Thoughts on motherhood: not underestimating the littlies

When doing craft with the kids I've often not been as patient as I'd like to be with them, which makes me a bit sad as I really want them to enjoy it. I find they want to try every step of the project at hand themselves. But you know how it is... dinner is running late, there's a huge mess you keep stepping around, the cat is squeeling for food, the washing needs to be hung out, and there's homework and vaccumming to do and someone has smeared yoghurt everywhere and wee'd in their pants... and it would just be quicker if I DID IT MYSELF, for goodness sake!!!!


So when my girls wanted to make some hair clips just before dinner time this afternoon I took a deep breath and told myself to stay calm. My friend Deb showed us how to cover buttons and use them for hair ties and clips recently and we loved it. Deb is so crafty, always has something interesting on the go, great projects and all sorts of ideas. There's something new to explore every time we see her and her family. Have you tried this? It's lots of fun and great for using up small scraps of treasured fabrics.

I knew the big girl (who's 7) would be fine with each step, but the little girl, who's not quite 5 also wanted to do it all by herself. I thought it would be too much for her but she did a fantastic job, even choosing a scrap of marimekko fabric out of the hundreds in my scrap box (a girl after my own heart :-). She held the small scraps and button holder in her small hands and used my big fabric scissors to neatly trim the excess fabric (deep breath!) and she was patient and methodical - teaching me a lesson!! And when I asked if I could take some pics along the way she sweetly agreed.


She's a funny one our little girl - drives us all insane with her craziness at times then turns around and floors us with her grown up ways. Tomorrow morning we're off to her second orientation for big school next year and I'm sure she'll take it in her stride, wearing some very pretty hair clips :-)

Belatedly playing along with My Creative Space again this week. Get your dose here.

Weekend craftiness - gift tags

Recently I bought a huge pile of cute blank white gift tags with the intention of decorating them to use as gift tags for Xmas and beyond.

So when the kids asked to paint on Sunday morning I brought out these and my watercolours.

It was so interesting to see what they came up with their first time with watercolours.

Some experimenting with blowing the paint around with water and really getting into the beauty of watercolour, I think...

Testing out what happens to the paint the more water you add...

And the little girl didn't really get the whole water idea but still loved it...

And came up with some interesting designs...

I love seeing what kids do when given freedom to create whatever they like. They're not so constrained by convention and I think it's a nice reminder to us grown-ups to loosen up and go with what feels right.

Now on to the wrapping paper ;-) ...

 

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A weekend away

Last weekend we had a few days away with some old friends, one of which had just celebrated her birthday.

 

We enjoyed staying at a great house again. I wish I lived here for all the great photo backdrops!

And we enjoyed cooking and eating some great food, including this naan made by birthday girl. Note the many uses for a wine bottle :-)

We also enjoyed some of our favourite beverages, including champagne (birthday girl's favourite), great wines (wisely chosen by birthday girl's guitar playing other half) and great coffee - our friends are as obsessed by good coffee as we are so we always take the coffee machine, grinder and fresh beans with us ;-) And last but not least we had this amazing ginger beer that I've been dreaming of ever since, made with birthday girl's favourite cooking gadget.

Of course there was also time for some crafting by the kids and us big girls.

 

Including a new addition to my ever expanding array of polymer clay necklaces, this one using a metallic grey clay.

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Has anyone else been having troubles with the new Blogger interface? The formatting is doing my head in... arghh!

Playing teacher

My creative space has been filled with children even more than it usually is this week.

This term I have been going in to help out in my big girl's (year 1) art class at school once a week. I've been having a great time watching all the little people express themselves through their art. It's absolutely fascinating watching those little personalities (some I know well, others vaguely) coming through visually.



Then recently I was using one of my hand carved stamps and thought I'd love to teach the class about block printing and to make their own stamp. The very encouraging teacher welcomed my idea, so after much thought and planning I went in this week for a hectic 2 hours full of fun.



I wanted to get the mix right of freedom to be creative with some guidelines so they wouldn't get frustrated or bored. We had them come up with a simple design, then draw it on to their own rubber block. While each child sat with me individually to carve their stamp, the others in the group used my existing stamps (below) to create a card, gift card and bookmark using scraps and samples of cardboard that I'd cut and folded into shapes and brought in. I also thought they might enjoy tying some string or ribbon on to the bookmarks & gift cards, so cut a heap of lengths of various bits and pieces I had. Anything colourful or sparkly is popular, of course!



I didn't get any pics of the kids in action as I was so busy helping them (phew, those teachers earn their money!) and also wanted to respect their privacy of course. They came up with some amazing (and bizarre!) little designs, and again those personalities shone through. What a lovely thing to see.

Take a look at Our Creative Spaces (last week for the year) here.

A day off school = craft time!

