I am coming back, I think

As the nights draw in and the temperatures drop and the Christmas decorations begin to appear, I find myself drawn back here.  Also, Z1 asked about making an Advent calendar this year so last year's sad story may have a happy ending this year. In the meantime, things have been made in the Conquering Crafts household since my  last post in April. The highlights are below.

 
Like many a household across the world, there were many of these to be found in our house. And like many a parent across the world, some of them were made by me after the Zeds were in bed. And there may have been swearing at spillages and mistakes. Overall, a success, though.


Then, there was a cupcake decorating party and Z2 got in on the action too. He is more of a fan of icing than he is of cake.

Z2's icing efforts. This
photo refuses to be posted
horizontally. Grr.

Z1 got a lovely sewing kit for her birthday which we cracked open during the summer. She is keen to make mittens now, I am considering some simpler project that she might be able to wear. Possibly a very simple skirt that she could sew decorations onto if I do the skirt. Hmmm.

As Z2 is now a very big boy (as he will indignantly tell anyone who dares to say that he is a small boy), he left daycare in July. I was rather proud of the gift basket I made for the lovely staff there. I like dots. Oh yes I do.





For Z2's birthday party, making fruit kebabs was a nice way to pass the morning without constant "what time will the party be?" questions. I have seen amazing efforts on Pinterest that look like rainbows but I think ours look pretty good too. I also successfully persuaded him to ask for a cake that would fit with my "Make an ordinary chocolate cake" plans. I rather like him. (The cake, that is, not Z2. He's a spider. Clearly. Again, the cake. Z2 is human.)




 And before you know it, Hallowe'en was upon us again and we took to the pumpkins. Last year, Z2 made valiant efforts with the Dollarama tools while Z1 took the role of artistic director for her pumpkin. This year, I did buy better tools and amidst warnings about being very, very careful and frustration that it was still a tricky job,  we carved the beauties in the picture. Z1 was disappointed that hers didn't look better but it was all her own work (middle step). Z2 was artistic director for his (top step) and I was disappointed with the botched eyes on mine (bottom step).

Disappointingly, from the point of view of photos and family records, Z1 decided that she wanted to be a bat again this year and Z2 followed her lead. I did make fresh costumes but used the same tops as last year so that saved some hassle. I followed the instructions here and used a measuring tape and everything to tailor-make them. On the great day itself, it rained. Again (3rd year in a row). Z1 didn't care and declined to cover her costume. Z2 put on his fleece and didn't really get to show off the costume at all but still got a great haul of crap to enjoy for weeks to come.



Sneak preview of this year's cake with a purpose

Last year, Z1 had a beetle cake. It was quite a chocolatey and wondrous thing. This year will also be chocolatey and wondrous as I mostly believe that cakes should be chocolate. We have decided upon a ladybird and I have planned as you can see in the lovely picture below. The party is on Sunday. Baking shall take place on Saturday. I am quite excited. 

 

On a side note, I was speaking to a friend here who had a book that talked about a ladybird. She thought it was a rather amusing typo or weird mistake. In Ireland and in England, we call them ladybirds but I do accept that the North American version - ladybug - makes more sense.

 

When you think you're ahead of the game but it turns out your're just about hanging in there

Last year, I had hearts of rage even though I generally have a reasonable affection for Valentine's day (but must admit to never having seen the relics of the venerable saint in my town of birth).

This year, I was all prepared with ideas in my head and a saved template on my computer. However, I had the wind taken from my sails by a post on Z1's class blog with the class list and an assurance that writing out each name would be a great writing exercise for the children. My schemes had mainly avoided Z1 having to write out much as I felt it would be tedious. Also, the bookmarks I had planned, glittery hearts with her name on them stuck to a lollipop stick - ta dah - a bookmark - were not conducive to having names written on them. We overcame the latter problem by putting the bookmarks in envelopes and, as for the tediousness, it turns out I had underestimated her tolerance for writing and she completed the task as well as decorating the envelopes with each classmate's favourite colour accompanied by frequent declarations about how awesome it all was.

