Another thing to do with your kid's artwork

When Lazy Kid painted some lovely watercolor fruits this summer, I knew I was going to have to do something special to preserve them for posterity. One scan, 10 minutes of editing/cutting/pasting, and less than an hour of sewing later, I've got two new placemats for our table.

I used the inkjet-ready, colorfast cotton pages you can find at most sewing and craft stores. I set my printer to print photos at the highest quality, and they turned out pretty sharp:

After I got the Lazy Kid fabric printed, I dug out some of my favorite stash, which I've used to make curtains for my last two kitchens, and which happened to coordinate perfectly with the colors of the fruit. Score!

I sewed strips onto three sides of the art to get it to be the right height for a placemat, then sewed the larger block onto the side to make it the right width. Grabbed some coordinating fabric scraps for the back, found some batting that was just large enough to work, and made myself an inside-out (quilt) sandwich. Stitched around the outside but left an opening for turning, turned it right side out, then topstitched around the edge to help it lay flat and close the turning opening. Topstitched around the Lazy Kid art to help it lay flat, and it was done!

Now, the fabric I printed at home is only "washable," not actually washable, so I'm going to have to Scotchguard the living heck out of these before I let Lazy Kid anywhere near them. But once that's done, I have hopes that these will be cheering our table for the rest of the summer!

Parenthacks: Painting without ruining your table

We're working on a dinosaur diorama, and I thought now was a good time to show how we set it up so that LazyKid can do crafts at our nice cherry dining room table without giving me a heart attack.

1. All craft projects are primarily done on some plastic serving trays I got on clearance at Target. This gives us a place (with a rim in case of spills) that she can be messy, but almost everything wipes off. Even dried-on "permanent" paint comes off with a bit of persuasion. And when we need the table for a meal, we can pick up the whole craft and move it out of the way.

2. I've been using heavy-duty foam plates as palettes for the paint, which lets her mix the colors together but limits the volume of paint she gets at any one time. The foam plates are easy to wash off and reuse over and over ... I just finally got rid of the set we'd been using for the past two years. Now we're using some disposable plastic drink cups. I cut the tops off of them so that each cup is only about 2 1/2 inches deep. This means that they're low enough to be hard to tip over, and again, it limits the amount of paint the kid can have. They're also low enough that LazyKid doesn't try to rest the paintbrush in them, which means she doesn't catch the paintbrush with her elbow and tip them over that way. These are wash-and-reuse items, too. We've also used styrofoam egg cartons as palettes, but that's harder to share among several artists, since all of the cups are stuck together.

3. Lots of paper towels, right there at the scene. It's much easier to clean up a spill if you don't have to run across the room to get a towel. Plus, if the towels are right at hand, it's much more likely that LazyKid will try to clean up the mess herself before asking me for help. We've also had good luck with using up some old packages of baby wipes as craft cleanup wipes.

4. Storage for the paints that makes them easy to carry without dropping or spilling. We've only got a few acrylic paints right now, so they're in a small shoebox that's stored with the rest of the painting supplies in a plastic tote. The plastic tote has all the poster paints, paint brushes, paint stamps, palettes, and stencils, all in one place. When we want to paint anywhere - on the easel in the basement, on the floor in the livingroom, at the dining room table, outside on the picnic table - we can just grab the tote and take everything with us in one trip.

5. Lots of supervision. If I'm not actually doing the craft with her (I helped paint some of the larger diorama figures above), I try to be physically with her at the table while I do something crafty on my own. I've got a number of mindless knitting and crochet projects I can grab to fill in a few minutes while LazyKid paints or works with clay ... things that can be picked up and put down a lot without getting messed up too much. I've found that trying to do things away from the table - like cook dinner or wash dishes - ends up with the kid making more of a mess than if I'm right there.

Hope some of these tips help keep you (and your table) crafty but organized!

Last-minute greeting cards

Okay, so the package to the Lazy Grandparents needed to be in the mail today, and Lazy Kid wanted to make a Valentine's day card to go with it. Glitter glue wouldn't dry in time, so I hauled out Plan B: punching designs in cardstock with a hammer and nail.

1. Put a piece of corrugated cardboard on a solid surface (one you don't mind nicking up a bit if someone gets a little too excited with the hammer), then put the paper to be punched on top. I used regular cheapo cardstock for Lazy Kid's card, and some commercial blank greeting cards for my versions. Make sure you're looking at the inside of the card, poking the holes toward the outside of the card.

