present idea: stenciled shirt

We made a freezer paper stencil shirt for our beloved Wu Yi Lao Lao recently for her birthday, and I was just thinking about what a great Mother’s Day present it would make. Well, this is assuming, of course, that you didn’t have to help make your own Mother’s Day gift. On second thought, perhaps it would make a better gift for a Grandmother or Grandma Aunt. Or maybe wait until Father’s Day.

Freezer paper stenciled shirts are not a new idea, but what makes it such a great gift idea is that the kids can be totally involved in the making of the shirts. Here’s what freezer paper is (you can buy it at grocery stores, next to aluminum foil and wax paper) and here is a brief tutorial. I gave each kid a piece of freezer paper and let them make their drawings.

Otis made a brown bear catching a salmon, with a bright yellow moon in the sky. I love the salmon detail so much, and I actually think that it’s a beautifully composed drawing.

Bee wanted a little more help. She’s loves to draw people and write letters, but wanted to make hearts for her shirt so I let her dictate where the hearts of different sizes would go, and drew dots for her to trace.

Each child helped me stencil in the textile paint, and watched with excitement as we peeled off the freezer paper. And Wu Yi Lao Lao loves her shirt, though she hasn’t decided if she’s ever going to wear it or just save it, tucked away safely in her drawer.

block printed fabric

I recently decided that Otis and I needed some alone time together. It felt like we were fighting a lot and one morning, I woke up with a surprising sense of clarity and knew that rather than spending less time together, we needed more time together. Maybe it’s sort of like immersion therapy where if you’re afraid of snakes, you get thrown into a snake pit? Hmmm, which one of us is the snake? Well, now Tuesday afternoons are our “special time” and this past week, we printed fabric.

It all started with this video. It’s beautiful, and we both really enjoyed watching it over and over. (via Wren Handmade)

 

This got us thinking, and we decided we also wanted to print fabric. Since we still have Valentine’s Day Fever, we decided on hearts. I cut out two hearts out of the rubber stamping blocks (like this one), and we used fabric paint on unbleached muslin, which we taped to the table to keep from slipping. I let Otis decide how he wanted to set the pattern, and we started working.

We took turns inking and printing, and the piece of muslin that we used, which was a little less than 2/3 of a yard, was just about the right amount of fabric for his attention span. Having two stamps to use at the same time really helped move things along.  Here’s a piece of our finished fabric:

You can really see the texture from the paint being rolled on with a brayer because the fabric paint was runnier than traditional block printing ink. I found it frustrating, but Otis didn’t seem to mind.

We decided to cut the fabric in half and use them as furoshiki, to wrap up some cookies that Bee and I made. We added food coloring gel at the very end of mixing to get a splotchy, “hand-dyed” look. Otis will take these to school for the kindergarten teachers, and he’s so proud of the work he did.

We also printed a few single hearts on some extra muslin, and I sewed them into little pouches so that Bee could also bring some to pre-school for her teachers.

I had a really great time doing this project with Otis, and I already have an idea brewing for next week. And maybe it’s my imagination, but it feels like Otis and I have been getting along better already.

how to: adjustable kids’ apron

Friends, just a little while ago, I wrote a tutorial for my friend’s blog, Stumbles and Stitches. It’s full of great craft projects, and you’ll be sure to find a project that you’ll want to put on your To Do list. My contribution was a tutorial on making an adjustable kids’ apron. I’ve been making them as presents for Otis’s school mates, and it’s a fast, easy project, and easily adapted for an adult. You can see it here.

Let me know if you make one!

how to: tooth bag for the tooth fairy

Well, it’s happened. Just in time for Halloween, he’s become a little jack-o-lantern. In some ways, he doesn’t even look like himself anymore. And he definitely sounds different as he’s adopted a little lisp, although curiously, “MAMA!” still sounds the same. My family is as traumatized as if he had woken up with a bad moustache and his voice an octave lower.

He wiggled his tooth daily and did disgusting tricks for ever, but unfortunately, it still did not spur me to take videos of his antics or to buy any of the cool tooth fairy paraphenalia that I found, such as this adorable pillow or this tooth fairy kit. The day after his tooth fell out, Otis wrote this letter to the Tooth Fairy:

He imagines that the Tooth Fairy is a girl, with black, black hair so that if you accidentally see her at night coming for your tooth, you might mistake her for being bald. Oh, and she takes your tooth, grinds it, makes copies of the pieces in gold, and reconstructs your tooth like a puzzle. Nice trick, huh? Anyways, with no more time to procrastinate, this Tooth Fairy got to work making a bag to hold Otis’s little tooth, and I wanted to share this easy project with you.

Materials:
ultrasuede or felt (I used a 2 1/2″x 4 1/2″scrap to make a 2 1/2″x 1 5/8″bag, but you can choose whatever size you like)
screw post button stud (like this one sold here, though many fabric stores will sell them with other belt and purse making hardware)
water soluble marking pen or chalk

Fold your fabric so that it is roughly in thirds, but making your flap a little smaller. Mark on the sides where your flap will start, and the center top.

Draw a curve for your flap. You can eye it, or use a curve ruler like I did.

Cut all around with pinking shears, holding the front and back together while you cut so that the zigzags match up. If you prefer straight edges, just use regular scissors instead.

Sew the sides together and use a small hole punch to punch a hole near the center top of the flap for the buttonhole. My hole punch makes a 1/8″ hole.

If your button stud doesn’t fit, then cut small slits in the hole to make for a snug fit.

Mark where your button stud will go by folding down your flap and marking where the hole is.

Punch another hole where you marked with your pen, insert your button stud and you’re finished! We used this for Otis’s tooth, but I can imagine making lots of bags like this for jewelry or other small presents.

The bag I made for Otis has a little tooth appliqued on it, and I think embroidery would also look great. Or it can be left as is for a simple look. Here’s his bag, along with his letter from the Tooth Fairy. Like how I tried to disguise my handwriting?  He was pretty excited the next morning when he found the letter, which was a relief since he woke up after F snuck into his room to do the exchange.

present idea for kids: homemade books

I have been drooling over Japanese washi tapes for some time now, and I finally bought some a while back. Have you seen them? They’re a little like masking tape, only more like paper, and they come in lovely colors and patterns. But how to use it? It’s so typical of me to buy something I love and then deem it precious and hoard it forever, and I was determined not to do it this time. So I cracked them out to make this present.

I made some simple books with cardstock and paper. I folded ten sheets of paper and then stapled them together with the cardstock as covers. I like the weight of the cardstock for the cover, but it’s not necessary. Next time I might go to the trouble of finding some colored cardstock. The books were too big for our stapler at home, so I took it to our local Kinko’s. I believe most of the Kinko’s stores have them hidden behind their desks, and the clerk there was perfectly happy to let me use it. If you don’t want to go to Kinko’s, then make the books narrow enough to fit in your home stapler. I also recently saw this project using a simple bookbinding technique, or you can use the bookbinding technique I used when making the sticker books.

To finish, I taped the stapled edge of the book with my washi tape. I bought a few different colors so I made a couple of each color/pattern and packaged a set of books up with the same Pentel markers that I used as a kid. Hopefully they’ve been used to make some creative drawings and stories.

I bought my tape here, but you can find them all over by searching for “washi tape.” I just bought another set of them on sale (dirt cheap!) at Anthropologie.