Z2 helped a bit with glitter painting his hearts but I did most of the work. As for the beautiful bag you see in the righthand panel of the picture, Z1 decorated it but it was chiefly my effort as bedtime was nigh by the time we got 'round to it. Sadly, I was not paying attention to detail and the other side of the bag has an upside down heart. However, on a positive note, it did not fall apart when we were carrying it to school despite the fact that I ran out of sticky tape (Z1 gets through miles of the stuff for her various projects) and had to use a glue stick to put on the ribbon handles and seal up the bottom. Furthermore, it turns out there was a book fair at Z1's school this week making the bookmarks so very appropriate and on theme. I win after all.

Would pumpkin seeds be big for spiders?

Z1's plan

Mine, Z2's in the middle
& Z1's at the back

The first thing I must say is that Z2 was not impressed with the idea of hammering cookie cutters into his pumpkin. I really thought he would be as one of his first and favourite sentences for a long time was "I'll fix it with a hammer". However, now he is very big and three whole years old and he definitely wanted to use a sharp thing. Thankfully, the Dollarama pumpkin carving tools (oh yes, I have specific pumpkin carving tools, this is serious business) are not so sharp that I was concerned for his digits so he was allowed to wield one.
 Secondly, I should explain the title of this post. This was a question asked by Z1 during the course of our pumpkin carving. I was a little baffled by it so I asked her to clarify. It turns out she was imagining that the stringy bits of pumpkin guts that we gleefully hauled out with spoons and fingers were spider webs. As a result of this thought, she was wondering whether a spider the size of a pumpkin seed would be considered big. I decided it would be medium.

Z2's pumpkin, please do admire the eyebrows

 Thirdly, it is worthy of note, I feel, that the eyebrows on Z2's pumpkin were entirely his own doing - he poked the holes and wiggled that carving tool around sufficiently to make them. He had help with all other features. Z1 also mostly took the role of artistic director on her pumpkin. The bluntness of the Dollarama carving tools not only makes them relatively safe for big three year olds, but also makes it fairly hard work to carve a pumpkin with them. Perhaps next year I shall upgrade my tools.





 

Z1's pumpkin

The last thing which I feel I must mention to make this post complete is that I went to the trouble of removing pulp and string from the seeds in order to roast/toast/bake them as snack. Z1 had tried some last year when one of her teachers did this and it does feel awfully wasteful, even for the spookily good price I bought these pumpkins for, to throw away such bounty.  Initial feedback was good, Z1 asked for more and said they tasted like popcorn. However, the next day Z2 specifically requested, out of the blue, that he not have pumpkin seeds for dinner and Z1 did not eat any of the seeds which I packed, with some degree of satisfaction, for her lunch. I quite like them but I feel that some of them may be destined for the rubbish bin after all.


 

Preparations are afoot

While I may not have got further than the one bat costume that I reported on earlier in the month, I have managed to keep Z2 on track mentally to be a bat this Hallowe'en.

We have bought pumpkins - three: one each for Z1, Z2, and me. They were only 88 cents each which was spookily good value, I am sure you will agree. Husband is away this weekend so will miss out on the carving though I think he'd very much enjoy it if he got down to it.

Hallowe'en extravagance

I set Z1 the entirely unnecessary task of washing the pumpkins while Z2 napped on Sunday. We have set them on our steps as decorations, not yet in their full, carved Hallowe'en glory. We also have one black tinsel cat, one black tinsel spider, one strand of black tinsel with purple spiders, one hanging bat decoration and one hanging ghost decoration on our front porch. We are positively understated compared to most of the houses in our area who have decorated for Hallowe'en, with the house in the picture being the outright winner in terms of extravagance and exuberance for the celebration.

