Playground Love

I always enjoy checking out the Ikea Hacks blog site for creative not-originally intended uses for Ikea products, so was quite pleased when inspiration struck for the Mongstad  mirror in our dining room.

M deleted my "before" photo so here is the Ikea one.

Both M and I love the way this over sized mirror bounces the light around in our winter-dimmed ground floor apartment but do not like the way the large black border seems to suck in all brightness. Nothing else we have is framed in black either so it stuck out a bit, and not in a good way.

After

I’d been toying with the idea of recovering in fabric or just plain painting it, but then, while convalescing from gum surgery on the couch- inspiration struck. Magnetic paint. The borders of the frame are so thick that this could easily hold multiple 5 x 8’s and many more 4 x 6’s. I like displaying photos but don’t really have nice frames or anywhere to prop them up or hang them, so this seemed like a great way to rotate photos, pretty papers, etc around and still make our space look visually appealing.

Three coats of magnetic paint and 4 coats of white paint later- we have a new mirror. We think this looks great! Beware of trying to use a weighted magnet though or trying to hang anything heavy. While the magnetic paint works, it’s not like sticking something to your fridge. Even with 3/8” earth magnets, this seems a bit tenuous for anything other than a small- mid size photograph. But since this is all we really need it for, it works for us.

Right now I am using it to hold the advent calendar that I’ve made with left over felt and winter stickers. We’re not really into advent, but I thought it might be a fun way to get the whole family into the Season this year with an activity-inspired advent calendar. More to come on Dec. 1 as we kick advent off! (I glued earth magnets to the top and back sides of the frame and then attached the advent calendar to the anchored earth magnets.)

xok

While most people where stocking up on school supplies last weekend, I got a jump start on supplies over the summer. While we are still several years away from schooling, I decided to really beef up what A has to choose from and we’ve been producing a lot of art. Spaced-out me hasn’t been doing a very good job of documenting the creations, so I thought I’d make a list of our art supply essentials to share. With children’s art supplies, remember this rule: you usually get what you pay for. That doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot of money, but it does help to know what is good quality and what isn’t. PS- ask around!

From left to right, here are some of the things I absolutely love to work with (A enjoys them too!)

Back row:

1. White glue- I love the size of this container and the fact that the lid screws off. I hate trying to squeeze gooped up glue out of a pin-hole sized opening. We usually have a small yogurt container with a lid ready to go at all times.

2. Glue spreader- plastic invention used for dipping and applying glue. Great to have and easy to hold. Keeps fussy fingers clean-ish.

3. Tempera paint- can’t have too many colours! Creative Children has a great deal on these and a whole array of colours. You can get bigger ones, but storage space is an issue, so we went with the medium 500 ml ones. Mix them up and make new colours. There are also some poster paints mixed in here too.

3rd row

4. Lyra pencil crayons (in the glass jar). Super expensive but so worth it. We’ve had these for about 10 months now and I’ve only had to sharpen them once. They come on all our trips and excursions in a zip up pouch. Their triangular shape makes it really easy for toddler hands to grip. From Collage Collage.

5. Paint pots and paint brushes. These are from Opus and they really make the area around the art easel much tidier than I would have expected. The jars have a funnel lid which allows for dipping the brish into the paint, but maximum containment when taking the brush out.

2nd row:

6. Oil pastels. Great fun to work with and so vibrant. One of my favorite art tricks is to get A to cover a large area with the oil pastels and then work with watercolour paint overtop. The oil pastels will resist the paint so you have a really neat effect of the pastel image not being painted over. These were really inexpensive from Michaels.

7. Miscellaneous mixed media for collaging. Anything works here- kids love gluing things. Interesting shapes, textures, papers, plastics, whatever. I love going to Urban Source on Main St. and loading up a paper bag of goodies from their bulk bins. I need to take A there on our next rainy day adventure! This place proves you can make art out of anything.

8. Watercolours- still struggling to find good watercolours that I can pour into paint pots. A has tried using the ones you dip into water first and then the watercolour puck, but gets stuck when it comes to cleaning the brush before moving into another colour- most frequently black, gooping up all the other pucks in the tray. Plus the pucks and the brushes that come in those tray sets are usually quite small, which small hands with developing motor skills find quite challenging. These ones are from IKEA. They have a limited selection of colour, but if you want to try the oil pastel and paint resist thing, these will work.

