Fall is fading fast here. We had an rainy and sometimes humid autumn, but there were beautiful, cool and crisp days too. There are precious few days of fall left. Here are a few projects from the archives to soak them up:
Well after that last post I went for a little walk to gather leaves. There was one lonely tree left with leaves on it, but they were huge and yellow and perfect. The boy and I snipped off their stems and folded them a bit, then I sewed them together one by one with a simple whip stitch. He picked yellow thread to match the leaves, so you can’t see it. But I have plans to stitch something on them in blue. This was such a simple and beautiful project. I think making these will be part of our fall for years to come.
All craft and thrift action these days is geared towards occupying two preschoolers without noisy toys or heaps of sugar (okay there is some sugar, but not much). This cute little typewriter showed up on craigslist at just the right time and thankfully it wasn’t 200 bucks, which it seams most (out of date, pretty much useless, but indie rock stylish) typewriters are going for these days. The ribbon was immediately destroyed–thank you, son number one–but they really don’t know how it is supposed to work anyway, so mostly it’s about finding letters and numbers and making it *ding*. And really it will always just be a toy for them. The other day, my daughter asked me what this toy was. We’ve had it since she was a baby! And she never knew it was a telephone! To her phones are little clam shell things you carry in your pocket. I am from a totally different world than she it, which reminds me of this list: 100 things your kids may never know about. I’m sure every generation has a list like this, ” back in my day…,” but it’s shocking to suddenly be the person saying, “back in my day…”
Okay, I need to stop now before I make myself feel geriatric. Onto happier things.
It’s starting to feel like fall here and though I haven’t been swearing at the heat all summer (the weather has actually been pleasant this summer, especially for a ginormous pregnant lady) fall is too lovely not to be excited about. So I thought I’d host a fall color week: a picture or two a day that captures a color of the coming season. The color week thing has been done a thousand times, so I thought I’d use Crayola colors this time, mostly because burnt siena was my favorite (second only to cornflower blue) and because it is the color of fall to me (I’ll decode the colors for all those who grew up crayloa-less). Leave a comment if you want to play along and I’ll list a link to your blog (or flickr) when we start on Monday.
Monday: Brick Red (deep red)
Tuesday:Burnt Siena (a reddy orange, like the rooftops of Siena)
Wednesday: Goldenrod (warm, deep yellow)
Thursday: Chesnut (dark, warm brown)
Friday: Plum (like a plum, duh)
See you Monday!
Today is Monday, so my daughter and I had a little crafty time together. I wanted to try making a collage with contact paper for a while now. She’s only just 2 and she hasn’t quite mastered the glue stick yet. We gathered our supplies: contact paper, tissue paper, leaves and twigs we picked up on a walk, and fabric scraps. We slapped everything down –well, I arranged mine–on the sticky side and then put another piece of contact paper (sticky side down) on top of it all. It looked like this:
Then I cut out leaves and taped them to the window. I think this is a good craft for the toddler set. Tearing paper and sticky things are pretty exciting to my daughter so this project actually held her interest for a while. Contact paper isn’t all that sticky, so the tissue paper worked best. But if you are crazy like me and save the tiniest scrap, well they work too and I think thread would look nice. Leaves work if they’re pressed (ours weren’t) and you get leaves in leaves at the end, which is exciting only to me. You could, of course, cut any shape out: turkeys, christmas trees, vacuum cleaners, whatever. When it came time for cutting, my daughter was already on to other things, but 10 quiet minutes is pretty huge.
