Horse Mandalas, Colored in My Best Sharpies

The girls have been spending lots of time with this coloring book of horse mandalas that they were given by the publisher:

Mandalas made from horses--who knew? They're basically the perfect mandalas for kids. I've occasionally offered mandalas to the girls to color, because they're so great for those little minds and hearts (So contemplative! So complex! So immersive!), but the girls just never could engage themselves in the abstract patterning.

Horses, though? Now THAT is something that my kids can engage in!

Although the girls both played with crayons and colored pencils and Crayola markers, their favorite tool for coloring these mandalas is--big surprise!--my nice set of fine-point Sharpies:

I eye their use of my Sharpies with narrow-eyed suspicion, since their points are delicate and there have been...incidents...but to the girls' credit, they have much better fine motor skills now, and a much better respect for pricey art supplies. Nevertheless, especially now that the girls have also begun to ask for my even pricier Faber-Castell Pitt pens, I'm eyeing the sales and setting aside money in the homeschool/crafts budget to buy duplicates of the art supplies that I'm fondest of, myself, so that I don't have to clench my jaw and share.

 I was really surprised/pleased at the level of creativity that the girls, especially Sydney, poured into these mandalas--they usually don't get so emotionally involved with coloring pages. For instance, Sydney spent a ton of time on this particular mandala, using both fine point Sharpies and Prismacolor colored pencils, adding a huge amount of detail to each form:

Notice how each unicorn in the mandala is very different? Sydney created them intentionally to be unique, and each unicorn has its own name--Ocean, Green Grass, Fire, and Pink Flower--and its own magical powers, and she now sometimes incorporates the idea of them into her imaginary play, embodying one of the unicorns herself or assigning one of her more mundanely-colored toy unicorns to play the roles.

It's almost like she re-invented the four elements of ancient times and is now exploring them through play.

If one of the elements had been represented in hot pink, that is.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Makeup and Hoop Skirts

a discussion of handmade makeup, inspired by these MuyLinda Collection lipsticks that I bought for the girls

and a tutorial for the hoop skirt that I made out of upcycled wire hangers

My friend Kayte already suggested a mod for this project, which is to use a pair of needle nose pliers to wrap the long wires around the hoop, instead of gluing them to it. Unfortunately, I've actually since abandoned this particular hoop as a no-go for Sydney's Trashion/Refashion Show dress, since it just didn't mesh with the flowy look that we're going for (a look SO spinny-flowy that, four seconds after trying the finished dress on Sydney, I realized that I'm going to have to use the last bit of that vintage silk sheet to make my twirly girl a pair of matching bloomers!).

So...now the kid has a hoop skirt to add to her dress-up wardrobe.

Inside the Glue Gun

In retrospect, there was probably always something wrong with that pink glue gun, the one that burned so hot that when I accidentally squeezed hot glue directly onto the back of my hand almost exactly a year ago while helping the girls make Sydney's Trashion/Refashion Show wings, the liquefied glue immediately peeled the skin off and I STILL have those scars.

This past weekend, making the wire hanger hoop for THIS year's Trashion/Refashion Show, I kept plugging that pink hot glue gun into the outlet back in the study, and it kept blowing the fuse to that part of the house. Weird, but I have, like, a million things plugged in back there (computer, external hard drive, shop light, two sewing machines, etc.), so I moved all my work to the living room, set the glue gun down on the table, and plugged it into the outlet there.

That damn hot glue gun caught fire! Fortunately, I'd make a big enough production about moving my work that everyone in the family happened to be looking at me at the time, and so everybody got to see the gigantic blue flame shoot out of the little heat vents on both sides of the gun. Matt fetched an oven mitt and set the smoking piece of junk (see how I didn't say "smoking gun?" on account of I have too much pride?) outside on the concrete front porch to settle down.

I'm REALLY glad that I didn't happen to be holding it when I plugged it in, or, god forbid, one of the kids, because they use hot glue more than they use school glue. It was clearly a total fluke, so I don't even know what to do to prevent something like that. Buy a more expensive hot glue gun? Set stuff down before you plug it in?

After the hot glue gun had had time to get nice and cold from our sub-zero outdoor temperatures, Will brought it back in, found a screwdriver, and did what we always do with every appliance that breaks on us.

We LOVE to take junk apart!

The insides are a little blue because I tried that crayon trick once. Did not work:

Will reckons that the fire originated here. See how it's all charred?

Sooo...at least that was fun, right? And now I get to go hot glue gun shopping!

Pink + Purple Circle Skirt + Bodice

In the process of creating a pattern for this year's Trashion/Refashion Show, somehow I ended up with this mis-matched, pinks and purples--

swirly-silly dress:

Or is it that kid who's swirly-silly?

The process is also getting a little silly, as I keep going back and forth on the hoop issue and up and down on the skirt length--this poor circle skirt pattern that I drafted has been trimmed and lengthened, um...three times? Four?


This dress WAS meant to be a muslin for the bodice + hooped underskirt of the final garment, but if I don't use the hoop, then I may ditch the underskirt entirely for several layers of petal skirt (and bloomers, because you just know that kid's going to twirl up on the runway!).

Ah, well... I needed to make a circle skirt pattern so that I could draft the petals, anyway.

