Heaven help me, I let my children use glitter yesterday. We made some 2011 sparkly window signs. You're supposed to use Contact paper, but I didn't have any, so I sprayed craft glue on some clear plastic instead. It was good enough. Now I've got a birthday party to put on by the end of the week. It's going to be more play oriented than the ( Read more... )

I have wanted to let the girls paint walls in the house.  Here, we approximated that by letting them paint walls in their own house.  I got my hands on some large slabs of insulation and the girls helped me build a house out of them.  First, wash,


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Here's an early dot-to-dot we did after seeing something similar on a Thomas & Friends video.  I draw the shapes with dots, and she connects the dots.  We do this with letters or pictures or numbers.  It's a fun exercise in hand\eye coordination for her, and she also gets to guess what I was trying to draw.   Unlike a conventional dot-to-dot, there ( Read more... )

My 1.5 year old little one has a couple of pairs of pants made from adult sweater arms. In this shot, she's wearing one I especially like because I used the sweater's buttoned neckline for the waistband, so I do up her pants by buttoning and didn't have to add any elastic. Of course I only managed to get a rear shot though. poo. See the elbow ( Read more... )

I have less pants in the 12-18 month size than I want. So after I cut up an old velour hoodie to make a fitted diaper out of, I had sleeves left over. I took a page from the technique for making wool longies (diaper covers). I made pants for her out of the sleeves. Perfect idea as most of the sewing is done for me already.


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This year, I've made a real effort to mark the special family events such as birthdays and anniversaries with some kind of gift.

My sister's wedding anniversary hit on the same day as the patent of the zipper. So naturally...

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Inspired by "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle
All you need is a cereal box or two, a hole punch, a pipe cleaner (or yarn or shoestring), and crayons.

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I have a Xyron laminate/magnet/sticker tool. I bought it when I was unencumbered by children, but am getting the most use of it while making magnetic puzzles and laminated booklets for my girls. The instructions say to put items in the pick-up tray close together to maximize the value of the cartridge as you roll things through it. But whenever I ( Read more... )

Here are a pair of Lolley's favorite pants. They had a couple of little snips in the side of one leg from her mad scissor skills, and she'd grown a bit tall for them, but while I was mending other clothes, I decided to go on and fix them too, so I put some red faux fur on some stabilizer and put the pants on top and stitched two of those little ( Read more... )

This is from January.


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