Matt's Anniversary Present: A Smash Book

It's been fifteen years since I, a sophisticated junior at TCU, looked at that cute but goofy freshman at Mike McCaffrey's Anti-Valentine's Day party and thought, "Hmmm...I think I'm going to trick that boy into thinking that it's his idea to go out with me."

And the rest is history, the history of kids and cats and cross-country moves and used cars and visits to the beach and drinking margaritas and watching way too much sci-fi together.

To celebrate fifteen years together, I defaced a vintage children's book, because nothing says "Happy Anniversary!" quite like graffiti and hot glue:

a Before picture: I found a coloring page from "The Last Unicorn" for Syd to color. It's an inside joke that all I did as a child was watch a bunch of weird, dark cartoons, and inappropriate 80s-era comedies that were on HBO, and it's my mission to introduce Matt to all of them

for a while at IU, until they changed their budgetary policies to both boot me out of my associate instructor position (and thus, indirectly, out of grad school) and forbid Matt to work any additional jobs in the university at all other than his current one, he and I did a comic together for the student newspaper. Our friends all appeared, and our parents, and our cats. It's one of my all-time favorite things that I've ever done

The year before we got pregnant with Willow, Matt and went on this CRAZY road trip across three-quarters of the United States. Seriously, we were gone practically a month! We almost got arrested on a beach literally five minutes after getting there, and we kept having to sleep in the car, and we'd eat in these freaky buffets all the time because then we could be full enough to not have to have another meal that day, and I brought along all these travel memoirs of couples that we could read to each other as we drove, but in every single memoir the experience of travel basically destroyed each couple's marriage, and we saw everything in the entire world, it felt like

Matt's introduced me to every awesome graphic novel ever written, except I stopped reading this particular one below when it got really rapey

 Fifteen years is kind of hilarious, because when I look back at those photos from when we were dating, we look like babies

Like this photo of us with our friends. We're babies! We're in my first apartment, which I first shared with this guy friend of mine who later went kind of schizo, accused me of slamming my car door into his every time we were parked next to each other (which I didn't do) AND of replacing his gigantic bottle of Pert Plus with a giant bottle of hand lotion (which I also didn't do) AND sent this threatening letter to my parents telling them that he was going to sue me if I didn't pay him back $250 for all the D&D books that he'd left in the apartment when he finally moved out AND he put a password on our telephone account in secret before he moved so that he could switch the account for free and I had to pay to set up a new account AND he stole that old gold velvet and horsehair couch that we bought together without even asking for it. I loved that couch!!!

I asked the girls to draw pictures of all of us, and to write down some reasons why they love their Daddy. The reasons for both girls generally revolved around activities such as wrestling and treat-buying

I had to look the word "occasion" up in the dictionary, because all of a sudden I couldn't remember how to spell it 

 paint, glue colored with acrylics, text printed onto photo paper, a fussy-cut piece of vintage wallpaper, and LOTS of glitter

more text on photo paper, and vintage sheet music with a few applicable phrases circled in Prismacolor marker

and the cover, which is just a glory of random stuff--paint, stencils, paper doilies, die-cuts, twine, Sharpie, and a few images from the ill-fated original book left uncovered

It was so pleasant to put this book together that I finally understand why some crafters spend so much time scrapbooking rather than performing more reasonable activities like, you know, making skirts out of pillowcases or finding weird ways to dye play dough. The physical present was for Matt, sure, but the real treat was for me, spending weeks reliving all the happy memories of our fifteen years together, suddenly making realizations along the lines of "Hey, Matt has NEVER done his share of the dishes!"

He's always been good at presents, though (except for that fake opal ring in San Antonio business--who the hell gives his girlfriend of three years a fake opal ring on the trip that they're taking to San Antonio to celebrate being together for three years? Don't you think that when you've been dating for three years, and you're on a special anniversary trip, on VALENTINE'S DAY for Pete's sake, and you hand a girl a ring box, and inside it is a fake opal ring, and it's not even a fake opal engagement ring, just a generic fake opal ring, that she might not react with pleasure and gratitude?!?). This year for our anniversary Matt bought ME a panini press, because he knows I'm a big nerd who wants to make paninis all the time.

Seriously, don't you want to come over for breakfast today? I'm making cream cheese, chocolate chip, and banana paninis, and if you stay for lunch I'll even make you a turkey bologna and mozzarella panini. For dinner it's pulled pork and avocado paninis, with strawberry, cream cheese, and powdered sugar paninis for dessert.

