Monday Made: DIY dino family T-shirts

Hello! Junior J had a party yesterday to celebrate him turning 5, and he wanted a dinosaur theme this round (if you can remember, we did an "under the sea" theme when he turned 3). I wanted to make personalized mini tote bags for his guests, and since I was at it, I decided to make us dinosaur T-shirts as well. 

These were done using fabric paint (from Art Friend) and freezer paper (from Cold Storage). I cut out the shapes and lettering from the freezer paper using a Silhouette Cameo, which I recently purchased second-hand.  Having the cutting machine really makes things faster, but you can also try hand cutting out the shapes with a pen-knife and cutting mat (which we did the last time). Unfortunately though, the blade of my machine was blunt, so even after I tweaked the settings, the machine didn't cut cleanly for some of the alphabets. So I ended up having to cut out some stuff using my scissors! (And was wondering why on earth I agreed to the dino theme since the names are sooo long!)

After the shapes and letters were cut out, I ironed on the freezer paper onto the T-shirts and daubed fabric paint using a sponge (I used one of those dish-washing sponges, you know those with steel wool on one side and a sponge on the other?). 

I also decided to go with ombre colours, so I started with a darker shade on the lettering, and gradually mixed in white fabric paint as I sponged the colours upwards. I loved how the colours turned out, especially my pink triceratops!

Oh, and we bought our T-shirts from Hang Ten (for the adults), and Tom and Stefanie (for the kids). I used an old white romper for Baby J, but Tom and Stefanie sometimes stocks those too. I love how affordable the T-shirts in Tom and Stefanie are, plus they come in graduated sizes, so its possible to find a perfect fit (something hard in our case sometimes as Lil J is pretty small for his age!):

I'll post a more detailed tutorial for freezer paper stenciling soon, since I kept getting questions about how this is done. Meanwhile, have a great week!

PS: I've realized that white T-shirts for kids don't go really well with parties. The two older boys promptly got chocolate cake stains on theirs! Now, if you know a place that sells good kids' T-shirts in various colours, please leave me a comment and tell me where!

     

Monday Made: A baby album for #2

We now have a new tradition, of making a baby album for each of our boys as a keepsake. Both Junior J and Lil J enjoy hearing stories about how they were like when they were babies, especially when they see how tiny Baby J is now! Junior J received his album during Lil J's full month celebration, and you can view his album over here, and more pages can be found here.

I thought it would be nice to give Lil J his during Baby J's full month. However, the kids all fell sick (even the baby wasn't spared), so I only managed to finish the album recently, but better late than never! So here's how the inside pages look:

The album papers were from Crate Paper's "Little Boy Blue" collection, while most of the embellies were chipboard stickers, die-cuts and stuff cut out from Cosmo Cricket and October Afternoon papers. I especially love the papers and stickers form Cosmo Cricket's "Togetherness" collection, so suitable for albums for families and babies!

Now that this album is finished, I'm hoping to start on Project Life, since I'm finding 12x12 layouts and mini albums a lil hard to complete these days. Am not too used to scrapping so "flat" (I like my layouts to be lumpy and layered!), but I think it'll be a great way to capture memories without spending too much time agonizing about the embellies to stick on. We'll see how that goes!

Monday Made: A card for Papa

We celebrated the hubby's birthday today. We didn't manage to make him a present, but we did make a card:

The leaves from the tree were thumbprints from myself and the three boys (yes, even baby J added his mark), and the 4 little birds were again from thumbprints, which I added details to make them look like birds. The two older boys had lots of fun with the printing bit (I had to restrain Lil J or he would have been putting handprints instead of thumbprints!), and also helped to peel those alphabet stickers for me. Baby J was just pissed that we kept trying to open his little fist!

Happy Birthday, dear! We love you!

PS: We did a handprint canvas for the hubs 2 years ago. Then, Lil J was the baby and also cried when his hand was smeared with paint!
                   

Monday Made: Crafts for Charity

We had a pretty busy weekend, and one of the highlights was meeting a group of mummy bloggers to make cards and gift tags together. It was a pretty fun and fruitful session...

... with lots of cutting and pasting...

... and lots of messing with papers and glue.

Everyone was so busy, they didn't even stop to take a break! But I think we all enjoyed ourselves, and these cards and tags will be sold to raise funds for charity. If you're interested, do look out for more details on this blog at a later date, as well as over on these blogs too:

A Dollop of Me

Owls Well Blog

MamaWearPapaShirt

Littlebluebottle

Mummy Wee

Tan Family Chronicles

A Juggling Mom

Life is in the Small Things

A big thank you to all the mummies for their hard work (and for contributing some materials too!), as well as to Claudia of The Loving Mum, who donated most of the papers used to make the cards and tags. Stay tuned for more updates, meanwhile, have a blessed week!

PS: If you're interested in getting your family involved in raising funds, why not join the Kids for Charity project? (Details here.)