2. Use a lightweight hammer to force a thin nail through the cardstock into the cardboard (but hopefully not into the table under it), punching a small hole in the card. Repeat the process, placing holes no closer than about 1/4" apart (much closer together and the paper will tear, and then the kid will cry, and that's not the point of this, now is it?). You can lightly trace a design for the child to follow, or tape a pattern to the paper and remove it when all the holes are punched, or just let them wing it. Or, if you're really dumb, you can hold the nail while the kid hammers, which lets you control where the holes will end up, and also really, really hurts. Don't ask how I know this.

Lazy Kid's card, made with me aiming the nail (ow)

The bumps made by the nail pushing through will be different sizes depending on what size nail you use and how deep it penetrates, so if there's a specific look you're going for, play around with it on a piece of scrap paper before you let the kid go to it.

One of my cards - the outer heart followed a pattern, the inner one was done freehand

If you use a fairly large nail, you could even glue or tape a piece of colored paper behind the holes so the color would show through (and your traced pattern would be covered up), but it's really the texture of the holes that makes this so fun. I've made a bunch more this morning, whenever I could wrest the hammer away from my daughter. I love that our craft session included the sentence, "I want to make another card - where's the hammer?"

Sewing for Lazy Kid

Child's Sock Pattern by Lucy H. Lee, found for free via Ravelry. Knit from Soxx Appeal by Knit One, Crochet Too, I think the colorway was Purple Haze. Fun, fast knit, even if they are done on size 2 DPNs. Gah.

Next up: A bean bag chair with a secret.


It's filled with all of Lazy Kid's stuffed animals, which she never uses for anything, anyway, but won't let me throw out. Hah! Now the kid has a place to sit when she watches videos in my studio, and I have extra room to store toys she actually uses. Not bad for coming from a free pattern and using up stash fabric ... even if I did have to use pins to sew on the bottom and top. Pins are evil, have I mentioned that recently?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I just realized that I have a vacation to pack for, and NO SUITABLE KNITTING TO TAKE WITH ME. The horror! The horror! Must buy more yarn!

Parenthack - how to keep parents from cheating at kids' card games

Lazy Kid has reached the age of Go Fish, Crazy Eights, and various other card-based games. She understands all of the rules and loves to play, but her hands aren't quite large or nimble enough to hold all the cards, so she spreads them out on the floor in front of her. Personally, I don't mind this, because it makes it easier for me to arrange it so she wins occasionally ... but Lazy Husband was getting frustrated because he was trying not to cheat by seeing her cards.

Enter ... the Lazy Parent 6000 (aka a cardboard box with 3 flaps folded inside*):

We use it with the open side toward Lazy Kid so that she can put her cards inside it or on the flap, and the extra surface on top makes a convenient place to put the communal stack of cards so they don't get mixed in with her jumble. The box is tall enough so that Lazy Husband can't see over it, so he can't cheat. Now, if we could just get her to stop announcing the color and number of every "fish" she draws, he'd be on the straight and narrow.

*fairy costume optional

Parenthack - how to keep the sand on the sand art

Last time I did sand art with Lazy Kid she insisted that we hang the resulting work of art up on the refrigerator ... where it then shed sand all over my hardwood floor, despite the Contact paper. Not good.

So when we made new sand art yesterday, I decided to try something different. This time I waited until it was dry, then put the art in a plastic sheet protector (like you'd use in a notebook) before we stuck it to the fridge. Now all of the sand gets caught in the sheet protector, and she can still see her work of art every day. Neato mosquito!

Oh, and in case you were wondering, this time we used watered down glue (about 2/3 glue and 1/3 water), a paintbrush, and gravity to make some cardstock sticky enough for the sand. They turned out pretty cool - this one's my favorite:

Sand Art for Small People

We picked up some sand art kits from the $1 bins at the front of Target a few weeks ago, and they've been a big hit ... except that it takes me longer to peel off all the stickers than it does for Lazy Kid to pile obscene quantities of sand on the resulting sticky patches. And she gets frustrated when the color doesn't go in the tiny little spots she's targeting ... which is why I came up with my own version of sand art that's easier for small kids to handle.

Safety warning: This project isn't for kids who still put stuff in their mouths all the time, unless you REALLY want to be cleaning multi-colored sand-filled poop up for several days. And you don't, trust me.

