Kids' Card Making: The Paper Doll Card

The cards for the girls' Kids Craft Weekly card swap are all finished up, and the monkeys are sitting at my feet right this minute writing up some semblance of a signature and holiday greeting (after one card, Willow abandoned her planned "Happy Christmas to all" as too time-consuming and began to make do, instead, with "Will"). When they're done with that, it's the momma's job snap a photo of the two angels looking angelic together and send it to the dadda, whose job it is to add my blog address to the bottom of the photo and print off ten color copies and bring them home to the babies, whose job it will be (with the momma's supervision) to stuff the envelopes and seal them, and then we'll all go off to mail them together.

I had planned to sneak in some geographical learnin' this week all about the places that the cards are going to--everywhere from Australia to Ohio--but I have the sneaking suspicion that I'll be unable to peel the children's eyes away from anything overtly CHRISTMAS!!! this month.

This set of paper doll cards was extremely time-consuming to make, but the girls LOVED it, and worked absorbedly on the activity until they'd run out of doll clothes, which I couldn't cut out from the Cricut as fast as they could glue, especially with all the turn-taking and choosing of scrapbook papers and outfit choices, etc. etc.

You can do this kind of card with any sort of homemade or boughten paper dolls, of course, but since the girls and I happen to be obsessed right now with our new Paper Dolls Dress-Up Cricut cartridge (bought for a song during a Michael's doorbuster, at least, and well worth it), that is of course what we used.

It's tricky to get exactly the right size of paper doll with the Cricut, however, if you're measuring by width, because the Cricut offers measurements only by length. For instance, I didn't particularly care how tall these paper dolls were, but I did need them to be a little less than 3.5" wide, because I wanted our cards to fit in standard envelopes. So I actually had to experiment a little with various heights until I discovered that a 5"-tall paper doll is just a smidge less than 3.5" wide. Fortunately, the girls were happy to take over my mis-fires.

The nice thing about the Cricut, however, is that once you know the height of your paper doll, you can just input that same measurement to cut out all the clothes and accessories that are proportionate to that doll, so I could use 5" for everything from the hairbow to the Christmas tree. I don't use that feature as often with the font catridges, because if I want a single lower-case p, I generally want that p to be exactly the size I want it, not proportionate to the upper case P that I'm not going to print, but with the paper dolls cartridge, it's an extremely useful feature.

I've been playing with using the Cricut cut-outs as templates for making paper dolls and clothes out of recycled papers like magazine pages or comic books, and I have some big plans of also using them as templates to cut out some things for the girls' big felt board, but these Christmas cards are all done with scrapbook paper:
I tried to plan for the cards to be at least winter-themed by asking the girls to choose clothes and things that someone would use in the winter. Sydney was really bad at this, but with her, you never can tell if she's not doing something because she doesn't understand the concept, or because she'd just rather do whatever the hell she wants--either way, it's an activity to repeat a few times. Will enjoyed that aspect of the game, however, and came up with some fun cards:

The card swap is for children of all ages, and whereas when the girls did their Artist Trading Card swap they were sorted into a group of age-mates, here I think that at least some of their partners are quite older than they are. For that reason, I did want the cards the girls' sent to be fairly neatly done and reasonable as Christmas cards, and so although I obviously didn't direct or criticize their work, I did sort the cards into a small stack for the swap, and a biiiiiig stack to send to our own family and friends.

Grandma Beck might better appreciate Sydney's card, which consists of about 40 items of doll clothes glued smack on top of one doll with a big mound of glue, which was then colored on, than some anonymous ten-year-old in Canada might.

When a three-year-old works for most of an hour on ANYTHING, I don't care what it ends up looking like--it's automatically a masterpiece.

Paper Dolls, or, Ode to My Cricut

On Thanksgiving Day, after a DELICIOUS early Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy-schmancy local restaurant (Sydney was all, "Why does that man keep give me more water?" I'm all, "That's a waiter, sweetie"), we finished just in time to load our full bellies into the car and drive across town to the Michael's store, which was opening with its Black Friday sales that Thursday from 5-8 pm. I had the sales flyer, which listed one of the doorbusters as Cricut cartridges on HUGE sale, and an additional coupon for 25% off my total purchase, and additionally, I was stoked that I wouldn't even have to consider waking up early on Friday.