Be My Valentine 2013

Despite the fact that I didn't do a lot, personally, to celebrate this year, Valentine's Day is one of my favorite holidays. I'm nine years old and barf at romance, and so our celebrations are usually of my favorite, family-centered type. Pink and red are great colors to work with, the heart is iconic, and any occasion that encourages people to send handmade greeting cards, and inspires our homeschool group to throw one of our "class parties," is an okay holiday by me!

Valentine-themed woodworking project at our local Lowe's Build-and-Grow Clinic

These workshops are among my kiddos' favorite activities, EVER. And they're free!!!

making valentines for their pen pals and our homeschool class party

Syd made an assortment of valentines, including a few that I let her make from our building block stash

Will took her cardboard necklace project one step further by using wood discs from our stash

How can you not love a valentine made using POWER TOOLS?!?

I kept my mouth entirely shut about how she scribbled on each disc in gel pen for decoration, even though we have plenty of scrapbook paper and a heart punch that would have been JUST the right size for the discs

She cut embroidery floss and threaded it through the hole in each disc, gave it to me to knot the floss well, then wrapped it around an index card, taped it down, and wrote "From Willow" on the card. And I tell you what, she got a HUGE thrill seeing how many kids put on her necklace right away after receiving it. 

I never regret keeping my mouth shut.

I didn't keep my mouth shut when I asked Matt to help the girls make our traditional Valentine's Day mailbox  instead of me and he instead concocted some weird thing with shipping boxes, aluminum foil, and a box knife, but of course they turned out great, too:

Although, you know, MY mailbox project has a cute little flag with the kid's name on it. Next year...

In fact, other than the party, all we really did THIS year was buy red carnations for the living room

The girls have been such good sports with their lousy-feeling, crabby, tired, humorless mother this winter, however, that I've been keeping my head busy planning some extra-fun activities for us to do now that I'm feeling better (knock on wood!). And those activities may, indeed, involve the colors red and pink, and various varieties of the heart shape.

It'll be Valentine's Day 2: Electric Boogaloo!

Happy Valentine's Day

My girls are giddy with anticipation for our class Valentine's Day party later. Their Valentine mailboxes are ready and waiting (one pink one, and one monster-mouth one), Syd is obsessively remaking several of her Valentines that she this morning decided are inferior in quality, Willow is putting off finishing up the last step of her Valentines and is instead taking apart our hot glue gun that caught fire this weekend, and I'm trying to decide if I have the energy to figure out the pink popcorn that I had wanted to take to the party, or if I should just grab that bag of pretzels from the counter and call it good.

It's going to be a lovely day.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Drawing and Painting

a write-up of the pens that I use to draw on rocks

and a tutorial for remaking ugly scrapbooking chipboard into something that you'll actually use

I painted these particular pieces of chipboard in silver house paint and black chalkboard paint, and as I was working, Syd came over and asked for some chipboard that she could paint for her own, so I set her up with a drop-cloth of aluminum foil (you've got to use something that the paint won't stick to as it dries), and she proceeded to have herself a big time, only accidentally painting a couple of pieces of chipboard in the process:

In the end, as you can see, that chipboard was entirely forgotten for the greater pleasure of fingerpainting on aluminum foil and rubbing deliciously slippery paint around on one's hands, smooshing and squeezing and mixing two delightfully complementary colors.

My big girls have impressed me lately with these types of activities in which they've immersed themselves on our rainy, sleety, chilly, windy winter days, ranging from a giant indoor sandbox in a clear plastic bin on the kitchen floor, to a building block and toy animal zoo that took up the entire living room carpet for two days, to cooperative imaginary games that send them downstairs and back up, outdoors and inside again.

It's a huge relief to have them so happily involved, frankly, since I am astonished, appalled, and outraged to tell you that after an entire day of feeling all better after my weekend bout with the norovirus, I have again been feeling low and puny for the past couple of days. I daydream of warm, fresh air and mild breezes, and fresh-picked salad greens and local fruit. I'm starting to think that my immune system has just about cashed out for the season, and will no longer lift so much as a finger in my direction. 

Schoolwork for the past three or more weeks has consisted of lots of worksheets, memory work, and documentaries, activities that are easy for kids to do while their mother slumps wearily in the chair next to them, or just "closes her eyes for a minute" on the bed beside them. Willow has discovered that she genuinely likes word problems, and is getting exposed to some new math strategies as she solves them, and Sydney is getting very comfortable with adding multi-digit numbers using Base Ten blocks. Fortunately, we'd dialed down to the mammal class in science before my endless crud began, and so many afternoons can reasonably be spent in front of the nine-hour documentary The Life of Mammals.

This leaves the kiddos ample swaths of free time, for their games, and for Sydney to listen to audiobooks (we did all of Peter Pan just this week, and Syd was VERY interested in this alternate, not so flattering depiction of Tinkerbell), and for Willow to play this old-school version of Sid Meier's Civilization that she loves. I'm trying hard not to TRY so hard right now, if you know what I mean, which is very hard for me, because I hate introspection, and I hate not being productive, and I hate not getting things accomplished, and I hate sitting around all day.

And there, now you know a few more of my neuroses--isn't that fun?