Front row:

9. Paint smock- old t-shirts, fancy velcro plastic arm covers- anything to keep the clothes underneath clean. Or go al fresco as A did over the summer.

10. Tempera paint pucks- these are the right size to drop into the paint pots we have from Opus. Add a little bit of water and you are good to go. For older toddlers who understand cleaning the brush before changing colours as well. (remove the black if you want your tray to stay in good shape if you’re working with a beginner!) Or not- embrace the darkness!

11. Sponge rollers- a bit of a luxury item here, but really fun to use. These work best with a tray or styrofoam dish with paint squirted in the dish. Roll the brush around the paint and then apply and the textured roller brushes leave all sorts of neat shapes and designs. From Creative Children. Not expensive and also not essential, but fun.

12. Sponges for prints- we need to invest in some really good foam backed shapes that make for good block printing, but for now, we are having fun with these inexpensive shapes. Dip into paint and apply. From Creative Children

13. Good quality paper. This is a 45 lb heavy weight cartridge paper 18 ” x 24″. Fits great on the easel and allows kids to work really big! Get thick paper if you want the art work to withstand constant painting over and pounding. Also from Creative Children.

14. Washable table cloth. I don’t need to explain this one. Our kitchen table also doubles as the art table so I sometimes need to protect the surface below.

15. Art easel (not pictured)- this one is great. We got ours from Ikea- it has a blackboard on one side and a wide tray to hold paints, crayons, etc. When we need a break from paint, it folds up into less than 5 inches wide and slides in beside our refrigerator- that is magic for small space dwellers!

Are you inspired? Hope so!

xok

PS- for those who have been folowing the Zero Cost Challenge project- it will return in it’s final two installments shortly. I finally had the chance to do some painting and made some progress on completing A’s room. Stay tuned!

A and I have been delving into the world of nude painting lately. Well, I’m fully clothed and A is painting scantily clad. There are practical reasons for this as we all shall see….

Several weeks ago, I rediscovered Creative Children. I used to work for an art school for kids and ordered a lot of supplies from CC. A mom in my area reminded me that CC is actually located quite close by, in Port Moody across the street from Rocky Point Park. So A and I went on a mission to source out some new tempera paints and heavier stock paper for painting on.

We came back with a big boxful of lovely new art supplies and have been pretty busy creating ever since. The deck in the late afternoon has become the creating place of choice. These next projects are not for the faint of heart….

1. Get yourself a large tarp AND drop cloth. The tarp will protect any paint from bleeding through onto the surface (ie: deck) below. Use large paper. We bought a 50 lb weight paper that is 18 x 24″. I’d go even bigger if I had a place to store it properly. Right now, whatever is not clipped onto the easel is stuffed under the couch…. You will also need a set of textured roller brushes and some flat bottomed pans, lids or containers. Whatever you use, make sure it has a lip- this will collect any paint that is bound to slide around. I think next time I do this, I will just use a baking sheet and lay out the colours inside. I added bits of tissue paper and paper scraps in case A decided to move into mixed media territory. I also added some chalk pastels to play with and a paint pot with a contrasting colour of paint.

2. Take off your child’s clothes and run a bath.*

* You can only skip this part if you are planning on dunking your child in a nearby kiddie pool or hosing them down. Your child will be covered in paint and will not hold still while you try to contain them and run a bath at the same time. They will ensure maximum collateral damage is done to your clothes, your body and your bathroom.

3. Encourage your child to experiment with the roller brushes and paint pots. We have a few rollers that have squares and stars as raised images on them which leave a really neat texture on the painting when rolled into the paint tray and then onto the paper.

4. I was a bit bummed when I super excitedly introduced A to splatter painting with little to no obvious effect the other day. Imagine my delight when she decided to add the splatter paint technique to this painting! Splatter painting is just loading your brush with runny tempera paint and letting the paint drip while holding the brush from various heights onto the paper below. You can also gently arch your arm over the painting for interesting effect. This can get messy and you will want to at least quadruple the area covered in tarps.

5. Hold onto your child when they decide to step into the roller paint tray to leave multi coloured foot prints on their painting. This can get quite slippery and your child will get quite excited.

6. Have a cloth handy to mitigate any damage made from paint drips while you haul your child from the outside into the bath once they have completed their works of art

7. Groan when the tub drains and you realize you will have yet another thing to clean. Although this one is kind of fun to clean as you chuckle to yourself about what you’ve just let your child experiment with.

The tree with some leaves

This wasn’t nearly so difficult as I thought it might be. It was incredibly time consuming though, or perhaps could be done over the course of a weekend. Lot’s of little tasks and a lot of cutting involved.

Cutting many leaves

But both A and I are super excited with how the tree has turned out. Really pretty and so feminine. I will be looking to ad a few more things to wall over the coming weeks, but am in no hurry to get started on those backburner items.

A posing by the finished tree

The big expenses for this project was the Steam A Seam 2- @ $6/ metre x 4 metres it ran upwards of $24. You could do this project with a lot smaller of a decal, but I wanted this quite big and close to scale. Fabric cost $0 as it was all stuff I had on hand. Still less expensive than many wall decals I have seen in stores and much larger. I ended up selling some of A’s old toys and spent the money on the SAS2 and some strawberry plants I bought for the planter I made (more in the next post).

I was looking back recently to when my first blog post was posted and this week celebrates my one year anniversary. Unbelievable- I cannot understand where the time has gone. I’ve met some really inspiring people over this past year and have jumped into the crafty mama blogosphere head first. I’m in love with so many blogs and projects, that it’s hard to figure out which I love most. To celebrate this past year of crafting,  I have made this cute little wine cozy and I’ll do a random draw for it. To enter the contest, leave a comment in the comments section below (e-mails do not count!). My handy random number picker will choose the winner. Contest closes on Sunday, June 27 at midnight. Thank you and good luck!

Well- this is it. This is what I’ve been wanting to put up on A’s large wall in her room for ages but wasn’t sure how to go about it.Thanks to Sewing for Scarlet for the great how to. When I initialy tried this, I found that the decal left a stain because I immediately tried to pull it off the wall. Once the fabric has had a chance to cool off from the iron, this will peel off nicely without marking up the painted wall beneath!

So the challenge for me was working with something so large with limited amounts of fabric and even more limited amounts of Steam A Seam 2, which is the iron on adhesive used to stick the whole thing to the wall. It turns out, I had the perfect chocolate brown fabric just right for the tree trunk lurking in my fabric stash. The two panels used for the tree were the bottoms of curtains I made shorter a while ago.

First I figured out how big (roughly) I wanted the tree to be and what shape I wanted it to be. I googled tree wall decal images and picked something that I thought I could replicate easily enough. I cannot draw free hand for the life of me, so this is how I do things…

Then I taped together pattern paper and art paper to the size of the tree I was going to draw. I drew it out, making a few adjustments here and there. I cut it out and then hung it up on the wall in A’s room to see where I’d want to centre it.

On the floorl, I laid out the fabric for the tree trunk/ branches and overlaid the paper template on top .On top of this, I placed my one small roll of Steam A Seam 2- you can see the skinny white rectangle covering the middle of the tree section below. I was going to try to avoid seams as I wanted the decal to be one whole piece, but that’s not the way it worked out. The SAS2 is not the same size as the fabric or the pattern, so it will be in sections, which looks fine.

So once everything was laid out on the floor, I traced the pattern onto the roll of Steam A Seam2, taking care to make a mark on each branch where the Steam A Seam 2 didn’t cover. I cut the branches off of the paper pattern and set them aside. Then I cut out the pattern on the SAS2 only. Laying one side of the sticky steam a Seam 2 onto the fabric, and smoothing it out, I then cut out the entire trunk. Remember that if you are following these directions, the fabric will be stuck to the wall in reverse- very important if your fabric has a good side and a bad side or if you are doing letters. If your fabric has a good side/ bad side, make sure to place the SAS2 on top of the bad side.

It’s up on the wall in three sections so far- the trunk and the top branches, and one side branch. I’ve run out of Steam A seam but will probably try to pick some more up this weekend to finish this off. I think I’ll only need another 2 metres of this for the 3 other branches and 50+ leaves I’ll be making to cover the branches.

The project wasn’t so scary once I figured out what I really wanted and what I had to work with. This coming weekend is going to be a busy one. HappyFather’s Day to all the terrific dads I know!

xok

Project 6 of the Zero Cost Challenge in A’s room is the start of creating a reading nook inside A’s closet. Our home is pretty small so I wanted to make the most out of this project and tried to give Amina a nice little private space where she could read books or just hang out.

I’ve been coveting the pouf’s (just a really fancy way of saying pillow) at  The Cross.  The how-to is quite lengthy, but if you are interested in making one for yourself check out the tutorial for the  morrocan pouffe.

I had done the closet up but am not happy with the way it turned out. I’m going to need to spend a bit more time thinking this one out before I post any pics, but I think it will be pretty neat once it’s finished!

I’ve been busy starting projects and only half completing them, so maybe I’ll get the chance to finish some up this weekend. A has chicken pox so we’ve been pretty low key lately. She’s great- hasn’t complained one bit and is not itchy at all. Seems to be a very mild case so we have been really lucky!

Here’s what we’ve been up to during our quarantine:

Playing with playdough: We’ve used the recipe from Mary Ann Kohl’s “Young at Art” and it’s super. I made this recipe about 2 weeks ago and A is still going strong with it:

• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2 tsp cream of tartar
• food colouring
• 2 TB vegetable oil
• 1 cup flour

Combine water, salt cream of tartar and food colouring in a pot over the stove on low heat. Stir. As the mix heats up, add in the oil and the flour slowly. Keep stirring until the mix looks dry and starts to pull away from the side of the pan. If it’s not sticky, it’s done! We did this with pink and blue (A’s choice).

We’ve also been busy with colouring pasta and incorporating this into our playdough and just transfering it back and forth into different containers for fun.

And lastly, A’s been making wonderful art: We started with oil pastels, added some tempera and water colour paints (water colours will resist where the oil pastels are giving a really neat picture) and then started adding tissue paper, printer paper and other fun mixed media. Voila- a mixed media collage!

A’s process is pretty interesting. She typically starts out with mommy, daddy or A faces and builds from there. There is a sun I helped her with in the corner. She’s been adding swings and slides and other things that we do in our daily routine. So fun and interesting to hear her verbalizing this and incorporating this into her art. Enjoy!

PS- Total cost for the pouf was $16 for the felt.

I had been coveting book shelves that display books for a while. I had been hoping to stumble into something at a thrift store, but the golden rule of thrifting is if you are actively looking for something, you will not find it.

So- I began looking around on-line and found some nice ones at Pottery Barn, but they were too expensive and a bit too vintage looking for the modern take I wanted to do with A’s room. Then I found display shelves just like these ones and came up with the brilliant idea of making them myself as part of this challenge! My father-in-law is a fantastic woodworker and I knew if I asked nicely he’d show me around his workshop and help me design and make these.

The dimensions of each display shelf are 30” long x 5” tall x 4” deep. The inside dimensions are: 29 x 4.5 tall x 3 deep. We went with a sheet of ½ thick plywood and made all the pieces with this.

I won’t go into a tutorial today about the shelves because I really don’t feel like I know what I’m talking about. Wood is not my medium, fabric is. I am really happy how these shelves turned out and was pumped to learn to use the table saw (very scary) and the mitre saw (fun!). R has fun tools like nail guns and an automatic sanding machine that made this a really easy process. It took about 2 hours to build and then many days to paint. There is limited space to paint in our house and it’s tough setting up and taking down each day, but the final result is great.

As A gets older, we can change the colour, the configuration and change up what gets displayed inside so great investment (of time) pieces!

Here are some pics with my father-in-law and me in his workshop/ garage:

Here are the completed shelves with A’s books proudly displayed:

Here’s some other pictures of other shelving I’ve put up on A’s walls and a big picture frame to highlight her art. The glass for the frame broke in the hanging process, which is actually probably a good thing. With my new-found paranoia of earthquakes, the last thing I want jiggling around on the walls is something with glass above A’s head while she sleeps! The frame is mounted to a hook and anchor, so it’s not going anywhere!

I also installed a reading light and a new lighting socket with cord. Unfortunately, we don’t have ceiling lights in our place, which makes installing ceiling lights really annoying as all we can use are plug in lights that are rigged to the light switches. There’s no way I can hide the cords, so I was excited to see that the cords come in green to match the décor of the room.

Book shelves:

$nice bottle of wine for the plywood, nails, screws, and hangers

$0- reused paint from kitchen and added white primer to make the colour limier

White book shelves:

$12 for wood

$0 for paint, anchors and brackets which I already had

Other:

$20- picture frame (well worth the splurge as this can highlight all the fun paintings that A will make)

$6- lamp cord

$19- reading light (also well worth the splurge)

It’s funny, I think this little triangle of space in A’s room is where I have spent the most money. Well- it needed to be done as the lighting is her room at night is pretty dismal. This will help and she likes being able to turn off the light herself now.

A’s room is really coming along now. I love how it’s turning out!

This week’s ZCC projects were quite simple- they mostly consisted of repainting and recovering.

My grandfather made this crib for his twin girls (my aunts). This got passed along to me (yay!) and when A was little, she actually spent a few naps in it while we visited in Winnipeg. All I did was repaint with some primer and white paint. My grandmother had made a crib mat and blanket to go with the doll crib and all I did was recover these in my favourite fabric. I saved the old stuff for a pillowcase dress or something else that will look lovely in vintagy fabric.

The highchair I scored from Craigslist ($10- the only cost for this project). The previous owners had already primed this  so I got away with one coat of the same paint I used on the crib. I made a cushion with tie backs on it with the same fabric as above and left over batting.

If you know how to sew a pillowcase, these are all essentially what I did. Instead of leaving room for the pillow to slip in and out, I sewed this part up.

Nice and cosy and looks great in the room. These two items get a lot of use. A has become especially involved  in feeding, shopping for groceries, pottying and napping her  ”babies” (of which she has about 7 popular babies in rotation- animals, hand-me-down and new dolls included).

This picture shows the seat cover for the highchair

crib + crib bedding: $0

Paint $0

Highchair $10

I’m not sure this really counts as a Zero Cost Challenge project because I started this ages ago but….

I’ll include it anyway because I’m just completing it now. I began this when A was still in her crib, hence it is sized to fit a crib mattress. Well- months later, it will make a lovely throw. I’ve never been inspired to try quilting, but was intrigued after a friend made an incredibly hip and modern quilt with truly lovely fabrics. M’s aunt also does a pretty kick-ass job and I thought I’d give some of the techniques a try:

While I’ll credit Handmade Home and Weekend Sewing Projects with inspiring me to start this, I think the blanket is definitely a creation of my own.

• You probably won’t have to do this step, but because the blanket was used as a poncho, I needed to sew up the hole in the middle of the blanket. I finished some edges of a fabric rectangle and sewed it to the good side of the blanket over top of the hole. Next I used the fabric strips (instructions below) to cover and make a pocket over top of this.

• Next- I used Heather Ross’ excellent instructions from “Weekend Sewing Projects” to make the letter A using fusible interfacing. Sew on applique when finished. These same instructions can be found in this post.

• Take an  old sheet and sew it to the blanket. I liked the thought of re-using such an old piece of M’s childhood and the melton was nice, but a bit scratchy. I think that sewing an old sheet to the underside gives the blanket some versatility. We’ll probably use this alot in summer, when A’s comforter will be too hot. Since my blanket looked the same from both sides, it didn’t matter which side I sewed it to. I did sew the sheet good side facing out though. Don’t worry about the raw edges as they will be covered with fabric strips used like blanket binding. Trim excess away along seam.

• Next- measure each edge of the blanket and total it up. Add on 8 inches to the total for  a seam allowance. Take fabric scraps and cut them different lengths but to all the same width. Sew them all together until you reach your total length measurement. I varied all the lengths of each individual fabric piece because I liked the random look of it. Press each seam flat- this is really important to get a smooth finish!

