I'm more of a multiple present person and Matt's more of a one-present person, but frankly, I always love my one present from him way more than I'm pretty sure he mildly likes his multiple presents from me. Dude is DIFFICULT to find presents for!), and this phone is amazing! And does time lapse videos! And from now on every one of my blog posts is going to include a time lapse!
So here's a time lapse of Syd's process creating something awesome from alcohol ink, Yupo paper, and paint pens:
How cool is that?!? Please ignore the fact that all of y'all have probably been able to do this on your phones for a decade by now and tell me it's super cool.
I'm really eager for Syd to scan in some of her alcohol ink creations and then embellish them in Photoshop using her Wacom tablet, but on this evening she was was more into hand-drawing on top of them.
Hey, do you want to know that looks like?
OMG, you DO?!?
Okay, here's a time lapse!
You're welcome!
And, fine, here are some still shots, as well, because having a fancy new camera on my fancy new phone doesn't mean that I'm not still obsessed with my behemoth single-lens manual camera:
Here's my finished product, hanging up happily on our Christmas tree:
And here are Syd's favorite two masterpieces!
You might remember that we had some trouble figuring out a good way to seal our tile art creations without desaturating the Sharpies, so I was super excited to see that Creative Alcohol Inks includes the specific supplies and techniques that you need to seal these creations.
Including yet another mention of resin, which I have been seeing mentioned EVERYWHERE lately, and it's making me more and more invested in the idea of buying some and playing around with it.
Perhaps a project for New Year's Day?
I received a free copy of Creative Alcohol Inks, because I can't write about a book until it's inspired me to spend an afternoon low-key sniffing rubbing alcohol and hanging out with my kid.
Origami isn't one of our enduring passions, but it IS super fun, and I'm always stoked whenever something randomly reminds me that, "Hey! We like origami! I should get a bunch of how-to books from the library and make an evening of it!"
This time, it was reading the leader manual for the Girl Scout Cadette Designing Robots badge, and noticing that origami is one of the suggested starting activities for Step 1: Pick a challenge.
Hey! We like origami! I should get a bunch of how-to books from the library and make an evening of it!
Which, with the addition of the first season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (on DVD, also from the library), is exactly what we did:
I busied myself make the stars from Hello Origami, trying to get the folds even and then making myself an entire rainbow. Later, Syd sneaked them onto the Christmas tree for me!
The folds are for sure not even, but whatever.
Will is our origami champion, though. She made the Compass from Modern Kudusuma Origami and made us our tree topper!
We have a nine-foot tree this year, so that star is HUGE!
And speaking of sealing... previously, we've experimented with sealing origami designs with beeswax. The five billion coats of polyurethane sealant that I just put on my lap desk, however, had made me wonder if we could also seal origami that way. I don't know what the benefits of it would be, though, as our origami paper is already pretty archival--perhaps it would stiffen it and make it even more workable as an ornament or in a garland?
Stay tuned!
Here are the origami how-to books that we still have on our shelves:
I want to make the folded box and the lazy Susan. Will wants to make the dragon.
I think the Christmas tree and Santa would make good embellishments for the front of a greeting card. And the Star of David looks super easy!
I am seriously going to try the gift tags before I wrap the last of my Christmas gifts, because I've really been needing a DIY gift tag!
Honestly, we're not going to make anything from this book, but I'm keeping it on our shelves until it's due so that I can pretend like we are. I SUPER want a giant paper sphere made of origami octagons folded as edges!
I thought that Syd was going to go nuts for this origami book all about folding miniature articles of clothing, but she's not into it. Nevertheless, *I* want to fold a couple of the skirts and then see if she'll draw me a person to match.
Okay, we are legitimately going to make EVERY SINGLE THING in this book. It's got a ton of geometric solids, and then interesting extensions of them, and creative embellishments... I'll be fine having this be our weekly math enrichment activity for the rest of the school year.
I think we've got enough to keep us occupied on all of our long, cold winter nights!
