packaged airplane crayon party favors

You last saw these in November, when I was casting them by stove top. Here they are all packaged up! I designed the backers in Illustrator and attached the crayons with glue dots.

a simple baby shower favor (for nesting mamas)

I'm going to keep this one short and sweet: bird's nest baby shower favors! Stock up on a couple of things after Easter, and you'll be able to make a whole grouping of nests for guests.

You'll need:

• edible Easter grass (made from potato starch; it doesn't taste very good. I found mine at Target.)
• speckled candy eggs
• parchment paper
• cellophane bags
• cardstock
• vintage-style labels (I like these)
• stapler + staples
• scissors
• pen

How to:

Take each bag of edible Easter grass and separate it carefully into five sections, one for each nest. Shape a round nest on a square of parchment that will fit inside a cellophane bag. After slipping your nest + parchment into the bag, pile six or seven candy eggs into the nest. Cut and staple cardstock tags over the folded bag tops, then cover front staples with a vintage label. I put the word "nesting" on the front, and on the back, "candy eggs * edible nest" as a little fyi.

These turned out so cute, I know I'll be using them for future showers as well! Thanks for stopping by to check out this sweet little project.

candy airplane party favors

A big "thank you!" to the blog Sewing Mama Raeanna for inspiring this fast and easy party favor.

Supplies list:

• Wint-o-green Lifesavers 

• rubberbands

• Smarties

• sticks of gum wrapped with scrapbook paper and washi tape (for decoration + sturdiness)

Thread a rubberband through two Lifesavers. If your rubberbands are tiny, you can link two or more together.

Insert a stick of gum through the looped ends sticking out of the Lifesavers.

Insert a roll of Smarties into the space between the gum (wings) and the Lifesavers (wheels). The rubber band will hold everything in place.

Repeat as necessary!

More Flying Machines Party projects:

Hot Air Balloon Pull-String Piñata

Airplane Crayons from Molds

crayon casting -- planes edition, part two

Hi again! As mentioned in my last post, I went off-label on this project. By which I mean that the package for the crayon mold explicitly states, "For Use with Melt'n Mold Factory Only".

Have you seen the Crayola Melt'n Mold Factory? It looks pretty cool. It's kind of like an Easy Bake Oven for crayons: there's a heating element that melts old crayons down to liquid wax and guides it into a mold via a metal tray. And it's a kids' toy, marketed to kids age eight and up. I don't have one because I'm a grown-up who owns a stove, I have little excess storage space, and also, these run from $40 (Target) to $54 (Crayola) to $69 (Fred Meyer).

I love creative toys, but I'm also a fan of creative methodology. And recycling.

So, as it turns out, we're planning a bit ahead for a "Flying Things" birthday party after the new year, and coincidentally, I bumped into the Melt'n Mold booster packs in the art aisle at Target the other day. They had an airplane one, from the Disney movie Planes. Dusty Crophopper, for you fellow parents of preschoolers. It was in the $7 range.

I bought the mold under the assumption that a mold is a mold is a mold. If I can use it with the Factory kit, I should be able to use it without the Factory kit. I poked around on-line before opening the box to see if anyone else had used it that way, and turned up nothing. Luckily, it works just as any other mold works.

 I will say, this kit comes with twelve crayons and claims to make four planes. Coupled with the size of the images on the box, I believed this meant the mold inside would make crayons approximately three crayons large.

But no. The mold makes planes that are a little over an inch in wingspan, and each uses about one crayon's worth of wax. The other two crayons worth of wax must be considered waste wax or something. I got twelve planes using the materials in the box (and then a few dozen with my own materials). Here's how.

First, I got out the crayons. I had a largish box of salvaged thrift store crayons leftover from the last two crayon casting projects (here and here), so I sorted them into groups by color family.

Here's a little glass jam jar with a few varied-color broken crayon pieces in it, heating in a pot of simmering water . If you don't stir or shake the jar and let it simmer over medium-low heat, you can maintain some color separation necessary for that neat marbled effect.

Here's the mold, filled. I used a paper towel to pick up the jar, then gently poured the hot wax into the propped-up mold until it was filled to the line. You'll note a lot of excess at the top of the mold, which can later be broken off and re-melted.