I have been pinning away a few templates of ideas for carving these pumpkins. These, I must admit, are mostly for me. I am much more excited by pumpkin carving than I thought I would be, something I discovered when I carved my first pumpkin in my first autumn over here in Canada.

I plan for Z2 to use his wooden hammer to bash cookie cutters into the pumpkin to carve his. I understand that this may be one of the points where my pumpkin carving extravaganza may not go to plan.

The sweeties to be given out to trick-or-treaters have been purchased and placed strictly off limits to all members of the household.

Pumpkin carving is scheduled for this Sunday. I will, of course, report back.

Black tops, bat wings and toilet trips

Having been to Dollarama to buy "bat teeth" and "bat ears" (actually cat ears and vampire teeth but I reckon with the wings, they will pass as bat ears and vampire bat teeth. I was prepared to make the bat ears also but these will do nicely and we got a bonus cat tail too) and having picked up a remnant of mostly black suit material for $2.99, all that was missing for the making of the bat costumes were the plain black tops. The outing to get these was postponed until Sunday after a lengthy Saturday afternoon nap on the part of Z2.

Map does not include detour to shop with lots of sparkly things where NOTHING SHOULD BE TOUCHED as I was a bit dizzy by then and can't remember where it was




Going to the shopping centre (or mall, if you will) requires, of course, plenty of preparation - the pre-car journey toilet trip, the setting down of the rules (no, we will not be buying any toys in the Rainforest Café but we can look at the fish and the pretend animals; we are going to buy plain black tops and look at tea for me, there will be no other purchases though we may get some kind of snack food if you are good), the route planning within the centre to ensure maximum efficiency... Actually, no, I did not route plan but that was mainly 'cause I didn't know where my fancy tea shop was. Also, even if I had route planned, it would have been quickly scuppered by Z2's announcement that he needed to go to the toilet and the fact that the first set of toilets we went to had a ridiculous queue so we had to go in search of some others. However, happily, we did find plain, black, long-sleeved tops in H&M as hoped. Hurrah. (However, the teas I wanted were not available which was

rather a devastating blow. Or, you know, slightly disappointing.)



What me? I forgot to dress up,      Mwa ha ha ha, I am
just wearing boring old black                 a bat!                 

Now, once the tops were purchased, Z1 was keen to make the costumes right-now-this-very-second. While I couldn't quite satisfy that request what with us being in the shopping centre and all,  I did get started once we got home and I even let her try it on when I had only done one wing. While doing the first wing was quite exciting and doing the second wing was rather satisfying, I now have to motivate myself to do two more wings for Z2's top and continue to foster their commitment to being bats this Hallowe'en. The advance planning bodes well for the former but will be a little trickier for the latter.







As summer melts into autumn

Back to school and slowly waning warm weather has been keeping us outside and busy in various ways. I make no apologies for soaking up every last drop of warmth and sunshine as the evenings and mornings grow darker.

That is not to say that craft and creations have come to a halt. There was a delicious apple cake which Z1 directed, funeral portraits for our dearly departed fish, a pirate hat for Husband from Z1 and we are currently planning for bat costumes* for Hallowe'en. 

I don't mind shop-bought costumes but I do maintain that there's a certain charm in homemade costumes that just doesn't happen with bought ones. Watch this space.

*links to other bat-mentioning posts, not brilliant bat costumes, you will have to wait for them.

Sad Sunflower Story

Oh people, I am sorry to have to come here and tell you that I think our sunflower shade circle is not to be this year.

I could blame the caterpillars or slugs who seem to have made a meal of a few of the seedlings that did manage to push through
but I really feel that I must take the blame on this one.

Firstly, I didn't really prepare the ground for planting. I didn't shave the area cut the grass to define the circle so that trampling feet would avoid it and to ensure that enough light would shine on the ground to warm it and nurture the seedlings.

Secondly, I dug with a spoon. A spoon, I tell you! I should have used the proper tools which would have been more effective at digging sunflower seed-appropriate planting holes.

