When David was two and three years old, he loved making necklaces, bracelets and long, meaningless strings with pony beads. Now that he’s 5, he’s ignored the big container of beads for some time.  I had almost forgotten about the container until I found an old paper with a few patterns that could get my boy’s boy to find interesting. Sadly, the instructions for the patterns were impossible to understand, so we just decided to wing it.

We started with a Gecko.

It was actually pretty easy. David did the body on his own, and I helped out with the legs, which we just made on separate small bits of beading string and shoved the excess string into the body beads. An inelegant solution, but it turned out OK.

The trick to the body is to start with your first bead in the middle of a loooong string, then bring each side of the string through the next row, crossing back and forth through every row till you get to the single string of beads that is the tail.

The butterfly was a bit harder.

The wings took at least a half an hour to figure out how to get the string to wrap around when there was only one end. The solution was to string all the beads in a single line, then go back through the beads as they correspond to the rows in the wing.

Tomorrow he’s decided we need to figure out how to make a spider and a frog.

I’ve dug up a few other bug patterns online too, like this bumble bee, this beetle, and this ladybug.

There’s also a few to save up for next halloween, like a ghost and jack o’lantern.

I finally have some hope that we’ll get through that big container full of beads in my lifetime.

David and I spent part of the day yesterday assembling Christmas cards for grandparents, uncles and cousins. We bought a few kits from The Oriental Trading Company, but the what really sparked the creativity was paper artist Robert Sabuda’s site, where he offers patterns and plans for a bunch of simple pop-ups, many of which are great for Christmas.

My favorite was the Christmas tree, while David liked the snowflake best. We finally had to stop experimenting when we ran out of cardstock.

David went digging through the workbook shelf today and uncovered the AEP’s “The Complete Book of Our Solar System “. It’s a tough book to work through, with lots of copy work, but he kept at it for a lot longer than I anticipated. I have to admit that there’s a good variety of activities and puzzles, so that it seemed worth the effort to get through the more dull pages to get to the games or riddles.

After working through about 15 pages, we went outside and collected autumn colored leaves. We put them in his nature journal, then spent time identifying them with a leaf identification book I didn’t even know we had.

Then he decided it was craft time, so we made some monster  paper lanterns that turned out kind of cute.

Now it’s nearly nine o’clock, and I’ve still got a bundle of work to catch up on before I can get some sleep, so I sent David off to watch a few shows on TV before he heads to sleep. I hate to condone TV, but sometimes I need the solitude to pay the bills.

I still can’t believe how lucky I am to be able to watch him grow and learn. As much as it can be exhausting some days, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

David has a serious fascination with fall and Halloween. I’d say he probably likes Halloween more than Christmas. He loves dressing up in costumes. He loves candy, and he loves crunching in the leaves.

Already he’s noticed the Halloween stuff in the stores and started asking me to make jack-o-lantern sandwiches (which are just english muffins with a slice of cheese cut to look like a jack-o-lantern).

He’s also started thinking about fall crafts.We made this cute little scarecrow face after seeing a similar craft package here. We had all the supplies necessary in our overflowing craft box, but if you’ve got a group of kids or would like to make a whole batch, the price for enough stuff for a dozen of these can’t be beat.

We did place an order for a bunch of other neat crafts for autumn and Halloween, though. We bought this pack of six fleece silly monster tied pillow craft kits as a Halloween craft. I plan on taking most of them out with me when I visit family so David and his cousins can all do their own pillow monster together, but I opened one to see if David was able to do the craft on his own. I’m happy to say that the tying is easy (though he got some of the pieces mixed up, fudging it after the fact didn’t make the pillow look bad at all).

I almost decided on the witch pillow craft kit, but thought the monsters were a little more generic, and could stay on the bed all year long.

And, a sucker for a bargain, I also grabbed a pack of 12 wooden hockey game craft kits for four bucks, only to wonder, now that they’ve arrived, what the heck I’m going to do with a dozen of the darn things. Maybe his Beaver group will be able to use them.

What could be more fun that flying a kite? What about flying one that you built yourself, with ordinary materials that you’ve almost certainly got around your home.

We made a simple kite today out of one 8.5X11″ piece of paper, some tape, a plastic straw, and a small plastic shopping bag. Also needed was a string. We used a kite string from a free kite that was given to us on Canada day. That kite was never able to stay off the ground for more than 3 seconds, and when it did get up momentarily, it immediately dive bombed the person flying it. So, it was no big loss to cut the string for our paper kite experiment.

Here are the directions and a pattern, if you want to try it yourself.

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Geometric design puzzles have ancient origins. The Chinese tangram, Archimedes’ puzzle and a host of others are recorded in ancient books.

And although they are old, time has not removed the shroud that makes three, four, five or more simple geometric pieces from being puzzles. They are as fascinating (and occasionally frustrating) today as they were to the ancients.

David and I have been making a few of our favorites to send to cousins and uncles for Easter (in lieu of cheesy cards).

Here is the first pattern for a simple square puzzle:

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We used to keep craft supplies in the kitchen pantry. And some in the office. And some in the bedrooms… you get the picture. It was chaos when we needed tape, or a glue stick, or a purple sheet of construction paper.

So last week I picked up a Degernes Bed Storage Box from Ikea to use as a craft box. I have to say, it’s perfect! I got the smaller one (90X66 cm) so it would fit under David’s bed (along side his sleeping bag and tent which are rolled up and stored under there.

It’s just a fabric lined flat wicker box with a fabric tie-down top that’s just the right height to slide under a bed. It stores everything just perfectly.

I gathered all our supplies and started adding them in one by one last Sunday. The biggest item that it had to hold was the Mala paper roll (also from Ikea). Some of the other loose things like chalk, foam shapes, and other small items got moved from old coffee tins to ziplock bags. Paper got stacked together, along with stencils and notebooks. Pens, markers and crayons got one big container. And odds and ends like paper towel rolls and other doodads just got thrown in randomly.

I’m happy to say that four days of crafting later, the box still looks pretty good, and having everything in one place in HIS bedroom has made David a little more conscientious about cleaning up too. And once the top is tied down, the dog doesn’t even try to get in to chew on the crayons.

This is definitely one of my better ideas this year.

We’ve been very craft-oriented lately, mostly because we’re in the middle of a cold spell that makes it impossible to play outdoors.

Today we made a poster that began with two 3D trees. My original plan was to have David draw or stencil forest animals around the scene, but once the trees were there, he decided he wanted to draw a curtain and stage between them so he could have a music show poster.

Materials:

• A large piece of paper. We use a roll of Mala paper from Ikea ($5) for projects like this
• 1 toilet paper roll
• 1 sheet of green construction paper (or use red, orange and yellow for autumn leaves)
• Tape
• Markers or crayons

Cut the toilet paper roll into two pieces lengthwise to make tree trunks. Your child can use markers or crayons to color them brown. David added a few black spots for knots and holes.

Fold the construction paper three times and you or your child can cut a leaf shape out of the paper. That should give you eight leaves. I used a simple elm leaf shape, but you could also use an oak or maple leaf shape for a different look.

Have your child split the resulting pile of leaves in half, then tape an equal number of leaves to the inside of each toilet paper roll ‘trunk’.

Once the leaves are taped securely, tape the trees onto the paper and draw the rest of the scene with markers or crayons.