We get to Michael's just a couple of minutes early, and there's a line waiting for the store to open, but up we trek in our fancy clothes, happy to just stand around and digest for a bit. A few other people line up behind us, and then this other lady walks up, and as soon as she gets to the back of the line she starts announcing, over and over, to whoever is listening, I suppose, that she can't believe that there's a line to get into Michael's. She just happened to drive over to pick up a few things, she announced, because she just happened to notice that it would be open, and she never dreamed that people would actually line up just to get in. She didn't even know what was supposed to be on sale, even, and look, she's just wearing the same clothes that she wore to make Thanksgiving dinner.

When the doors finally opened, Matt swears on his life that she shoved him trying to get inside.

I've never been to a store right when it opened for Black Friday before, and it actually was a little hairy, because I guess everybody wanted these pre-lit artificial Christmas trees that were stacked right by the door, but the beauty of being on a team is that I left Matt and Syd to grab a cart at their leisure and negotiate their way in, and Will and I dodged past the tree-hoarders and jockeyed for position in front of the Cricut cartridge display.

The other middle-aged female scrapbookers were sweet as pie there, of course, but were grabbing up cartridges like CRAZY, so Will and I basically grabbed up whatever we were even halfway interested in, too, and then took them all over to a quiet place for a closer look. I was plenty okay with the prospect of walking my unwanted cartridges back to a sales clerk for the opportunity to browse in peace.

I made some very careful choices, spent my entire remaining Cricut allowance (I'm relying on my swagbucks for my Cricut upkeep allowance), and ended up with some cartridges that the girls and I are THRILLED with.

And, obviously, they're the nerdiest of the cartridges. We turned up our noses completely at all the Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh nonsense, and ended up with, along with a couple of awesome fonts, a cartridge that has maps of the continents and countries and various icons from those locations (including lots of farm die-cuts, Willow was delighted to see--now we can make a silo!), a cartridge that does maps of the states AND their correct flags AND their correct birds (this was one of the cartridges that made me want to buy a Cricut in the first place, I'm that big of a nerd), a cartridge that does a massive menagerie of animals, and a cartridge that does paper dolls.

Hell, yeah. A cartridge that does paper dolls.

It organizes them by all these random costumes, so there's a bride and groom, for instance, and a cowboy and cowgirl, and a caveman and cavewoman (I know--whatever), and for each costume it's got a couple of options and some hair and some random stuff that would go with that costume. So, you can cut out a wedding dress for the bride and also a three-tiered wedding cake, and for the caveman you can cut out a volcano and also about four different dinosaurs (hmmm.....who do I know who loves dinosaurs?)

Needless to say, we have been playing with this cartridge ALL WEEKEND.

You can put the paper doll tabs on some of the clothes, but not, you know, the wedding cake or the palm tree or Santa's sleigh and stuff (did I mention that it has Santa and Mrs. Claus and an elf, and the requisite sleigh and reindeer and junk?), so the girls actually prefer to play with everything laid flat on the table, in these little two-dimensional scenes, and they've snookered me into cutting out for them tons of different outfits from scrapbook paper.

Here's one of Sydney's favorite outfits:
It's the shirt and pants to the groom's tuxedo with Frankenstein's hair, I think? And obviously, drawing the features on the doll itself is something of a highlight.

Here's Willow's favorite doll and outfit so far:

I'm not sure why all their doll selections manage to look sort of ghoulish AND sort of tranny chic, but there you go.

Oh, and the woman in the line in front of Michael's? Matt claims that she was checking out at the register next to us (an hour after she went in? So much for "just dropping by for a few things"), and he could hear her telling the cashier all about how she was so surprised there were so many people rushing in here on Thanksgiving, she just happened to be there herself and couldn't believe all those people standing in line before the store was even open, etc. etc.

Yes, lady, it's one of the lamest things a person can choose to do, to stand in front of a Michael's before it's even open, waiting to buy scrapbooking toys, but if you're gonna do it, hell, you might as well own it!

I wonder if I saw her again when I went to Joann's at 7 am on Saturday for THEIR Cricut doorbuster?

A Family Block-Building Enterprise

Our little town's Christmas lighting ceremony, in which the mayor turns on for the season the lights that extend from the courthouse to the roofs off all the buildings on all four sides of the town square, as well as the seasonal streetlights and the Christmas trees sponsored by various charities, has something for every kid. If you're a big kid who's way into the lights and the ceremony and the festivity, then that's what you've got in spades:
However, even if you're a little kid, and you're mostly just about "What is going on right NOW and how will affect ME?"...well, the guy who hands out the programs also has an ample supply of candy canes:We actually stayed in town for Thanksgiving in part, this year, so that Matt could go into work on Friday and save that extra vacation day. However, the Alumni Association unexpectedly (at least to Matt--I'm never quite sure how knowledgeable he is about basic company info like that) closed its offices on Friday, so we've had an extra-long holiday with our man, and we have all been THRILLED. The weekend's not even over, and not only has he cleaned the gutters and enabled me to go shopping ALONE and put up all the Christmas lights, but I can tempt him into staying up late with me much easier with nowhere to be the next day, and he can tempt me into goofing off for long periods of time much easier, knowing he'll be around to help out later.

