I haven’t taught my children to sew. It’s horrible I know. I cook with my kids and make art with my kids all the time, but sewing I’ve always kept for myself. When sew mama sew sent me the book, A Kid’s Guide to Sewing, I figured it was high time I started  sewing with my kids too.

My daughter picked the backpack charm project in the book. You could choose between making a flower or an ice cream cone. Even though I tried to get her to think of something else (kitty? donut? bike?) she was dead set on the ice cream cone.

All the templates in the book are very sweet and hand drawn, but I urged my daughter to create her own pattern.  The book is actually written by an 11-year old (well, her parents helped a lot), which makes all the projects feel much more approachable for a kid–and doable!

Then she cut the pattern out, traced it on felt, and cut out all the felt pieces.

To make the cone look more like a cone, I showed her how to do a simple running stitch. She immediately ran off and came back with a piece of chalk. She wanted to draw lines on the cone to guide her stitching.  Turns out that I have been teaching her to sew, if only by sewing when she is around. They pay attention to us much more than we think.

Sitting next to my daughter, watching her embroider an ice cream cone, I realized sewing isn’t all that hard. A running stitch is up, down, up, down. A whip stitch is around and around, around and around. The thing I was teaching her was patience. Sewing takes time. It took me a long time to learn that, but when I did–when I really started to love taking my time–then my sewing got better, much better.

I noticed another thing about sewing while we were working on this project together: sewing is quiet. Cooking with kids can be frantic (the cookies are burning!!!), making art can be messy (who poured glitter on the baby’s head?!), but sewing is slow and contained and practically silent.

We sat at the dining room table, my daughter and I, talking about the day, stopping now and then so I could tie a knot or show her a stitch, and just having a quietly wonderful time.  Thanks to sew mama sew, and their fantastic FunStitch Studio Summer Camp, I taught my daughter a bit about sewing and learned a lot myself!

Pick up a packet of plastic cups at the store and your kids will play happily all afternoon. At least that’s what happened to me. This is just a small sampling of what my kids did with a stack of cups.

–building pyramids

–making bombs out of cups to throw at the cup pyramid

–jumping cups!

The idea for the jumping cups came from this awesome project from All For the Boys. We were too lazy to make a minion (I need my own minions to do that) and our cups were little so we could just wrap the rubber band around the whole cup, but it’s the same idea. This is an awesome little trick to file away for a rainy day.

–jumping cup variations

There were 3, 4, 5 cups jumping at one time. And my son even hooked up two passengers to jump with a cup!

–play money

My daughter cut up a few cups, while we were flinging them all over the living room, and made play money. The coins are the bottoms of the cups and the bill is the rest of the cup.

–bracelets

She didn’t get my “By the power of Isis” joke, but they are still cool bracelets.

Kiwi Crate contacted me a few weeks ago and asked me if I’d like to review one of their crates. How could I say no? Kiwi Crate is a company that delivers a box full of crafts to your door! Could there anything better than that? My kids were so excited when the little green box arrived, I couldn’t even get a photo before they started tearing into it!

Each box contains the makings for two projects and some extra treats as well. We received the Nature Explorer crate, which is part of their Summer Discovery Series.  The crate had the makings for a nature box and a lantern. In addition to all the supplies for those two crafts, there was also a deck of cards, little kiwi birds to cut out and color, and a lovely little book about constellations.

I have three kids and there is only one of each project. You might be thinking we just got a big fight delivered in the mail, but not to worry Kiwi Crate has thought of everything! They have an option to tack on extra supplies for each sibling, which not only makes for less fighting but more fun in the end.

I decided to see how my kids would do with just one. And they did great! Even though projects are simple, there are lots of different parts. So everyone gets a turn doing bit of the project. My kids picked the nature box to work on first. They put the box together, colored the stickers, and decorated the outside of the box.

Then they added one of the many different scavenger hunt boards to go in the bottom of the box. The one above is a for color scavenger hunt, but there is one for shapes and one for actual things (leaf, twig, etc) too. Best of all, there is a blank one to make up your own scavenger hunt.  Every project in the Kiwi Crate has an activity that goes along with it. Not only do you get to spend a lovely morning with your kids making things, but then they can go off and play a game for the rest of the afternoon! I wasn’t kidding when I said they thought of everything!

After a few backyard scavenger hunts, the lantern making project was up next. This kit came with a super fun (and very sturdy) star punch and my three year old went crazy for it! Many loud karate chops later we had a table full of colorful stars. And not too long after a working lantern!

The activity suggested for the lantern was to build a dark fort and take it inside. My children ran upstairs, intent on making the darkest fort in the world! There they created not only a fort, but a whole world.

Kiwi Crate makes projects that are simple and beautiful, spark the imagination, inspire you to learn and play and make more! Not only that, but they are delivered right to you door. I knew I was going to like getting a project kit in the mail, but I didn’t expect such a thoughtfully designed experience to be waiting for me and my children.

Super simple and super fun project. Cut out a square of a picture from a magazine or newspaper. Next, glue it to a piece of paper. Then finish the drawing. See what strange and hilarious things come out of it! Title of my children’s works appear below the pictures. (please excuse the crummy phone photos.)

Alligator Loves His New Pants

Two people sitting on a couch with their heads on fire and Monster 

Pretty Darn Cute Cat

Two Donuts

Have you done any good projects lately?

Now that it’s officially summer, elsie marley is officially in summer mode. Like last year, I’m going to keep a simple summer journal. Post will be a bit shorter, a bit slap dash, just a peek into our summer days really.

If you like the idea of a simple, summertime blog I would love it if you played along! If you have a blog, use summer journal as your title. If you are more of an instgramer/twitterer/tumblrer type use the #summmerjournal hashtag. Leave a comment if you’d like to play along, so I can follow your summer journal!

The other afternoon, we played a game of Simon Says, Draw! Jean from the Artful Parent, posted about this game years ago and I’ve been meaning to try it ever since.  It’s just like the Simon Says game you played when you were little only with drawing instead. So Simon says things like:

• draw a dot
• use a blue crayon
• draw a squiggle
• pass your marker to the left
• draw three eyes
• draw seven legs
• color something purple
• color with two markers at the same time (this one was a bit hit)

You can say Simon says at the beginning of the sentence or not. That part of the game got lost and we just had fun telling each other what to draw. Everyone’s picture ends up completely different. And it’s a great game to wake up your creativity on a hot summer afternoon.