Fire and Wax and Inspiration

I know, I know...I post about kids and candles and crayons ALL the time.

But seriously, if you knew how much time my kids really spent goofing around with candles, melting crayons, then you would be shocked that I'm this restrained with my posting.

One Saturday morning, while Syd and Matt were at ballet (and picking up holds at the public library, and interlibrary loans at the university library, and dropping off summer camp forms at the Humane Association, etc.--you know the drill!), Will asked to play with the candles and the matches again, the candles and the matches that she and her sister and their friend had just played with last night after their candlelit dinner (turkey bologna and cheese sandwiches with apples and carrots, if you must know how poorly I feed my children's company).

I set her up with the glass plate that we use as a candleholder, but when I saw that she was really more interested in holding crayons to the candle to watch them melt--another common pursuit over here--I moved her to a big mat board left over from Matt's art school days:

Here's the thing, though--as Willow is working, intently and with full concentration, I'm sitting next to her at the table, making sure she doesn't catch her hair on fire and working on a smash book that I'm making Matt for our anniversary (more on that later). So I'm working on my stuff and watching her do her stuff, and suddenly I'm noticing all those nice puddles and pools of crayon wax, and I'm thinking that they look like those old-timey beeswax seals that you see people put on their envelopes to seal them in the movies, and I'm thinking that I'd love to have some sealing wax and those special stamps to play with, and then I'm thinking that, you know, I've actually got some clay stamps that I bet would work pretty much the same as that...

A few minutes later, and now Will and I are BOTH goofing around with candles and wax. At first, my experiments don't go so well--

But after a while, I do believe that I've got that perfect method figured out: 

And that's what I mean when I'm always telling you that my children inspire my craft.

P.S. I've got that crayon sealing wax tutorial up over at Crafting a Green World.

Power Drill versus Crayons: DIY Valentines

I'm the mean momma who still makes my kids do homemade valentines, pretty much just to save a couple of bucks.

Also, of course, because we're DIYers to the bone, we don't buy what we can make, putting a little effort into a handmade gift makes our celebrations more thoughtful and meaningful, and frugality is a habit that must be constantly cultivated or it slips away.

In other words, I like to save a couple of bucks.

That's not to say that the kids' valentines take hours and hours of painstaking work for them to craft, however. Instead, the valentine work exists on a sort of spectrum. At the smack beginning of February, I tend to set out the materials to make big, splashy, complicated valentines, because the kiddos are super-excited and want to make big, splashy, complicated valentines.

A few days later, and they're perhaps cutting hearts out of paper and writing HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY on them, along with a hand-drawn picture and some stickers or stamps.

The day before the big party, I count out how many more valentines they each need to make, hand them some heart die-cuts, and say, "Here, write your name on these." Done and done!

The following project comes from the BEGINNING of the month of February, when hearts and valentines and complicated holiday crafts are pretty exciting to be starting off with. It also utilizes power tools, which everyone knows by now is something that my Will and I are both big suckers for.

You start by making yourself some recycled crayons. Will made hearts both big and small to use for valentines, as well as big LEGOs and small skulls for an upcoming friend's birthday.

Next, you set yourself up with a power drill, a good work surface, and a big old book or something else underneath your drilling area.

You probably want to put your kid in safety goggles. I evaluated the project, and decided not to require them for this one--with the power drill, it depends on the material for me regarding whether or not I make the kid wear the safety goggles. Wood and masonry and even plaster=goggles. Crayon and beeswax and just messing around in the dirt=no goggles.

Notice Will's good posture here:

She's on her knees on the chair so that her head is elevated above the work surface and the drill, and so that she can hold the drill vertical to the work surface without having to keep her arm at an awkward angle.

She's got a firm grip on the crayon on the far side away from the drill, and she's pressing with just the right amount of force to keep her grip on drill and crayon without losing control:

And then you drill!






I had a better video, but then at the end of it Will suddenly swung the drill up and pointed it at her face so that she could "watch it spin," and in my chastising I may have called her a little redneck and told her that if she put her eye out with a power drill she'd have to be a shop teacher instead of a humane society worker when she grows up, so with that fabulous combo of dangerous tool use and impeccable parenting, I'll just save it to show at her rehearsal dinner or something.

After you drill a hole in the crayons, you'll have a stack that looks like this:

To make these into valentines, Will typed "from Willow" onto cardstock, cut it out and hole punched it, and tied it to each crayon with yarn. 

Not that you need a reason to drill through big crayons or anything, though, because frankly it's just fun.