Matt and I together are even bigger nerds than we are apart, so when we all got out the girls' ridiculously large number of building blocks (seriously, it's ridiculous, and yet if I walked into a Goodwill 50%-off storewide sale tomorrow and saw another thousand, I'd buy them in a heartbeat), while the girls did normal stuff, like build themselves a block city with block buildings and block people and block cars--
--Matt and I had to use the crazy-fancy Kapla blocks I bought years ago at a Wonderlab sale (if you're a block nerd like us, Kapla blocks are where it's AT!) to build a tower that touched the ceiling:Seriously, it touched the ceiling. Here's the view from up there, courtesy of Matt standing on a chair and holding the camera up above his head:I wanted to leave our tower up all night, but Matt feared a middle-of-the-night bathroom trip or curious cat rub that would cause everyone in the house to bolt upright in their beds, so here's the rapid-shot view from my camera, which can take several photos per second:
My favorite part is the expression on Matt's face. Yeah, if he's going to look like that and he KNEW the crash was coming, we were right not to risk a middle-of-the-night demolition.

Kids' Card-Making: The Collage Window Card

It just wouldn't be Thanksgiving without the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV!
It's so fun to have the kids at these ages, because they don't have a huge memory for most things. Therefore, remembering, myself, how delighted and surprised they were to see the huge balloons in the Macy's parade on TV last Thanksgiving, I had my camera ready to catch the new delight and surprise on their faces when they saw the balloons this year.

They didn't really recognize any of the characters that the balloons were supposed to be ("CheeseBob!!!" shouted Willow, when the Spongebob Squarepants balloon came around a corner), but just the concept of HUGE BALLOON is apparently enough to thrill a kid.

Of course, in other ways it wasn't a typical Thanksgiving at all. For instance, our nice big library table, instead of being set for the traditional meal, spent the day looking like this:
All the better to spend the day making Christmas cards with, my dears.

It's been fun to try out several new and different card-making strategies with the girls this month. Some--the window card in which they create their own cut-outs, the window card in which they paint one panel with watercolor paints so that it can show through the window--are complete failures. Others, such as this window card that uses strips of wallpaper in a behind-the window collage, worked great for the five-year-old, the three-year-old, and the 33-year-old.
When the girls do art, of course I like to keep the level of instruction as minimal as possible and just let them go to town with whatever art materials they've got (while keeping intact the rules about not contaminating the paint jars with other colors, not marking on someone else's work, etc.). Even when we do something like this, which is really more of a "craft," I still like to keep the number of instructions and step-by-step directions and parent work down as far as possible. I don't like children's work that is too crafty or obviously parent-directed--there aren't just a lot of ways to make a Santa out of an upside-down white handprint and some red construction paper and googly eyes, ya know?--but I also would like the children to send some Christmas cards that can be recognized as Christmas cards by anyone, not just her parent who can interpret the scenario under which the smear of orange tempera on a playing card was created.

For a full-on collage window card tutorial you can check out my tute on Crafting a Green World, but it really isn't that hard to figure out: tri-fold card, cut-out window, artful collage across that window--

--and a judicious amount of white glue.

And then, once we've got a few of these under our belts (two for Will and one for Syd is about the limit), plenty of time to make even more cards out of leftover wallpaper scraps, pink cardstock, the hole punch, and an extremely generous amount of white glue to hold it all together.

When Cursive Handwriting Comes to Play

Even before I had Montessori girls, I looooooved the Montessori garage sale that the school holds every spring--in the National Guard Armory, it's so big. At a garage sale hosted by a fancy-pants private school that's at the same time so child-centric and child-led, you can expect to find loads of not just once-expensive snowsuits and excellent books and all the other stuff wealthy parents provide for their kids, but wooden toys and dress-up clothes and well-cared-for board games and puzzles and craft kits and fabulous educational materials, as well.

Last year, among some of my random (and REALLY cheap purchases--another benefit to the sale is that parents work it, and some of them have NO IDEA how to price thing) purchases were a drill-operated lathe and a complete set of large cursive sandpaper letters, mounted nicely on wood. I had figured that I would either end up crafting or decorating with these letters, or that they'd come out to play only much later in my children's lives, after, you know, they both knew their print letters, for instance.

