Holding the World in a Paper Cup

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Tuesday, January 1, 2013

DIY Reversible Record Bowls

Melted Vinyl

For Christmas I made my nephew some record bowls.

Want to try it?

Just put each record in the oven (by itself) on top of a tin can.

After about 10 minutes of 200°, pull the warmed record out of the oven and use your hands to mold it into shape. It'd be nice to have about 3 hands for this step, but you make do.

I made A LOT of bowls, so I came up with the idea to make them reversible.

Of course all you do in order to achieve this, is just glue them together using the super strong glue of your choice. Careful that you don't get any ooze through the hole of the record.

I picked out two of the best ones and wrapped them up...

because who needs THIS many record bowls?

And because he's 16 and probably doesn't need ANY bowls, we gave him a little something extra...

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Friday, January 20, 2012

Indoor January Activity for the Kid

Peel the paper off a few crayons ahead of time.

Heat your rocks up in the oven and then place them on newspaper.

Then let the kids hold the crayons to the rocks and watch them melt into beautiful designs!

Plus you get the added activity bonus of collecting the rocks and washing them in soap and water. (If that sounds strange to you then you must not have a kid under 5 years of age.)

Used to, Charley could spend hours washing rocks in the bathroom sink.

Very simple but fun.

Now be careful. Some age groups won't mix well with this craft.

(Charley was 5 years old when photographed here.)

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Sunday, January 2, 2011

We had to prepare for a birthday party recently. The invitation said "no gifts". Now, normally I would find it tactful to respect the "no gifts" request, but this party was in honor of a little girl that came to Chrysanthemum's party with a gift. I didn't feel right showing up empty handed. I told her mother so. Her mother said if it would make us feel better then we should just make something.

I thought that was a grand idea.

So we took our recipe for crayons (crayons and a candy mold) and made 6 of those suckers.

We stacked them up and tied a pretty ribbon around them.

But we didn't think that was enough. So we made a coloring book.

I took 6 or 8 sheets of basic white paper and folded them in half. Then I punched a hole in the fold on each end as far as the hole punch would reach, and bound it with a ribbon. I reminded Chrysanthemum that the pictures needed to be outlined drawings and she made the pages. She really enjoyed it too. It was sweet to see her putting so much effort into it.

Sweet stuff eh?

11 Comments

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Melting Crayons

Still need an inexpensive gift idea? No? You're all done?

Well, you can save this one for next year.

I know this has been done to death all over blog land, but I am posting anyway.

We needed something to give the kids at school for Christmas.

I am super happy with the way they turned out.

STEP 1

Gather all the old crayons you can find. We ended up using some of our good ones too, but Almond Joy was perfectly ok with this. She has plenty and she understood we were making something to give to her friends. It was worth a few good crayons to her.

STEP 2

Take the wrappers off. This can be time consuming, especially before you realize you can take a sharp knife to make a slit down the paper sleeve.

Your welcome.

STEP 3

Then break them up into little bits and add them to your muffin tin. Almond Joy helped me with this step. She decided which colors would work well together. Bright colors work best. We used 2-3 colors per star but you could get crazy if you wanted. We've actually done this activity before and found that using more than 5 colors just results in a muddy brick of a crayon. Not pretty.

STEP 4

Then just cook them up! Put them in the over for about 10 minutes on 300 degrees. Check on them periodically. Once they are good and melted, pull them out. Let them cool completely before popping them out of the mold. If you pull them out too early, they are likely to crack. If they do, just melt them down again. No big deal.

Here are some of my favorites!

I attached them to this pretty glitter paper I found at JoAnn's in Fairbanks. Convincing Old Man Chuck to allow me to pull into JoAnn's for 10 minutes when he was ready to get on back to Delta Junction was not an easy task.

Figuring out how to affix the stars to the paper wasn't easy either. The top sides of the crayons were a slightly concave so getting them to stick with glue wasn't possible. I didn't want to just flip them over because the bottom sides were the prettiest. Then Chuck suggested Duct Tape. And it worked. And while I didn't like the fact that Chuck thought of it before me, I went with it.

I wanted to add something regarding the true meaning of Christmas so I searched for Christmas songs with "star" in the title.

I chose this one because it seemed simple enough for a preschooler to understand. Of course, most of our students can't read, but I thought if a parent were to read it aloud, the preschooler would be capable of absorbing it.