counting on it!

Well hey there! It's been awhile, right? It was an amazing and busy summer. The kiddo and I made a lot of stuff, went on a lot of adventures, and generally kept ourselves occupied from the day preschool let out until the day preschool started. And I'm on the board this year, so things have gotten even crazier.

I'm stopping in today to share one of the big projects we finished this summer. It's a book.

About halfway through the school year, the kiddo's teacher started having the kids make one or two alphabet letters per week as part of a daily series of arts and crafts projects.

E is for Eagle

F is for Flower

X is for X-ray

If the kiddo was sick on a day a letter was introduced, we made our own version at home. Adding to the fun was putting each letter in a black portfolio book, one after another, until finally we had the whole alphabet.

P is for Pirate

Q is for Quilt

"But wait, Mama!"

There were so many blank pages left! I suggested we take on as many numbers as possible until the book was filled, and the kiddo was game. We managed to fit zero through twenty in the book before we ran out of space.

One red apple / Two pretty flowers

Six crunchy carrots

Aside from cut paper, we used a little of every material in our arsenal, from googly eyes and multi-color pipe cleaners to bingo daubers, glitter glue, and stamps.

Eight wiggly spider legs

Seven spangly fireworks

Ten flying keys

He even stitched through the buttons using a tapestry needle and yarn!

Nine colorful buttons

Towards the end, when things were getting crowded and the projects a little lengthy, we got extra inventive.

Eleven apple trees

Thirteen sugary donuts

Fourteen fuzzy bunnies

I love the sweet little faces he drew. Love them to bits.

Sixteen glittery jewels

Seventeen black zebra stripes

Eighteen wiggly hairy eyeballs

Nineteen peppermint candies

Twenty pink carnations

Whew! We made it through the whole thing. I tried to let the kiddo do most of the work on the gluing, drawing, punching, stamping and coloring (although I got a little bossy with the zebra). I stuck mainly to cutting, although he's getting so good with the scissors now that I'm going to be pawning more and more of that work off onto him, too. We're planning to tackle the lowercase letters next, unless the new preschool teacher gets to them first.

What about you? Did you tackle any arts and crafts projects this summer too?

Thanks for reading!

--a

large zelda pixelated cut-out party decorations

As I've previously mentioned, finding Zelda-themed party decorations is difficult. After Googling for awhile, I headed over to Pinterest and did a little browsing, finally, turning up a link that led to the Let's Explore Blog, and a really fabulous Alice in Wonderland party Amy put together for her daughter Delaney's birthday a couple of years ago.

One of the projects Amy and her husband created are these great, large-scale cardboard character cut-outs. Here's a link to my Pin, featuring the Mad Hatter cut-out from Delaney's party.




Of course, the best part of Amy's project is that it's infinitely adaptable. You could use this project for literally any character or theme. For our theme, old-school pixelated Legend of Zelda, the project is even more simple, because the grid used in the tutorial for plotting the design is the perfect way to make pixelated designs. Just find an image, and follow along on your cardboard! Eventually, I had these figures of Link and Zelda:




But first I had to acquire some cardboard, for the figures as well as the cardboard forts I'd planned to build (more on those in a future post). I headed over to a department store and asked about appliance boxes, and instead, the guy at the receiving dock offered me these large 4.5 x 8 foot sheets of corrugated cardboard, which I was told arrived with pallets or something and are usually recycled right away. Instead, I shoved six of them into my husband's car somehow.

This is how they looked in my tiny kitchen (with a shoe box full of recycled rupee crayons on the back counter):




Here's my kiddo standing by a newly-painted Link figure, for size comparison.




And here are some more shots of the figures (Link, Zelda, and an Octorock) decorating at the party.








These take about three hours, start to finish, and if I'd had a little more time, I would have loved to have made a few more. Luckily, as I mentioned, this project is infinitely adaptable, so I'll start even earlier next year and make six or eight figures for birthday number three!


(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)



Linking up to:

Young House Love, Bower Power, The Great Indoors, and Hi Sugarplum, who are all co-sponsoring the winter Pinterest Challenge! (I'm borrowing their graphic:)

delusions of grandeur part three : the legend of the zelda birthday cake

If you were someone with a lot of time on his/her hands and a cake to make, and if you were someone who loved repetitive, detail-oriented tasks, then, and only then, would I recommend the project I'm about to show you.

Behold, the pixelated Legend of Zelda birthday cake I made for my kiddo's second birthday.




The Link figure, shield, and flag (which featured his name on one side, and the Hylian phoenix graphic on the other, painted on with food coloring) are made of dyed gum paste.








Cake is banana cake with Nutella filling and peanut butter cream cheese icing, covered in colored fondant. The "pixelated" image on the side of the cake is made from dots of colored fondant, cut with a straw and released with the aid of a chopstick. (Thanks for the help with the dot cutting, E!)




Tektite cupcakes (the spidery guys) are butter cake with maple cream cheese icing. The eyes, teeth, and spots are made of fondant. The spider cupcake holders were picked up on Halloween clearance at Target.




Total time spent (including baking, modeling figures, cutting dots, and assembling/decorating cake): approximately 12-14 hours.

Not for the faint of heart, but worth the labor of love for my sweet pea.

Follow me on Pinterest (button at the top of the column on the right) to see a couple of much cooler Zelda cakes on my Party Planning pin board. I used those for some much-needed inspiration for the top of the cake.


Pin It



(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)