Rainbow Fish

I finished half a dozen fishies!

Some of them will be Christmas gifts this year and some of them will be birthday gifts for this coming year.

These little guys proved to be a nice "stash busting" project!  I had a lot of fun finding coordinating fabric scraps for their fins.  I used the same pattern that I drafted up for the first fishie pencil case, which was inspired by minnebites' shark pencil cases.

Now who's hungry for sushi?

Goodie Ghosts!

For children, halloween is simple.  You simply get dressed up and go from house to house trick or treating for candy.  But things get much more difficult once you become an adult and even more so once you become a parent.

Do you stay home and hand out candy to kids or escort your own kid around the block so that they can get candy?  Give or get?  ...Can you ever do both?  Well that is what I will attempt to do this year!  I can't be in two places at once... so I decided to make some little helpers!

Some Goodie Ghosts!

While I'm out with Buddy the Dragon collecting treats, these guys will be sitting on our porch ready to hand themselves out to the trick or treaters passing by.  Unlike just leaving a bowl of unsupervised candy out, each ghost contains an equal assortment of candies in a cute, single-serving sized package.  Hopefully these little guys will be large enough that the kids will be content with taking only one each.  And because the candy assortment is a "surprise" it will discourage the "picking and choosing" that leaves you with a bowl of unwanted milk duds and butterscotch dum-dums at the end of the night.

These little guys were also pretty easy to make!  Here's how to make your own Goodie Ghosts:

First, cut some white copy paper in half to make 8 1/2" x 5 1/2" sheets.  Also, cut some tissue paper into 12" squares, roughly.  Feel free to be approximate with the tissue paper and crinkle it thoroughly for best results!

Roll the copy paper sheets into tubes by wrapping them around a large dowel or an empty paper towel tube and use masking tape to secure the seam.

While the paper is still wrapped around your dowel or tube, fold over the top inch of the paper towards the center to close off one end.  Secure the folded end with some more masking tape.

Dilute some white Elmer's glue with water and paint onto the top half of your paper tube.

Now place your paper tube, closed end down, in the center of a square of tissue paper and crumple the tissue paper up around the tube.  Paint the top half of the tissue paper with more diluted glue to help smooth it onto to the paper tube and then let it dry completely.

Once your ghost is dry, draw a face on it with a sharpie marker.

Now for the fun part!  Turn your ghost over and fill it with candy!  Staples work well for closing the bottom end of the tube.

And there you have it!  An army of ghosts ready and waiting to evenly distribute candy to the little monsters!

Trick or Treat!

Roly-Poly Fish Heads!

It's summertime, and that means vacation time... which in our family means fishing time!

This picture is from a couple of years ago... Guess who caught the big fish?

Our family's annual vacation tradition inspired this super-cute pencil case:

I was also inspired by the shark pencil cases in minnebites Etsy shop.  I made up my own pattern with shorter fins and I appliqued the eyes (mostly because I didn't have any googly eyes in my stash...)

This fish sure is hungry!

Fish heads, fish heads...

...eat them up, YUM!

Tutorial: Big Blocks

We go through quite a bit of soy milk over here, resulting in the accumulation of many half-gallon cartons.  And I am not one to let so many cartons go to waste!  Yes, I could just throw them in the recycling bin, but where is the fun in that?  Instead, I turned them into jumbo building blocks for Buddy to play with... which literally IS fun!

Start by slicing the tops off of the cartons with a box cutter.

Then I lined them all up in the bathtub and filled them with hot water and a splash of bleach, just to make sure they were all nice and clean and wouldn't start smelling later on.

After an hour or two, dump them all out and let them air dry overnight.  They need to be very dry!  Then slide two cartons together, one inside the other, to make a block.

The last step is to cover the blocks with contact paper.  This holds them together and makes them look like actual blocks instead of milk cartons.  I used wood-grain contact paper, but you can use whatever color or design you want!  I found that it was easiest to cover the ends of the blocks first but cutting out a square a few inches larger than the carton.  After centering the contact paper on the bottom of the carton, cut slits to the corners and fold up.

Then cut a piece of contact paper to wrap around the middle of your block.

And voila!  A big block!

Now comes the fun part... building big towers!

Can you guess what Buddy's favorite part is?

To Boldly Go...

Open shuttle-bay doors and begin docking sequence...

Buddy has his own spaceship!

A classic Star Trek type-4 shuttlecraft with reinforced cardboardium hull plating, named after Buddy's favorite stuffed animal.

Buddy is already adept at laying in course adjustments via the control panel.

Several months ago, this intrepid space vessel was nothing more than a large cardboard box...

We trimmed and folded the front of the box to create the front point and then cut out some windows.

Rear doors and internal reinforcement (in the form of mailing tubes) came next.

Buddy turned out to be a great quality inspector!

We reinforced all of the exterior edges with additional "cardboardium" for extra durability.  Astronomical anomalies can really give a ship a beating...

Next, we integrated the ship's control systems and installed a tactile interface.

Propulsion systems came online after that.  We constructed warp nacelles out of extra-large mailing tubes and extra-large sports-drink bottles.

Finally, we gave the ship a proper paint job and registry number!

U.S.S. Crazy Monkey, ready for launch.

"Engage!"

Itty Bitty Butterflies

The butterflies that I got for my birthday are super colorful and super easy to make!  (...easy enough for a three-year-old at least!)  Thanks goes out to my sister-in-law for coming up with these.

All you need are two squares of fabric (these were 5"x5") and a fuzzy pipe cleaner.

Fold the squares of fabric in half and place the folded edges next to each other.

Pinch the fabric squares together in the middle and wrap a pipe cleaner around them.

Trim and bend the pipe cleaner into the butterfly's antennae.

Ta da!  You just made a butterfly!

Birthday Butterflies!

I had a birthday a few weeks ago!  I got to hang out with my family and a bunch of friends and it was a pretty fun day.

However, I didn't get to see the little Mosher girls until just recently and they had a surprise birthday present for me.  They had made me a whole box full of rainbow butterflies!

Their bright, fabric wings and colorful pipe-cleaner antennae are just too cute!  I had to find a good way to display them, so I made a mobile.

I twisted some wire into a flower-shape and hung all of the butterflies off of it with some thin string.

Now I have some cheery butterflies fluttering around my living room!