However, Willow found this alphabet during the massive study/studio reorganization and asked that they be put as a choice on the shelves in their bedroom. I complied, and there they sat for an additional long while, but this weekend I guess the urge finally hit (don't you know that feeling?), and Willow suddenly came up with a slew of activities that she wanted to do with the letters.

Since Willow doesn't know her cursive a from her cursive z, Momma got to help, and it was quite fun.

First, Willow wanted to make a "long line," so I gave her the letters, one by one in alphabetical order, showed her how to trace it with her finger (sandpaper letters are big in Montessori, so Will has this concept down cold), had her tell me what sound(s) the letter makes, and then she put it in its place in the line:
There were a few moments of angst when it was discovered that t was missing, but at last it was found, safe and sound, in the car (?).

Then Will wanted to play "games" with the letter line, so while I sat all nice and comfy down past z, I'd tell Willow what letter I wanted her to point to, then release her to run as fast as she could down the line, point to the letter, and run as fast as she could back to me, where I'd catch her:
After a while this transitioned to me spelling out a simple word (bed, say, or cat) and sending her running to point to all the letters in order, then after she ran back to me and I'd caught her she would sound out the word she'd just spelled.

And all I had to do was sit on my butt!

Will's next big plan was to draw all the letters on a really long piece of paper. The really long piece of paper we had (of course!), but I wasn't sure if Willow had yet seen in her classroom how you could do rubbings with the sandpaper letters, so I showed her how, and it was such a big hit, waaaaaay more satisfying than leaf rubbings for little hands, that drawing all the letters was immediately abandoned and instead each letter was traced in its place on the long letter line: Each in a different color, of course:

And after that I foisted off on Matt the next project, which was to write underneath the line, in handwriting "very pretty," the verse "Now I know my ABCs; next time won't you sing with me?".

And then Matt made us popcorn and margaritas (virgin for the littles, saucy for the bigs), and we all got into bed and watched the old-school Doctor Dolittle until half of us fell asleep--Willow and I, unfortunately, which was probably not exactly the half that Matt had planned on when he made me a nice margarita, but what can you do?

Tonight perhaps we'll try an early bedtime for the littles, and THEN margaritas.

Turkey Cards from Monkey Girls

Here's what we did with the hand turkeys: While the girls were at school, I scanned their turkeys, re-scaled them to 4"x5", and printed them in color on plain typing paper. I cut down a piece of 8.5"x11" cardstock to make a card about 5"x7", and glued the turkey prints to the fronts of the cards. They still needed a little something-something, so we used our letter punches to punch the word "TURKEY" on the front of each.

In case, you know, you couldn't tell what you were looking at. Which I admit is a distinct possibility.

We might use this same format for at least a couple of the Christmas cards that we'll be making this week for the Kids Craft Weekly handmade card swap. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to have the girls start making cards before we got our recipients list this morning, but the girls now have until December 1 to make ten cards, so I'll be thinking today about how to set up the activity so that it does NOT resemble a sweatshop.

The girls desperately wanted to give all their cards to friends at school, but I forced them to write out a bare minimum (in our house, that generally equals 2) to actual relatives. Can you tell which relative this one is for?

Okay, if you were up to that challenge, here's a way harder one. Can you tell which relative this card is for?

Happy Thanksgiving, Uncle Chad!

Which Photo Will Win?

For some reason, I really enjoy the photo contest that our local newspaper runs every year. They always have some theme, and tons of people enter, and it's never totally clear by what exact criteria the photos are being judged, but everybody gets to be in the online photo gallery!

I missed out on entering for the past few years, but the last time I entered, in 2006, the theme was Christmas (or Winter? Or Winter Holidays? Surely not Christmas...). Anyway, here is my photo that was given an honorable mention and published, in the NEWSPAPER, on CHRISTMAS DAY:It kills me that I used to get to snuggle with kiddos that young.

The theme for this year's photo contest is Down to Earth, soliciting photos that depict "some aspect of the natural or built environment in the state." They have to have been taken in 2009, duh, and in Indiana, duh, and it's a little vague exactly what sort of photo manipulation is allowed, but to be on the safe side I kept it pretty vanilla. I also added my own personal criteria that I wanted either one or both of the children to be in the photo, but that the photo shouldn't focus so much on the child, but on her environment or, better yet, her interaction with her environment.

Here are the seven that I've narrowed myself down to, in chronological order with the year, from Monroe Beach in February to Anderson Orchard last month:Beyond that, however, I'm having trouble deciding. Which do you like best?