School was closed yesterday so I had my big girl at home with me and my boy (it was little girl's preschool day). I took them on my errands for the morning and along the way we popped in to a local thrift shop for a peek and had one one those rare lucky days where everyone found something they loved:
• paper weaving kit for big girl
• Eric Carle ABC book for little boy (with a bit of help from mama ;-),
• sparkly bracelet for little girl in her absence (can't leave her out!)
• pair of jeans for me, an old favourite style - Lee Rider low rise flares
• and a huge length of heavy cream cotton, perfect for screen printing practice and making tea towels - yay!
The morning was off to a good start. We then dropped in to a local cafe for a milkshake and coffee and finished the chores before the boy's tiredness set in and ended in a tantrum!

When I'd asked big girl if there was anything she wanted to do for the day she did a little jump and said "craft!" of course! She mentioned this cute project that I'd had pinned for a while, so we set to...

She drew and painted...



and I did the cutting...



...and we got there in the end.



I'll admit that there was a bit of angst and frustration on my part. I don't seem to be able to complete a single craft project with the kids without getting a little frustrated or stressed at some point. Is it just me or do you too? Come on, make me feel better and say you do ;-)



Anyway, she was pretty happy with the outcome. If we made it again I'd make a few structural modifications, but still, a nice crafty afternoon regardless.

Have a lovely weekend everyone.

Weekend craftiness: part 2

OK, I'll admit it - this one is a mummy craft, something I've been wanting to try ;-)

I first spied this tutorial for mandarin lantern at the Lucy Patterson Hands-on blog a while ago and fell in love with it. But of course we had to wait for mandarin season, and you also need those lovely specimens with the thick but slightly detached from the flesh skins, if you know what I mean!



So you basically carefully cut around the middle of the mandarin, and gently remove the skin from the flesh, leaving two pieces. Then cut a hole in the top section (to act as a chimney).

Using what's left of the 'stalk' of white pith attached to the base, squeeze and trim it to act as a wick, put some vegetable oil in the base, light it and place the top section on.



It took us a couple of goes to firstly get the flesh away from the skin without breaking it, and then to get the 'wick' the right size/shape to burn, but it was lots of (nerdy) fun and great when it worked. We lit up our mantle in the lounge room with the beautiful orange glow.

Do check out Lucy Patterson's tutorial, she say it all much more eloquently than I do, has full instructions, lots of pretty pictures and a mandarin-eating dog :-)



Now I just wish we had mandarins available at halloween and Christmas... but we'll have to leave that up to you Northern Hemisphere dwellers out there!

Weekend craftiness: part 1

We've had a long weekend here with lots of rain, perfect for a couple of craft projects...

I've noticed lately some groovy machine stitched brooches around made from several layers of fabrics and have been looking forward to making one myself. So I thought it might be a nice project to do with the kids. They seem to like playing around with bits of fabric (wonder where they get that from!) and I always find it interesting to see what they put together without the preconceived notions of what works and what doesn't that we adults have.


My big girl decided to make a flower shape. She chose denim as the base and I machine sewed it to the circle beneath. She then hand stitched a couple of circles and a button on. I used the hot glue gun to stick on the small spots she'd chosen to sit on each of the petals.


I then stitched a safety pin onto the back and it was done.

She quickly had an idea for another brooch... She traced a circle onto felt, cut it out and asked me to stitch it onto a backing fabric. I had fun doing this little spiral...



And she then started sewing on a selection of buttons that she'd taken time choosing from my button stash.


Then we finished it off with a backing piece of felt to hide all the stitching and a safety pin.


It was great seeing her sense of achievement and her unique design ideas.
Yep, I think she's getting indoctrinated into the crafty life!

Thank you for all of your kind words and support about my mother guilt and anxiety in my last post - it helps to hear I'm not alone

Gift wrapping

Kids seem to get invited to a lot of parties. It feels that there's a birthday popping up pretty regularly, which brings me to the subject of gifts, or specifically, wrapping them...

If time is running really short I go to our great local toy shop, buy something that I hope the child will enjoy (and won't drive the parents mad ;-), and get the shop to gift wrap it, buy a card there and write on it my myself and get the kids to sign/scribble on it.

But if there's time - even the morning before the party, I like to get the kids to do the gift wrapping. Sometimes they've not had a part in buying the actual gift and so I find this a nice way to get them involved and feel they've contributed. Plus it's a great little craft project to keep them busy for a while.



As seen above, in our arsenal of gift wrapping bits we have:
• plain pieces of nice cardboard to make cards with
• painted pre-cut cards to use as gift tags
• card fronts to use as cards/gift cards
• balloons
• ribbon in bulk
• textas, pencils, crayons etc for decorating paper
• holepunch, scissors (and sticky tape)
• brown craft paper roll

So what we do is:

Cut off a piece of the craft paper, then start the decorating, on this occasion with big hand prints...



... there's usually a lot of decorating (kids don't do minimal, I've found!)...



Then I get them to choose a card. This is either a blank card, which is nice card off-cuts kept for this purpose, or old card fronts which I like and have kept. The butterfly shapes at the top were found blank at a craft shop and the girls painted one side with acrylic paints, leaving the reverse free for writing on (we then punch a hole in the top to thread the ribbon through)...