I say to prop it because I discovered the best way to fill the tiny tail fins completely is to rest the mold against something at an angle.

Once each plane crayon cooled, I pressed the center together with my fingers while prying the mold carefully apart. When the bottom half of the mold was off, I turned over the mold and popped the plane out onto a soft paper towel cushion. It mostly worked like a charm, except for the occasional broken propeller or tail fin when breaking off the excess wax.

I tried to use up a lot of my crayon stash and to make some nice swirls; some were more successful than others, but all will make nice party favors. I would recommend that if you want to make a lot of these, having two molds will make the work go faster. It takes about ten minutes for the wax to melt and ten minutes for the castings to cool, so I had the stove on for the better part of a day.

Still, not bad for a $7 investment!

Remember: using art and craft materials against their intended use can be dangerous, so please take precautions to protect yourself! Heating crayon wax in simmering water is not child-safe, and neither is handling melted crayon wax. Grown-ups only! Careful grown-ups only! Safety glasses! Aprons! Gloves! Etc!!!!

That said, I really liked the way the mold worked for this project.

Thanks for reading!

succulents in vintage glassware

A simple project for centerpieces, gifts, or window gardening.

Vintage highball glasses, punch cups, and candle bowls are filled with pebbles (for drainage), potting soil, and a little hens-and-chicks succulent varietal each.

They need to be kept out of all-day sunlight and watered once in awhile, but succulents aren't too hard to keep alive.

These look awesome clustered as wedding centerpieces, and equally nice in a kitchen window. Which makes them perfect (upcycled, green) wedding favors, if you think about it.

Thanks for reading!

Linking up to:

The Cottage Market

My Repurposed Life

The Vintage Farmhouse

what's a robot party without a life-sized, prize-distributing robot?

My husband started laughing at my "to-do" list for the kiddo's robot party, and I leaned over to see what was so funny. "You've got 'add glitter to Play Doh' and 'use stamps on napkins' on either side of 'build life-sized robot to distribute party favors'." 

Ah, yes.

He's right; my lists often lack a sense of scale. For me, there's no building up from the smallest project to the largest; I jump head-first into everything at once, all four burners firing, and the toaster running, besides. Everything's on equal footing. I think it keeps life interesting.

* * * * * * *

Awhile back, I blogged about this iPod speaker that we made from an old intercom speaker and a busted set of ear buds.

At the end of that post, I mentioned that the speaker was part of a larger project I'd be sharing soon. Today is that day, readers. Here it is: the aforementioned life-sized robot made to distribute party favors and entertain toddlers.

size comparison: kiddo is 42 inches tall

I started with a stack of cardboard boxes and a pack of MakeDo Cardboard Connectors.

beginning "planning" stages

The feet are made of paperboard packaging inserts.

The kiddo and I trolled Bring and the Habitat ReStore for months to find "robot parts". It got so bad that every time we parked outside of any store at all, he announced that we were there to search for robot parts. It got so bad that his first act upon entering JC Penney at Christmastime was to inquire with a clerk as to the location of their robot section. No surprise here: JCP doesn't carry old bike reflectors, dryer ducting, light fixture parts, or old combination-lock alarm system panels.

completed head

A note to anyone interested in completing a similar project: our hunts for robot parts weren't usually specific. Most of the time, especially in the beginning, we'd go in looking for "robot parts" and I'd let the kiddo pick out whatever he thought that meant, from springs to sprinkler parts to metal light fixture bases. At 25 cents to 2 dollars per part, we weren't going to go broke, he felt involved in our project, and I ended up finding ways to incorporate most of it.

in progress

finished 

I also used hot glue, glue sticks, duct tape and aluminum sealing tape, Christmas paper, reflective stickers, plastic gears (from the Village), cardboard tubes, colored wire, an old house number, a push light (from the hall closet), and the clear plastic fronts that some packages have.

back

 opens to access battery hook-up

The key really turns, due to a bit of engineering. It's made of layers of cardboard and an empty glue stick with a hole drilled in the exposed end. I tucked it into a hole in the back and secured it with a cotter pin so it would turn, but my original attempt with layers of duct tape failed upon Kiddo Test. Thank goodness for my built-in QA engineer!

duct tape makes it look better than layers of cardboard

The buttons on the front are juice caps attached with cardboard connectors, so they really turn, too, with less engineering.