Even if you're NOT a redneck like us.

Tiny Dancer

Syd doesn't watch a lot of Disney movies, but she does listen to a lot of Disney music. You'll know if a certain musical piece of the Disney war machine is an especial favorite of hers, because she'll choreograph a dance number to it:


I really like to watch these, not only because my kid is awesome and brilliant and dances like an angel, but also because I can see how she's begun recently to incorporate some of the specific moves that she's learning in her ballet program. Syd's been in our local university's VERY expensive pre-college ballet program since the age of three, and it's by far the biggest item in our kid budget. Every now and then Matt questions the expense, but it's my belief that when a kid is legitimately serious about something, she deserves our best provisions for her passion. I'm also the one who enrolled her in and took her to pretty much every OTHER (cheaper) dance studio in town for classes first, including the class in which they danced to Barney songs, the one in which the other kids all sassed and disobeyed the teacher while my big-eyed babe looked at them and absorbed it all, and the one in which five minutes of every class was devoted to, I kid you not, cheerleading practice, so Syd's Pre-College Ballet program, with its dress code and its dedicated pianist and its student roles in the university's Nutcracker performances every year, thrills me, whether or not it's the reason why we eat beans and rice just that many more days each month.

Of course, then I go and let my classical dance-trained kid spin around in circles to Disney songs all day, every day, so what do I know?

Melted Crayon Afternoon

I am actually loving the fact that I don't do craft fairs anymore. Instead of spending an afternoon constructing elaborately-layered crayons mostly by myself, with the girls helping me or playing with each other, now a crayon craft afternoon looks like us all together on the floor, surrounded by the craft crayon bin, the entire silicone mold collection, and an ever-growing pile of crayon wrappers, the stereo playing Sydney's latest Disney Song and Story CD obsession (we get them from our public library or from Spotify, and Syd LOVES them). There's no pressure of perfection, it's much more child-led, and since I don't have a quota to fill, we can stop whenever we feel like it.

Well, unless it's this week, when the girls have got some Valentines to make, and a couple of birthday presents for an upcoming party to craft for--THEY have a quota! And while we're at it, I might as well try out that giant peace sign silicone mold that a friend gave me for Christmas.

Handy Tip: I grab crayons from our big bin, slice each one up the side with an X-acto knife, and put them in a separate pile for the girls to dig through and unwrap:

We've got little hearts, and big hearts, and little LEGOs, and big LEGOs, and little skulls (but not the big skull, on account of it's not a silicone mold, and therefore not oven-safe), and this humongous peace sign, so large that I can throw entire crayons unbroken into the mold:

Two hundred degrees!

You'll notice this change from my previous melted crayons tutorial: I only had to spill an entire mold's worth of molten crayons into the bottom of the oven to learn to put a baking sheet under the molds. You can't fool me more than three or four times!

The skulls and LEGOS came out perfect for delighting a certain little boy at his birthday party this weekend, and the peace sign?

I LOVE it! I need to figure out some way to make it mountable on my wall, and then I'm totally making another one for my pumpkinbear etsy shop. Another one, however, because this one is all mine:

But those melted crayon hearts? Well, they're not quite ready to be Valentines yet. After all, we haven't yet taken a single power tool to them! Stay tuned...

Tutorial: A Kid-Friendly Aluminum Pour

You can do anything with a Dremel.

At Maker Faire Detroit, I hadn't thought to bring my power tool collection with me (silly me!), and so the girls and I scratched out our scratch block for the iron pour with some random hand tools--a butter knife, a quarter, a spoon handle. We love our finished piece, but that was hard, tedious work for a couple of little kids, and I didn't come away from the process feeling like carving a scratch block was a very kid-friendly enterprise.

When our local hands-on science center teamed up with our local hands-on metal sculpture studio to do an aluminum pour, the scratch blocks were available to purchase from the museum several weeks in advance. I bought one each for my girls, took them home, unpackaged them, tossed the huge nails that came with them as a suggested carving tool straight into my Odds and Ends for Crafting bin, and instead brought out my Dremel and its grinding stone bit.

You might think that power tools are too dangerous for little kids to use, but really they give any kid with decent motor skills and a good pair of safety goggles safe and easy access to a wide variety of projects that are too hard, too dangerous, or simply too tedious to perform by hand. Kids like drilling holes, kids like cutting, kids like carving, and kids have big ideas. Heck, that's why power tools were invented!

