kid craft: fun with food coloring

i don't find much time for crafting with a preschooler and (not-so-)newborn in the house, thus the dramatic slow-down in posting the past three months. today, though, we did a bit of kid crafting that i wanted to share. not quite a guest blogger post, but a collaborative effort to be sure: not only is the artwork eva's, but she took all the photos as well (she got her own camera for her third birthday, complete with her own flickr site -- have i gone off the deep end?).

we started out by playing around with food coloring and water, as suggested by a fellow mama. as you can see, we decided to start with the three primary colors in "tiny" (ahem, shot) glasses and go from there. we worked out things like what colors you need to make green, what you get if you mix red and yellow, and that no matter how many times you try it, mixing all three will give you a version of brown. ("how about if we add blue to the orange we just made? oh, look, that makes brown too, mama!")

we used a syringe to suck up water and mix it in a small white bowl (the needle-less syringe i happened to have lying around was a marinade injector. why? because my sister is a foodie, that's why. normal people can use a dropper from a craft or teacher supply store). from there, the new color went back into the syringe to be placed on our medium -- first, a paper towel. (the original idea was to use coffee filters, which would be great, but we didn't have any handy.) the colors bled and mixed in cool ways, and being a paper towel, it soaked up enough of the water to prevent a huge mess. we even made a duplicate "print" of the original by pressing a second paper towel onto the first. neat.



next, we tried doing a modified tie-dye: i rolled up an old tea towel and bound it with twist ties and rubber bands to make a "caterpillar" shape. eva placed different colors along the caterpillar, then we unrolled it to see the design. this is a somewhat ephemeral project, as my understanding is that you can't permanently dye cotton with food coloring (maybe next time, we'll try kool-aid?). i may try heat setting it with an iron -- still won't be washable, but might be good enough that i can let her use it for her toy kitchen without worrying that it will stain the carpet.



now, since this is eva's project, here is the method in her own words in a 17-second-long video, which she recorded herself with her camera. (it's only her third (or so) video, so you can hear me telling her how to turn it off at the end. :)



[caption: "mom, we used this colored water, and we used "play water", and we put it on that cloth right there. with twist ties and rubber bands."]

this isn't earth-shattering stuff of course, but we sure enjoyed ourselves. and with minimal set-up/clean-up, we did the whole thing while baby hazel slept. perfect for our rainy afternoon!

globe cake

here's the cake i made for eva's third birthday. she loves her earth ball (an inflatable globe ball) and likes to talk about where different places are on the map -- where we live, places she's traveled, where family members live or have traveled. so, why not make an "earth ball cake"? sure it's round and complicated, and sure i just had a baby, but why not? :) luckily my sisters are visiting, so i had both hands free for long enough stretches to enable me to make this. hurray for sisters!

it's hummingbird cake (pineapple/banana/pecan) with cream cheese icing, and each half of the earth is composed of two 8" cakes (torted into four layers) plus half a torted 6" cake on top. then, the whole thing is carved into shape (i could have bought a special pan, but this worked fine). i covered each half in fondant, inverted one, and stuck them together. (structural notes: there are dowels supporting the bottom tier (hemisphere?) of the cake, and i put hot glue between the two pieces of cardboard to help hold the two tiers together.) the fondant on the bottom half threatened to fall off -- and in the heat at the park, it did start to slip -- but i added a band of fondant around the center to bind the two halves together.



the continents are piped on in royal icing, which i did by looking at a map and using latitude and longitude lines as a guide. i got a bit impatient around 1 a.m., so the filling in of the land masses got a bit sloppy at the end. good enough! (i'm learning the beauty of that phrase.) the topper -- a girl holding a toy airplane -- is made of fondant, with a piece of wire in there to support the arms. it's eva-like, but as she'll tell you, her hair is a little bit lighter... the flags are to denote places of interest, places we've found on the map time and time again. ("mama, show me seattle again. remember when we saw the face needle?" she's still working on pronouncing that "sp" consonant blend :)



the location of the party moved at the last minute from our back yard to a park 20 minutes away... so the cake suddenly had to survive an unplanned transport and *then* had to endure the texas summer heat. i'm surprised that it did all of that without a hitch. (we rigged up a clever support system in a cooler.) it didn't come out exactly the way i envisioned it, but i'm quite happy with it. and it was really tasty, too.

rocking chairs

in honor of father's day, here are photos of the rocking chairs my dad made for my daughter. (she received the larger chair for her first birthday, and upon realizing it was a bit too big, he promptly started making the smaller one for christmas! thus, two chairs...) now that he has two new granddaughters as of this year, he's got more woodworking ahead of him, it seems.