Finally, despite Z1's excellent planning and helpful diagrams, I did not carefully space the seeds and make sure they were evenly distributed around the circle. I did things hurriedly and haphazardly and my punishment shall be no shady, sunflower circle for me or the Zeds this year. Alas and alack.

Having said that, there is one seedling doing quite well, reaching up tall against the odds so I think we shall have a solitary sunflower. This strong sunflower will shine as a beacon to remind us that next year, if we prepare and plan AND execute the plan correctly, we could be the proud and happy cultivators of a shady, sunflower circle fort.

Diagrams and digging

The idea of planting a circle of sunflowers as a sort of shady den for the summer came from Pinterest though I had seen and loved a sunflower maze in Dublin Botanic Gardens and loved it. It just hadn't occurred to me to translate it to my very own garden until Pinterest.

I had spoken about it quite a lot and the Zeds and I tramped out the circle in the long grass on Saturday. Husband then cut the grass so we got to tramp it out again which was a good thing as the Zeds are big fans of running, skipping, marching and jumping around in a circle. I got a bit dizzy.

Z1 then took it upon herself to draw a diagram to plan the circle out. We currently only have a temporary fence on one side of the garden so crayon drawings are allowed. The parameters she planned to illustrate were the size of the circle and the height of the sunflowers. She also had a separate table where she planned how often the sunflowers would need watering. Apparently they will require watering 6 times on Mondays. This was a very serious project.


On the right, you can see that the upper circle has a tick and an arrow - this is the required size of the sunflower circle. It also has 2 flowers in the middle which show the location of the circle as there are two orange flowers on our lawn. The circle below has been crossed out as too small.

In this diagram, you can see the height she wants the sunflowers to be (8 units, units not specified) and, in the righthand panel, you can see she drew a picture of herself for comparison. As she is about 3 feet tall and the sunflowers can apparently grow up to 10ft tall, she may get her wish of the sunflowers being twice her height as illustrated.

We had misplaced our trowel when the time came to plant the seeds so we made do with a spoon. Z2 was napping and Z1 took charge of choosing the seed for each hole and watering each seed after planting. Now we must wait and see if they grow or wether the birds ate the seeds immediately after we planted them.
 

A small swarm of beetles

Beetle blueprint

 In part inspired by the marvellous Jo and her Woodcraft Folk group, the birthday party beetle craft was born. On the left, you can see my expert blueprints. The key idea in the plan was the paper fastener, allowing the beetles to open and close their wings.

As I began to plan the party, I envisioned a short talk about beetles complete with a poster to show the variety of beetles that can be found and their general coolness. I even added that poster to my ebay watch list, so excited was I.

Small swarm of beetles

However, I talked myself down from the beetle poster and concentrated on getting coloured paper plates, pipe cleaners, paper fasteners, googly eyes, stickers and a hole punch. It's just as well, really, as things at the party didn't quite go to plan. I showed them the prototype (guess which one in the photo on the right was mine) and offered help. Predictably enough, but not anticipated by me, the boys preferred to run around bashing balloons while the girls sat down to make beetles. I was a little over-stretched as the girls needed help with the hole punch but I like our little swarm of beetles.  It would have been larger but, delightfully, a couple of the girls took theirs home. Z1 was mostly happy to have our stash of pipe cleaners replenished.

Hearts of rage



The hearts of rage (they look
innocuous, don't they?)
Download them here to avoid
having the rage yourself

As a Dubliner, I feel sort of proprietorial about St. Valentine's Day, though I have never been to see his remains in the city church in which they rest. I also like seeing people smiling carrying flowers and I think telling people you love them is a good thing. Sure, it's all marketing and hype and prescribed affection if you want to see it that way but, it you want to partake, I will be happy to support your efforts. You can even send me some flowers while you're at it and I'll be grateful, thrilled and surprised.