Monday Made: The wheels on the bus

Lil J loves his vehicles. In particular, he is obsessed with the song "The wheels on the bus", and has verses of the song down pat. He also loves the colour yellow. So when his birthday drew near, we decided that we would make him a yellow bus out of cardboard for his birthday present. 

Junior J wanted to paint the bus yellow, but the yellow poster paint didn't show up very well when applied directly on the box. I contemplated just buying yellow paper, and wrapping the whole box (which seemed like the most effective way to go about it), but the boy had his heart set on painting the bus for his lil brother, so we ended up wrapping the box up with masking tape and painting on that instead. 

Lengths of masking tape and oodles of yellow paint later, we added another smaller box in front, and cut the grilles and lights out of cardboard and wrapped them in aluminum foil: 

The hubs helped with all the cutting for the windows (we had two with flaps so they could open and close), and reinforced the insides with more cardboard so that the whole thing didn't collapse. Then I used black insulating tape and duct tape for the window borders (and to "seal" the edges of the windows), and blue disposable plates secured with Makedo clips for the wheels (we couldn't find any black plates!).

For the dashboard inside, I drew in a fuel gauge and tachometer (I was clueless about all the meters, so I actually had to google the components of the dashboard!)...

... as well as a speedometer and odometer. The needles were just secured using craft brads from Daiso.

The steering wheel was just a disposable plate, secured again with a Makedo clip. I admit, I was contemplating adding a gear stick, but trying to figure out the mechanics of using cardboard to make one escaped me, and I thought the kids would probably ruin that quite quickly!

For the back of the bus, we just added rear lights and I couldn't resist a little license plate. And I added wipers (so Lil J could do his "wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish" thing):

And of course, before you own a vehicle, you had better bring it for a test drive. So how did it fare?

Lil J loved it. He'd sit inside and fiddle with the dashboard, and scoot along his bottom dragging the bus along with him (its too heavy for him to lift from the sides), and pretend to beep the horn (I tried looking for a squeaky toy for the horn, but couldn't find anything suitable!). The kids all squished inside it during his birthday party. There was always one kid or another driving this about. 

It was a tight squeeze for three, and quite cramped if you have two kids sitting inside, but it's just nice for two kids to stand inside. All in all, I think the bus passes the little boy's vehicle inspection!

PS: I think we have this strange obsession with working with cardboard boxes. Click on the links to view our cardboard play kitchen and fridge!

Monday Made: Polar Animals lapbook

Hello! We've recently started lapbooking during our homelearning sessions. We were looking at polar animals, so Junior J and I did a lapbook on the topic, our first lapbook ever!

:: The lapbook was made using some Book Depository packaging, and I covered the outside with white  paper. Junior J pasted some polar animals (from a printable here) on the cover, added some "icebergs" with paint, and also got to try his hand at typing the title in Powerpoint (he chose the font and got to print it out, and was pretty excited about it!). 

:: This is how the inside looks. I was too lazy to type out the titles, so I just wrote them out using a marker. There's a map to show him where the Arctic and Antarctic regions are, as well as 3 little flipbooks that show him examples of animals from both regions, as well as some that live in the sea. (Update: You can download the printables for the flipbook and map here! Do note that the Beluga whale goes under "Sea Animals", but I've squeezed it into another page to save on paper! )

:: I prepared the flipbooks, and stuck on the names of the animals inside the books. Then the boy got to match the pictures to their names (he cannot read yet, but was able to figure it out by sounding out the first letter for each animal name), and paste them down. 

:: We also watched a short video on the adaptations of penguins and polar bears (you can view it here), and I printed and laminated a couple of pictures of animals and their adaptations (from this site, I used the snowshoe hare chart as a substitute for the arctic hare):

:: And at the back of the lapbook, we pasted a chart of various types of penguins. We used bits of washi tape of varying colours and patterns to identify each type...

... then measured off their heights on the wall with another matching piece of washi tape. That got the boy rather excited and we also measured his height, as well as the height of some of his toy dinosaurs too! (We read "Measuring Penny" before we did this exercise, just to review the idea of measurements and the use of units.) Turns out, he's taller than the King penguin, but shorter than the Emperor penguin!

Not too sure if this is how you do lapbooking, but we did have fun! Will share more activities and books that we covered in future posts, so stay tuned...

Monday Made: More Christmas cards

Junior J has more or less recovered (I wish I could say the same for his brother!), and we managed to make some Christmas cards the other day. I found these little stick-on felt trees at a sale, and thought we could use them in our cards. So we got down to tearing strips of white paper (as "snow")...

... and he had quite a bit of fun crumpling them up (for texture):

Then he stuck on trees on the snow...

We punched out stars using a Daiso paper punch and added light rays with a white colour pencil (he described it as "turning on the star", and insisted on turning each one on, once he stuck the star down!). Then I helped him to cut out a little house for each card which he then pasted down, to represent the place Jesus was born.

Simple, and quick yes? If you need more ideas, here's two more that we made (over here and here). 

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