Nevertheless, I get ahead of myself. At this point, all we have is a scratch block in front of us. Measure your scratch block--


--then draw out several mock-ups on newsprint so that the kiddos can practice their design:


There are two things to remember about a scratch block design:

1. The image will be reversed. This is only a big deal if you're writing words; I had the girls dictate to me the words that they wanted to write onto their scratch blocks as I typed them into our handwriting software program, then I printed them out mirror-image for them to copy.
2. What you carve in will stick up in the final block. You can do some really cool things to play around with depth in your scratch block, although this time everyone stuck to simple single-depth line art, which is fine--playing with a process takes time!

Each girl used a black Sharpie to copy her final design directly onto her scratch block--

(tangent: I love the look of peace on her sweet little face as she works. She is truly a child who thrives learning at home.)

--and then, because hallelujah it was an unseasonably warm day in mid-winter, we took the scratch blocks and the Dremel outside and didn't get dust all over the living room!

Here's what they look like when they're sketched on but not yet carved:

When using power tools, a good, clear pair of safety goggles is the height of fashion:

Using the Dremel with grinding stone attachment as a stylus, set to just perhaps a 1 or 2 speed setting, all you have to do is trace the Sharpie lines:

Have I mentioned how great it is to have a little girl with dirty hands?

Especially when she loves power tools with the same goofy love that I do?

Syd did not feel safe using the Dremel, but she's a brave kid, and so when I assured her that she was safe, and explained that I would not carve her scratch block for her, she gamely gave it a go:

And here's what a scratch block looks like after it's been carved!

Matt is REALLY hard to buy presents for (he doesn't like anything as much as he likes not spending the money for it), but he is an artist, and so a scratch block of his own to carve was my Christmas present to him:

And what did he give me for Christmas, you ask? Oh, just this brand-new laptop! Ahem...

(Hint: I'm REALLY easy to buy presents for...)

After a few days of admiring our scratch blocks, and of studying aluminum as our schoolwork, we all trooped over to the Wonderlab one Friday night to watch the metalworkers pour molten aluminum into our very own scratch blocks:

It's always the process, not the product, for us--having fun bowling is more important than your lousy score at the end of the game, goofing around in shaving cream is just as fine as doing your math right then, etc.--but I have to say that in this case, both the process and the product?

We LOVE them!!!

Homeschool Math: Our DIY Roll to a Hundred Game

I have a strict Montessori-style policy that I do not discourage my children from doing academic work that is "too easy" for them. If Willow wants to play the Jump Start Kindergarten CD-Rom that I checked out from the public library for Sydney, then that's okay. If Sydney wants to spend the afternoon working color-by-number pages, then that is totally fine by me. If Willow suddenly develops a passion for those old First Chapter Books that she first read two years ago, and reads them all again, then good for her!

It's an important part of my homeschool philosophy that repetition reinforces skills, internalizes concepts, and builds the feelings of mastery that reward children for learning, and the confidence to take on more learning challenges.

Therefore, although our DIY Roll to a Hundred Game highlights skills that both my girls have already learned, we LOVE this game! It's excellent reinforcement for number recognition, sequencing, counting, and addition concepts. The unpredictable nature of the roll of the die prepares the girls for future lessons on statistics, graphing, and averages. The coloring requires fine motor skills, and is also graphing, and pattern-building.

Oh, and the game is based on a die, so the little one can win as often as the big one does, hallelujah.

To play Roll to a Hundred, you will need:

• a copy of a Hundred Grid for each person. You can use either a labeled hundred grid, or a blank hundred grid that the child labels for herself--this turns the potentially tedious activity of labeling a hundred grid into a useful activity that a child might choose to do for herself, by the way!
• one die
• crayons

1. Decide who goes first. The first player has the advantage, so it's important to remember to take turns.

2. During her turn, a player rolls the die--

--and then colors the same number of squares as pips on the die:

3. Change crayons each time so that you can see each individual roll on your hundred grid, and the first person to reach one hundred--

Wins!!!

We play such that you have to roll to reach 100 exactly--waiting for that perfect roll gives everyone time to catch up and makes the game a little more exciting.

Ways to modify the game:

• Use two dice, or a 20-sided die, etc.
• Play on a 200 number grid. 
• Play on a number line.
• Play Roll to Zero, where the game is subtraction!
• Multiply each roll by two.
• Assign a different mathematical operation to each number: One must be subtracted, Two gets doubled, Three gets added to the previous roll, Four gets divided by two, etc.
• Have everyone graph their rolls to see how many times each person rolled each number.

It's certainly not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon!