recent creations

M came home with some of his artwork recently.  A cool African inspired mask:

and a very life-like gecko!

I didn't get a good picture of it, but when we put the gecko down near the cats, they had to go check it out to make sure it wasn't alive.  M's art teacher was quite impressed with the gecko and offered him a slot in her advanced art class next year.  He is happy about that - art all year long!

Here's A with his recent Magnetix creations:

The Magnetix were a big hit when he first got them and for about a year thereafter, then went into hiatus for about a year.  A claimed he didn't want them anymore, but we held on to them anyway.  Lately they've had a big resurgence in interest.  He's built bridges and towers and cool geometric designs - all very interesting.

Tied Blanket

This was a really quick and easy project. I bought this fleece kit a few weeks ago on sale and have been waiting for a good time to work on it (needed the dining room table cleared off, but I didn't want to tie up the table). I needn't have worried - I finished the whole project this afternoon and evening, even with a lot of help from both cats!

Pounce kept trying to investigate while I was trying to spread it all neatly out - I had to leave the area to get her to leave. Then once I got it spread out and cut (MUCH faster with the rotary cutter than with scissors), Shadow came over to help me with the tying.

Christmas bag photos

Finally here are the photos of some of the fabric gift bags that I promised I would show.

It's a very simple design. I generally take a piece of fabric and fold it in half (trying to watch if the pattern has an "up" to only fold sideways). I then stitch the other two sides closed, but stitching in to the seam on one side a tie - ribbon, rickrack, whatever looks good. Then I hem the top.

The first time I made the bags, I tried making a drawstring, but that took too long. Then I tried making the bags without any tie and just tying a ribbon on once the package was in there, but the ribbon kept threatening to come off.

The bigger the bag, the larger the tie seems right. Each of these bags probably only took about 15 minutes to make (once I decided on the fabric and what size I needed).

It's getting rather close to Christmas to stitch up a bunch of these for this year, but I like to get the Christmas fabric when its way discounted after Christmas. I always say I am going to stitch up a bunch of bags way before Christmas, but it rarely works that way.

Wands, a la Harry Potter

M found a cool website which featured how to make a Harry Potter wand.  I looked it over and it certainly seemed workable.  Now the site says that it only takes 20 minutes to make.  Well, that's a bit of a stretch.  Maybe its 20 minutes of hands-on time, but that doesn't include locating all the materials, waiting for glue to dry (several different times), waiting for paint to dry (again several times).  I would guess that our wands took more like an hour of my time, spread out over most of the afternoon.  But they really look cool!

This first picture is of an intermediate stage, where we put on hot glue to texture the wands.

I had the kids draw where they wanted me to put down the glue, but really they could have done it themselves (since I have a low temp glue gun).

M's wand.  It's really a little browner than it appears in this picture.

A's wand.  

In both cases, we skipped the "distressing wash" step of the process, since we had spray painted the wands black initially and enough of the black showed through the other paint to be equivalent to a wash. 

M wanted to take his wand to church this morning and show it off, but we dissuaded him.  Both kids did show them off to my mom and she was suitably impressed.