Materials:
Contact paper (clear or colored)
Colored sand
Optional: scissors and paper, or photos cut from magazines, or other flat stuff to stick down
Outside area to work that you don't mind having covered in sand

Technique:

Cut Contact paper to be about the size of a sheet of printer paper. Peel backing off to expose the sticky side, then tape it securely sticky-side up to a table or work surface. I found it was easiest to use one of my trusty craft trays for this (makes it easier to pick up and knock off the excess sand at the end).

Stick down any paper or other flat things you want to use. If you want to mimic a "real" sand art page, cut shapes out of construction paper and then cut inside them to form just the frame of the shape, so that the child can sprinkle sand inside the outline. Or just stick down pictures, or sequins, or glitter, or random sticks that blow onto the sheet from the windstorm that has kicked up since you started the craft.

Let child apply sand to the sticky parts of the Contact paper.

We still had the sand in the little bags it came in, so I just cut the corner off the bag and let her pour it and spread it out with her fingers.
You could also put it in small bowls and let them use spoons or their fingers to sprinkle it on the paper. You can get really creative with this - put their hand down and sprinkle around it to make a handprint, then fill it in with a different color; trace letters or pictures you slide underneath the clear Contact paper; etc.

When you've finished all the sand stuff, pick up the paper and knock off the excess (and trust me, there WILL be excess). We did this by just picking up the whole tray so I didn't have to deal with floppy sticky sandy Contact paper much.

If you want to preserve the sand art (i.e. not have it dribble sand all over your kitchen floor for the next three weeks), stick a piece of clear Contact paper on the art so the sand is sandwiched between the sheets. If you want, cut the outside of the sheets to be even, or into a shape, but remember - the sand is going to REALLY dull the scissors fast, so don't use your good sewing scissors for this!

If you used clear Contact paper for both sheets, you can hang the art in the window as a suncatcher. Otherwise, it looks great on the refrigerator, or as a small placemat for snacks, etc.

Hope you have fun with this project! Now, let's just hope I can find a cheap source for more sand, because we're going through it at a fast clip around here ...

Awwww...

Lazy Kid shows off some of the results of our craft binge:

The individual-sized-cereal-box puppet, which is significantly more complicated than the construction paper ones that inspired it (find them in Incredibly Awesome Crafts for Kids by Better Homes and Gardens). We added a polar fleece sleeve to make this look more like the "alligator" it's supposed to be ... the hot pink fleece Lazy Kid picked out kinda takes away from the effect, doesn't it?

Next up: Using glitter glue to make prints for birthday thank you cards.

This was supposed to be "use glitter glue to make pictures on craft foam," but Lazy Kid prefers to make huge blobs of color, and I thought those would take forever to dry. So we pressed pieces of paper onto the craft foam and made prints from the blobs, like these:

We got about four prints from each set of glue blobs, and the remaining glue washed off of the craft foam really easily so we can use the foam again next time. We got a couple extra prints by pressing paper onto the first (somewhat globby) print from each series.

Still in process: Salt clay figures, most of which are painted a hideous Pepto-Bismal pink. Yum.

Keeping the kiddy crafts corralled

Lazy Mama HQ was Kid Craft Central yesterday, with no fewer than three ridiculously involved craft projects begun and sorta finished. Go, us!

While we were in the thick of it, it occurred to me that my method of keeping the kid craft projects corralled might be of interest to my readers, some of whom might not have come up with it on their own. Our house is somewhat small, you see, and while we managed to find a small closet to house all the kid craft supplies, Lazy Kid doesn't have a dedicated craft table or anything like that. Instead, she's got sort of a corner of our kitchen counter, and for larger projects we spread out on the dining room table. So being able to keep the craft surfaces clean - and pick them up quickly when we're done - is important to my sanity.

Enter the plastic serving tray. We bought several of these from Target a few years ago, originally as a way to contain the cat food that our messy eaters nudge out of their bowl when they're famished. Then the trays got cleaned up and actually were used as serving trays when we ate out on our patio. And now they've been drafted into duty as craft stations, keeping crayons from rolling off the table, paints from staining the tablecloth, and cotton balls from blowing all over the house when the door opens.

They wipe clean easily, and best of all, when I need room on the dining room table or kitchen counter, I just pitch all the craft supplies onto the tray and throw the whole thing back in the closet. Cleanup doesn't get much easier than that, unless you count the old "fingerpaint in the bathtub and hose the kid down afterward" trick.

So if you're doing kid crafts, keep your eyes on the clearance rack at Target - they change plasticware designs every month or two, and when they do, you can get one of the older designs at a significant discount.