I’m really not one for the whole princess thing. And I thought we had avoided it, until on her fourth birthday my daughter wished that “all princesses would be sparkly.” There has been a health dose of princessness since then, even though I rarely ever buy princess paraphernalia–and wow you can buy just about anything save for major appliances with a princess slapped on it.

It’s not so much the prince saving the princess that annoys me, it’s the total lack of substance on the part of the princess. Well, that and the rampant consumerism of it all (see above).  For the most part the princess just lies around looking pretty all day long. Because of that I rejected them outright until I found myself looking at a fashion magazine in the check out line and realized it was just grown up princess crap. So I guess if I can indulge in pretty girly things, I can indulge my daughter a little too.

And so the princess dress. It’s not sparkly or even very flooffy, but it’s pink and princessy and she loves it. The pattern is from Carefree Clothes for Girls and with it’s quilted bodice (that’s for you nan) and raw edges it’s more Cinderella before the ball than at the ball. The pattern was easy and a lot like the other dress I made from the book. The only part I couldn’t figure out were the button loops. There was a diagram on how to make them, cut I couldn’t decipher it out, so I just crocheted some chains with quilting thread and sewed them in. And it worked out well, washes up nicely, and gets dirty often. For me it’s a dress with a silly amount of baggage, but to her it’s just a pretty dress to pick flowers in.

I’m sure you know what a tangram is but didn’t know it was called a tangram (when I looked it up, I think I might have typed, “that clever triangle-y puzzle thing”). If you’ve never even seen one, well then: it’s sort of a puzzle and sort of a game that involves five triangles, one square, and one parallelogram.  The objective is to figure out how to make a given shape, which is shown only in silhouette, using the pieces and not overlapping any.  My kids and I had a blast just playing around with the shapes and seeing what we could make. I thought you might like to make some too:

Materials:

• balsa wood (or sturdy cardboard, foam core, or actual wood wood, but you will need different tools for cutting the wood)
• a sharp pencil
• ruler
• exact-o knife
• fine grit sandpaper
• paint brush and paint (optional)

Directions:

1. Use an exact-o knife to cut the balsa wood into a 4 inch square.  The piece of balsa wood I got at Michael’s Crafts was 4 inches wide already, so I only needed to cut it once to make a square.

2. Next you need to draw a 1 inch grid on the square very, very lightly. Draw a line one inch from the edge, then another one inch from that, one more and then turn the square 90 degrees and do it again. If you press down on the balsa wood at all it will make an indentation that won’t come out, so keep the pencil marks very, very faint.

3. Now we are going to draw 5 lines. I think it would be more confusing for me to explain where all the lines are drawn, so you can just follow the series of lines I drew above. Use the grid as a guide: draw through the corners, or on the lines, whichever is indicated by the picture. The first picture is the grid and the next five show the sequence of lines to draw.
4. Lightly erase the grid.
5. Take your exact-o knife and ruler and cut on the lines. Cut the shapes out in generally the same order you drew the lines. If you have a sharp blade it should take 3 or 4 passes along the line to cut through the balsa wood. It helps if you start a little above where you are cutting, instead of starting right on the line. Go slow and try to keep the blade perpendicular to the wood.

6. Lightly sand the pieces.

7. Paint (if you like). It’s nice to have both sides painted–especially the parallelogram–because it makes it easier to make more pictures with your tangrams, but I think they are equally beautiful not painted at all.  It’s up to you.

You can even make a little cute box for your new tangram set to go in. The box I got was a little too small for the pieces to fit just right–oh well.  Now go play: you can make animals, letters, quilts,  cookies even and this book looks lovely too. Watch out though, you might get carried away:

I was sick of the stupid bathroom towel always ending up on the floor. So I whipped up this bad boy in the spirit of those awesome old fashioned public bathroom continuous towel thing-a-ma-jigs (which I can seem to find on the internet; have they ceased to exist?).  All it took was a little patchwork bias tape to cover the raw edges and velcro to join the ends.  You could use buttons or snaps, but I could not because my monkey of a son would then use it as his personal bathroom swing.

The towel fabric is a waffle weave muslin that I found when I was looking for fabric for the kids’ summer towels or summer robes. I only bought a quarter of a yard so I could see if it would soften when I washed it. And it did, nicely too. Then I went to get some more, only this time I went to Joann’s instead of the fancy fabric shop, and when I washed the three yards of it I got, it came out super thick and shrunk up (see above).  Does Joann’s just carry inferior everything, or did I wash it wrong? Has anyone worked with waffle weave muslin before and have some insight?  Because I really like how the bathroom towel turned out and had visions of making kitchen towels for everyone for christmas out of this stuff

Wouldn’t it be great in the kitchen? I suppose linen or terry cloth would work just as well.  I’m going to have to use the shrunk up stuff to make the kids’ robes; I just hope they don’t make them look like little sumo wrestlers.

A while back when it was raining nonstop we made these very sweet rain paintings, but now that it’s extra hot I was thinking I’d turn on the sprinkler and make sprinkler paintings instead. I found the project at the crafty crow— where you can find every kid’s art project ever thought up–and you can find the original post about it here.  To make rain paintings  you crush up watercolor paints (we put them in plastic bags and banged on them with a rolling pin), sprinkle them on some paper and put it out in the rain.

It’s such a simple and quick project, but every part of it was exciting for the kids (and me): whacking the paints with the rolling pin, using the paints we “made” and standing out in the rain waiting to see what would happen.

After you decide the picture is done and pick it up, all the paint will run (and your sidewalk will turn bright blue). I was kind of disappointed when this happened, but my kids squealed with joy.  We hung them up in the window to dry and they were so beautiful with the sun shining through them. The whole porch was bright and glowing even though it was still raining outside.

The pictures do fade when they dry, but then you can take a pen and turn your rain painting into a beautiful rain garden.

I had grand plans to do project after project with my kids this summer, but there has been more lazing around than anything else. This project, though, is right up my alley: simple, quick, bright, and all about the process. Anyone got any good preschool age art projects to recommend that have been a success? I’m thinking marble painting is next.

image by Eric Fisher via (sc)

Jenny over at wisktenmade said a while back that she collected images from the internet that inspired her or just struck her fancy and stuck them in a folder, then over time she could see themes come out: a certain color, or shade of a color, specific details, things that you so obviously like, but somehow tend to forget. I do tear pages out of magazines, but then get lazy when it comes time to put them somewhere (and then of course they are everywhere). It’s easier to collect images and links on the internet of course, but I wasn’t putting them in a place where I could step back and see them as a whole.  Then I found tumblr, a site that hosts mini blogs, and it was made for this kind of thing.  You can find me here on tumblr; let’s hang out.

So tumblr works really well to collect all the images you find inspiring, but then there is this sort of ridiculous site called rumblr, where you pit two tumblr sites against one another. It looks pointless in that “hot or not” kind of way, but it actually makes some beautiful diptychs that are inspiring in their own right. The one above and the one below are from mociun’s and the brick house’s tumblrs.

And these next two are a mash up of molly irwin‘s tumbler and and one of nat‘s awesome tumblr collections:

aren’t they wonderful?

And speaking of great photography, the lovely ladies at habit are featuring submissions from their readers all month. The only guidelines are to take an unstaged picture that represents your day in some way and post it the day it was taken.  I think that habit is a fantastic photography project that lets you stop fussing with what you are taking a picture of and just enjoy taking the picture.  It’s wonderful that they are letting their readers play along. I’ll be there and you can too.