However, Z2 is two and a half. When asked if X or Q or R is his friend, he will respond either "He doesn't hit me" or "He can talk, but he can't sing songs".  His concept of friendship and love is not yet fully developed. Although he is an affectionate little fellow, I don't think he has any particular want or need to show his pre-schooler colleagues his affection by way of a heart-embellished card or pencil or sweetie. His daycare is brilliant and I generally can't fault them. However, my heart sank when  I saw a list of all the children and teachers in the room taped to his cubbyhole. There was a paragraph explaining that bringing in Valentine's tokens - shop-bought or homemade - was not compulsory but the children would be having an activity involving distributing Valentine's tokens to each other. This letter is what brought on the hearts of rage. The letter went up on the Monday, with Valentine's Day being Thursday, so I didn't even have a weekend to prepare.

In fact, I had already been stewing and pondering over a craft for Z1 to do to bring in to her friends. I had opted out last year, our first February in Canada, not knowing she would come home laden with sweeties and pencils and stickers. I rolled my eyes a bit and resolved to sort her out with something to bring in this year but hadn't really got a concrete idea by the 11th of February. I wanted something that she could mostly do herself but knew she would get bored before she had written her own name, let alone any further message, on a token for each of her classmates.

And so, with this double pressure, from memories of last year and the letter from the pre-school room, I used Word to make the hearts of rage. The rage was caused by various cutting and pasting, text placement and font size complications. The plan was to bring them home, have the Zeds paint them in pink, red and glitter and then glue the paper to some card, cut them out on squares and possibly, if I had the energy, personalise the ones for Z2's colleagues given they were having a distribution activity. Sigh. Even worse, despite supposedly  having become one of those people, I didn't have any saved cereal boxes for backing the hearts. The idea grew into attaching bits of paper to Z1's tokens to make them into very useful bookmarks instead of pretty useless bits of card just beautiful tokens of affection.

Valentine's bookmark
from Z1

Glittery Valentine's hearts on
squares from Z2

Considering the forced march feel of this activity from my point of view, it was actually rather nice. Z2 more or less painted one sheet before wandering off to do something else (I haven't yet discovered any pink, glittery handprints) and Z1 zealously coated her two pages in glitter glue and paint. That was Tuesday evening. I cooked a creamy mild curry dish while this took place before finishing off Z2's other sheet. Z1 was set to work on Wednesday after school attaching pieces of stiff paper to her squares (while I made homemade burgers and cooked up some sweetcorn) and the finished products are certainly passable. I cut Z2's sheets into squares and decided it would be MUCH easier for the staff if I didn't write names on each heart so they could be distributed randomly.

Resting on my laurels and planning for the future

In our covered porch today

As I type, our marvellous marbles are a week old and buried in the worst snow in 5 years. Sorry, no, that should have been THE WORST SNOW IN 5 YEARS. Ah, the meeja media, they have enjoyed working themselves up to a frenzy about the snow we are having today with promises of storm reports and second by second weather reports. Admittedly, we trekked to the bus stop only to take one look at the main road with u-turning, stuck and skidding cars and return home. In fact, husband actually got on a bus for a minute or two before realising it was foolish and he should work from home too.

Our covered porch in July
(with Z2)

Anyway, yes, our marvellous marbles are still there though some of them cracked a little from freeze-thaw action and the like. Husband thinks they are wondrous and I know of at least one family who have copied the idea so I have been resting on my laurels and we have been craft-free since last Friday.

However, the cogs in my brain have been turning and I have several ideas gradually emerging.  In fact, given that we have a snow day today and I am working from home, we may have to get cracking today and back on the craft wagon. Oh, the craft wagon, such a thing to behold. I imagine it looks a bit like this.

The Craft Wagon

Breaking news: Z1, on this day, the day of the worst snow in Toronto in living memory the last five years, has asked to colour in my craft wagon drawing so craft-free week is officially over.