• Cut each fabric strip to match in length with each side of the blanket adding 1 inch  on top and 1 inch for each panel on the bottom for a seam allowance.

• Next, Fold  each strip in half, (to give you a long skinny strip) press and use  a hem gauge to hem 1/2 inch to each raw edge. Press again.

• Pin top and bottom of each panel down by 1/2 inch press and fold down another 1/2. Sew. You now have finished ends for each of your panels.

• Open up fabric strips and lie raw edge of blanket into fold. Fold the fabric strip over and pin. Sew.

• Repeat for all 4 edges.

I love the way this turned out.  It’s a nice way to personalize a blanket. You can always use old remnants of burp clothes or any other special fabric to trim a blanket to make a lovely keepsake!

Cost:

$20? New fabric:  can’t really remember because it was so long ago, but probably close to this

$0 Interfacing- already had on hand

$0 wool blanket- was M’s old Scouts poncho

$0 sheet- already had on hand

$0 other fabric- part of thinning out my stash

xok

So last week I introduced the idea of a Zero Cost Challenge which would involve making over A’s room for zero cost (financially, speaking of course. I forgot to mention how much it costs me physically to try to get the zillion things swirling around my head into action!) I’ve been madly selling items on CL and at work and have been repurposing all sorts of items from other areas of the house. I’m really great at starting things, but not so great at finishing…. So I am happy to present 2 projects that I have completed!

1. Patched up old holes in the walls, puttied, sanded and re-painted the whole room. I could only accomplish this with A away at her nearest grandparents. Thanks guys! Cost= $0, reused old (VOC-free) paint.

2. Rainbow pennants. Cost: $12 for wool felt, $0 for all other fabrics and other acrylic felts. So fun and easy and they really brighten up A’s room. Here’s how I did them.

• First I made a cardboard pattern. Essentially a triangle  with a  base measuring 5.5″ and the pointy tips 6.5″ long. Then I trimmed each of the corners near the base back about 1/2 inch so now the pattern looks more like a dart.

• So you can see the cardboard triangle pattern above. I used a straight edge and my cutting tool to get really nice clean lines when cutting out the pennant pieces. I measured the distance across the ceiling  in A’s room and estimated that I’d need about 16 per string with 9 across the curtain rod. (You may have noticed those are not up yet in the picture). I cut out 41 triangles in total.

• I folded over 1/4″ of the base in order to make a casing so that I could thread the string through and make a chain of pennants and pinned.

Folding the base edge over 1/4 inch to form casing

• Stitch the casing. Repeat.

• I also added some fabric to some of the pennants in the string as well. I used my new best friend- fusible interfacing- to get a really nice clean triangle without fraying raw edges. I cut out  the dart/ flag pattern as above and placed it good side down onto the soft side of the fusible interfacing. I sewed the interfacing all the way around to the fabric.

• Cut out each sewn interfacing + fabric triangle.

• Next- Make a small cut with scissors into the interfacing being very careful not to cut the fabric. This cut will allow you to turn the fabric right side out and have a clean finished seam instead of a raw edge.

• Flip the fabric right side out. You can use a blunt pencil to help poke the tips to get a pointier tip.

• Iron the fabric. The interfacing fuses to the fabric- aha! Genius.

• For the next step- Pin and sew the fabric triangle to an already stitched felt triangle.

• Turn the felt flag over and follow the casing seam and sew over this in order to make sure this will still be threadable.

• The final step involves threading a pre-determined length of string. Tie the string to a safety pin and began inching the pin and string through each casing making sure to have the seams of the pennants all facing the same direction. A helped me choose the colours by throwing them up in the air and letting them land on the floor. She handed me various colours and I did some minor corrections to make sure two of the same colour didn’t end up next to each other (oh the horror!)

• Because today was a bit of a miserable day, it was great to get these up and hanging on her ceiling. I tied the strings to white and clear coloured tacks and tacked them to the corner of the wall and ceiling.

A fun project to pick up an otherwise rainy west coast day.

xok