... the card is decorated and written on...



... and added to the wrapped present (in this case some dress-up props). We add ribbon, a gift card (or 2!) and sometimes a balloon too, for a festive feel.

One thing I've found I must do if I'm giving the kids the chance to do this is to largely leave them alone. While it's temping to suggest a limited palette/tasteful colour combination or whatever is aesthetically pleasing to me, it's their thing, and other parents understand that we're not going for high art here - it's a bit of fun and made with love.

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In other going's-on:

* I'm making some mittens tonight for my girl to wear to school tomorrow morning (hopefully!). It's a fun project, despite hiccups along the way. I'll show you tomorrow if they work out - or even if they don't ;-)

* While blog surfing recently I came across the Style Arc patterns. Have you seen them? I think they're basically replicas of on-trend clothes (they have "Pippa's dress" from the royal wedding recently). I'd normally think I wouldn't be interested but they look great. I've pinned several dresses onto my Pinterest 'sewing patterns' board. If anyone has made one I'd love to know what you thought. I'm seriously tempted by the Emma dress - ahem, after my stash-busting is done, of course ;-)

A birthday sleepover part 2

Continuing on from yesterday's post...

After the sleepover bags were thoroughly raided the girls got started on their craft activity. It is a must to do craft before a sleepover, apparently (girls after my own heart :-). They decorated a pillowcase each using the fabulous fabric crayons pictured above. It was the quickest and least messy activity I could think of that related to bedtime.



After dinner was The Cake - do you find that the cake is often the most anticipated part of a birthday? I just love how excited children get about it. My girls talk about their cake all through the year, even when their birthdays are ages away!!

Big girl had excitedly gone through our favourite celebration cake cookbook, The Australian Womens Weekly's "Kids Party Cakes" in the weeks before the event and decided on this moon cake to suit the sleepover theme.



Each time I've used this cookbook I've picked up some new tip or trick, and this time it was the coloured textured icing. It's a standard butter icing coloured yellow, which is then sprinkled with sugar that you tint yellow. The sugar smooths off the surface and can be scattered around any dips in the icing, so it's very forgiving of wonky application! It looks great, but just don't think about the fact that you're eating pure sugar. Hmm, maybe that's why sleep came pretty late to the lovely girls :-) (The cake is this favourite quick and easy egg-free chocolate cake).

OK, one birthday down for the year, 2 more to go...

Wayols and Ligas and other stuff

This motherhood gig is hard at times. But you knew that already. And it's only the little stuff I'm talking about! No catastrophies here at the moment, just everyday annoyances.

I'm feeling guilty today for yelling at my big girl this morning for playing instead of getting ready for school. It's not her fault that I have 2 other littlies to get ready, that I can't find any shoes that fit no. 2 and that no. 3 is still running around bare bottomed when we have to go NOW! Or that I'm tired because I stayed up too late working on a dress for her birthday that I'm not even sure if she'll like. Or that I subsequently woke up late and so now have no time to have my morning sanity-saver coffee before rushing to school... arghh! Does it sometimes feel hard to hold all the little things together for you too? Those flash points during the day can get me down.



But then I look at her gorgeous drawings and first attempts to spell. And marvel at her sense of imagination: "what's a Liga sweetie?" a shrug of the shoulders and "half lion, half tiger, mum" of course. My heart melts and all the little things don't matter.



It's a shame it's so hard at times to not 'sweat the small stuff'. I read blogs of women with older children and shudder at the things I'll need to deal with in time to come. So I try to tell myself to relax and enjoy the here and now, even if I'm not having a wayol of a time (haa haa). And make sure I get that coffee early ;-)

PS. Have a look at what Trula has done with her drawing sessions with her daughter - too cute!

Scenes from a (rainy) weekend away

We came back yesterday from a long weekend away with friends. Although my visions of playing with the kids on the beach for hours didn't materialise, we did...



...Stay in a great holiday house with lots of space for 4 grown-ups and 5 kids. Very Australian in feel, it was full of wood, steel and corrogated iron, with a great native scrubby garden (good for treasure hunts when the weather allowed) and a lovely wood fire for the slightly chilly evenings...



...The kids played and explored, watched the beautiful birds...



...And the big little girls did some craft of course! It's genetic, you know. They designed their own little teddies, cut them out of felt, and after Crafty Deb and I embroidered their names on they sewed them together and stuffed them. Of course I forgot to photograph them. There was also a lot of pom pom making, cutting of paper shapes, drawing and making of books complete with pictures with 6yr-old spelling "My holdas"...



...And when there was a break in the weather they squealed with delight at foraging on the beach...



... Crafty Deb and I had a 'Shearwater Kaftan' wearing weekend (2 for her, 1 for me) and she impressed me with her fantastic idea of the sleeve snap detail (I've only done buttons)...



...Then driving home we got stuck in a flash flood and ended up feeling like we were driving through rivers. I now have a bit more empathy for the poor people up north who lived through severe flooding recently.