The intercom/iPod speaker mouth played a mix of robot-centric music as well as robot noises and one-sided conversations we recorded in GarageBand with filters applied. If you need some help finding the right "robot" filter when you tackle this project, send me a note and I'll tell you our secret formulas. You can export the new robot audio tracks directly to iTunes, then sync them to your iPod. (This is way easier than you might think.)

The head isn't motorized, but can swivel (by hand) due to the cardboard connector attaching it.

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2

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The arms swivel, too. For sturdiness against the toddler horde, there are used cardboard mailing tubes inside of the flexible dryer ducting.

The pincher hand isn't functional (though with a grabber arm inserted, it could be); it's another section of cardboard tube covered in aluminum tape.

The party-favor-distributing hand is a toy package leftover from Christmas, covered in more tape. A hole in the back to join with the cardboard tube makes it easy to swivel the arm forward, drop a prize down the tube at the shoulder joint, and have it pop out into the hand for the fascinated toddlers . . . and big kids, too! My niece and nephew are several years older and still thought it was cool.

This was a really fun recycling project (all but the tape and the reflector stickers came to us used), but I did use a lot of tape. Two rolls of gold Duck Tape, one roll of chrome Duck Tape, a partial roll of standard silvery duct tape, and a roll of aluminum duct sealing tape in all, plus some leftover silver Christmas paper and some paper tape from Target. Still, by weight, it's more than 95 percent recycled.

The percentage is even better if you count the bricks I put into the trap door feet to keep it from tipping over too easily.

brick trap doors closed with tape

brick trap doors open for stabilizing bricks

So: what long-term projects have you been up to? Any birthday party over-acheivers out there?

Thanks for reading, and remember: you can make these pictures larger just by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that, clever you.

Linking up to:
Skip to My Lou
CSI Project

robot party favors + bags

Time for more robot party fun! Today, I'm going to show you the party favors we put together for the kiddo's third birthday party. (You can find the robot cake post and a piñata post here and here.)

The favor bags are really simple. You'll need some silver-colored bags with handles, and some of this paper tape from the stationary aisle at Target.

I also used the circles I cut out of the party invitations (post coming soon!) cut in half for the eyes.  No tutorial required, just some glue dots (for the eyes) and scissors.

I had planned to use googly eyes on these, but some of the guests were under three years old. You can make all of your bags look the same if you want; I made each of our robot favor bags different.  Fun and smiley!

We left the bags mostly empty except for these sticker sheets from Amazon and some robot erasers from the Dollar Tree. (Several of the kids tried to eat the erasers [thinking they were candy] so I'd nix them if I had it to do all over again.)

The kids collected other favors for their bags during the party, like these wind-up robots we found at Eugene Toy and Hobby locally. You can find them in a local toy store too, I'd bet, or you can get them on-line (I'd skip the wind-up robots at Oriental Trading Company though. We'd ordered a box and half of them were missing pieces or didn't walk, and the rest broke really easily. Ditto the replacements they sent.).  

I made this silver-glittered Play-Doh using some party packs of Play-Doh I picked up after Halloween. 

I made the silver color by mixing the following colors with silver glitter and dividing into five containers: 2 white, 1 black, 1 green, 1 purple. 

To finish them off, I taped each one with the paper tape and labeled them with a fine-point Sharpie.

To make the robot candies, I found a robot candy mold  and cast three different recipes: gummies (using this recipe from Skip to My Lou; you can see the blue mix cooking in that photo above), chocolate butterscotch, and chocolate peanut butter (both by melting chocolate chips with either butterscotch chips or peanut butter chips).

I designed the packages in Adobe Illustrator, and stapled everything together with green staples.

The jelly bean packages were easier. I bought mixed beans in bulk and separated out the yellow/green/blue ones.

If you want a copy of the PDF file so you can print your own wrappers, leave me a comment below or send me an e-mail, and I'll get a copy to you.

With most party themes, there's a way to mix handmade and store-bought party favors to maximize budget and really personalize. The trouble I ALWAYS have is knowing how to plan my time well so that I'm not frazzled by the time the party rolls around.

Any time management tips? How do you narrow down party ideas and decide what to leave out?

Thanks for reading!

(p.s. you can make these images larger just by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that. clever you!)