both my parents have always helped me to know that i can probably make most anything -- or, more accurately: it might not work out at first, but it's sure worth giving it a try. the first thing i made with my dad (that i recall making) was a wooden jigsaw puzzle. i colored a drawing on a scrap of plywood with some crayons, and he used the table saw (okay, so it wasn't a jigsaw, but who's ever heard of a table saw puzzle?) to cut it into about 10 pieces. strangely, this resulted in a really challenging puzzle that adults had difficulty putting together, even after a bit of practice.

happy father's day, dad. :)

home made

yesterday we welcomed hazel into our family. she was born peacefully at home, and we're all doing well...

frog meets bear

sometimes i get into this mode where i enjoy some project so much, i then repeat it (with variations) several more times before moving on to something else. well, those bears i made last week were pretty entertaining... so this week i made a frog. (seriously, the kyuuto amigurumi book is totally worth it -- for the price, it would have been worthwhile had i made only one project out of it, and i've done three already...)

my main difficulty, though, is the facial expression. this is as true of stuffed animals as it is of dolls (when i made eva's doll, i restitched the second eye about ten times so she didn't look depressed or crazy, and in the end i gave up and settled for half-drunk -- isn't it weird how a pupil half a milimeter to the side can cause a whole different expression?). it took some effort to get the frog eyes to look roughly balanced, and then i did the mouth (which is embroidered since i had no red felt on hand) three times before he looked friendly and not like he might try to eat you in your sleep. expressions are harder than they seem, and i have much respect for people who have learned to do this well. (i luck into a passable expression eventually, but some people can achieve the look they want with actual skill.)

this is for a friend's little girl, but i think first i'll have to convince eva to relinquish it. she's been ribbit-ing it around the house for a few days now. and of course, she's now asking about her bear. soon...

crochet stitch marking trick

i hate stitch markers. there, i said it. sure, it's nice not losing your place in crochet (or knitting, but i'm basically a crocheter). but they're so annoying! (*whine*...) they get caught in your working yarn, it slows you down having to remove and replace them, ... i just don't like using them.

but on my last project, i came up with something that really works, won't fall off, and takes almost zero effort to place or remove. it's so simple that i'm sure lots of other people have come up with it before, but i've never read about it anywhere, so i thought i'd share.

basically, take a short length (4-6 inches, whatever) of contrasting scrap yarn. when you get to the place you want to mark, just drape it across the previous row of stitches before you make the next stitch. the contrasting yarn will be caught under the stitch, and that's your mark. but here's the cool part: when you get to the next row/round, no need to pull it out and reinsert it, just flip one end of the contrasting yarn, say, from the front to the back. on the next row/round, flip it back to the front. the result is what looks like a little vertical row of running embroidery stitches. when you're done, just pull and it comes right out.

and here's a bonus: let's say you're in a part of your pattern where you need to count a bunch of rows or rounds. (when it's the same for a big set of rows, i tend to lose track -- and again, too lazy to do something as crazy as use a pencil and jot down a count on some scratch paper.) you can use your marking yarn to count rows (or rounds) -- just pull it out before the section you want to count and replace it at the first row. you can then count the "stitches" created by the contrasting yarn as you proceed; that is, each stitch or space created by the contrasting yarn is one row. now you're marking your rounds (or rows :) and your stitch count at the same time. and there's no little plastic doodad snagging your yarn.

and i should say, i'm sure there are stitch markers out there that actually work well. but i like this, because it's free, and i always have a little scrap of yarn on hand without having to dig around in my bag. give it a try and see what you think. (and as always, if anything is unclear, feel free to ask and i'll try to clarify...)

amigurumi bears

eva started preschool last week (just two afternoons a week), and in order to help her transition, i sat at school with her for the first two days. hmm, what to do with my hands? as i've gotten closer to the end of my pregnancy, i've been less absorbed in crafts (as you may have noticed), so i had nothing (portable) in progress.

i bought the kyuuto amigurumi book a while back, and decided this was a good opportunity to put it to use. i made a tiny orange bear for the baby (which thrilled eva to no end), and then she decided that next i needed to make a green bear for her. so, i made a version of the striped bear project in the book (eva said no stripes, so i omitted those, but liked the size of this bear -- there are three sizes of bears alone offered in the book, let alone a whole assortment of other animals...) i went ahead with plastic eyes for eva's bear, but just embroidered on some eyes for the baby's bear for reasons of safety.

i really like this book -- for about $10 you really can't go wrong. i mean, sure, after you do one or two, you can pretty much make up any sort of amigurumi you want. but, even if you're making up your own patterns, this can still be really useful as a general guide for sizes and patterns of stitch increases, etc.

so, now we have a big sister bear to go with the baby bear. i've hid it from eva so far, so it can be a present ("from the baby" so to speak) after the birth. i'm amazed she hasn't asked for it (the typical toddler "out of sight out of mind" thing), but i'm excited because i know she's going to love it. after all, she squealed and came running when she saw the baby's bear...

(oh, and see my next post for my cool stitch marking trick. very useful for amigurumi or any crochet in the round.)