Fall Craft, part 2: Electric Boogaloo

I was going through all my program photos on Facebook, when I found more of my fall crafts (most of these from last year). I don't know when the ones I showed you before were from.  Doesn't really matter.  Anywho, part 2.

Apples. We gave the kids paint (which is always scary) and loofahs to do the leafy parts of the trees.  Then we gave then toilet paper/paper towel tubes and those were the rings for the apples.  Anything else they wanted in the picture, we gave them crayons to draw in, and encouraged them to do that BEFORE painting.

Leaves. This was a totally crazy idea when I thought of it. Did I see it somewhere or did I modify something? I don't know.  We decided to give the kids different kinds of popcorn to glue to the trees to represent leaves. We tried getting the puffed corn pieces rather than popcorn, thinking it would stick better. It didn't. We used cheddar, regular, and caramel, so we'd have yellow, orange, and brown. It didn't turn out too badly.

Fall. This was a fall craft I did AGES ago. I have this small picture-frame die-cut, and I used to use it ALL. THE. TIME. I've calmed down a bit since then. I had made tamales with my friend recently, I think, so I knew they sold the corn husks at the grocery store.  I think the other things are Corn Nuts, and then there's scrapbooking paper that's popcorn print. The corn husks REALLY did not want to be glued down. And gluing the Corn Nuts on top? Not my best plan.  But this looks kinda cute, right?

Owls. Another paper towel/toilet paper roll craft! You just wrap it in paper (which you glue on, of course) and fold in the head.  We gave them stickers to make the eyes and let them draw in pupils. Glue on a beak and some feathers for wings, and you're done!

Pumpkins. This next craft was SO easy and it looks SO good. All you have to so is cut out the pumpkin shape in the paper, and then cut strips of scrapbook paper in whatever colors you want. We stuck with golds/oranges because duh, pumpkins. The kids may have been a bit confused as to which way the strips had to be facing, but it just took a second to show them and they got it. (Or they had a parent helping them).

Halloween/Bats. I can't remember which this was for last year. Could have been either. We've done some iteration of this craft many times. For polar animals, for Christmas, and now for Halloween. Pretty much you take your bat cut-out, color it with chalk, then place it on the paper, and smudge the chalk off the cutout and onto the paper, so you wind up with the outline.  Or you can do like this girl and take your cutout and make and outline around it, and then smudge that.  Either works. Coloring your cutout means that you don't have any hard lines.

Teens Craft Project: Hula Hoops

Every summer I try to have at least one major project that I know will blow them away.  It's really hard to predict my numbers, and that's why I plan for one major one. Sometimes my attendance is as low as 2 - and it's not that we don't do something fun, I just have to save the super-awesome stuff for the big days.

So summer before last I found a tutorial on making your own hula-hoops, and I thought, "I'm going to do that with my teens!" It really is simple to make.  The hardest part is gathering all the supplies.  The second hardest part is the wait the teens had because I had to help them one at a time, so they played Apples to Apples while they waited.

When I started researching this, I found all sorts of stuff. Like about calculating hoop size for your body. We did the standard to the top of your hip - which let me tell you, made all the difference for me.  I'm 6' and *cough* pounds.  Ok, I'm not a small girl - and as such, I need a much bigger hoop!  Makes sense, right?  Once I made it and tried it out, I did so much better than I ever had!  I've never been able to hula-hoop!  It was great!

I didn't have a whole lot of options for decoration in my small town, so I just bought a bunch of different colored electrical tape and let the teens go to town.  Once everyone's hoops were made, the decoration part definitely took some time.  As far as I can tell, everyone loved the craft.

Warning: this is obviously not a cheap program to do.  You *could* charge a few bucks for this program if you needed to, or just even it out by doing other less expensive programs for awhile. Truth be told, I probably spent about $100+ for about 12 teens or so.  Would I trade it for the world?  Never.

Fall Crafts

I said I'd go back and add crafts to the themed posts, but instead I just decided to go ahead and make them their own post.  All of the ones shown are what's been salvaged from years past.  I still have yet to make what we're doing this year, so there may be another post coming up.

Apples.  This one was truly pulled out of thin air.  In the past, we'd done things like a wreath made of paper apple cut-outs, but I wanted something different.  I know the kids don't care, and I have different ones from year to year, but still. So I found this or came up with it at the last minute. We pre-cut the holes in the plates as well as cut out the leaves.  All the kids had to do was glue on the tissue paper to color the apple and glue on the leaves.

Owls. In NO WAY do I ever expect anyone else to be able to do this craft during a regular week, but we had the stuff sitting around, so we did.  I had all these pairs of kids sunglasses from something the department was going to do years ago. So popped out the lenses and then hot-glued cardstock in the shape of these giant owl eyebrows onto the top of the frames. The kids glued feathers onto the cardstock, and voila! Owl glasses. I love them, and my adult friends all wanted a pair. 

Pumpkins. Since we try to avoid Halloween and jack o'lanterns with this week, it's a little hard to do crafts with it sometimes. I love doing mosaics, so we've done that a couple years, giving them split peas, barley, and of course pumpkin seeds to use. A LOT of the pumpkin seeds never make it to the paper. Heck, a lot of the pumpkin seeds never make it to the kids. I have to buy an extra pack just for me to eat.

Halloween!  As stated before, I LOVE Halloween! So I'm giving you a two-fer.  First, the ghost.  I think it's pretty straightforward, but if you need directions, you can find them here. We simplified them a bit because we didn't want to cut out as many things, so the eyes aren't layered.

Cotton Swab Skeleton.  Again, to me this looks very self-explanatory.  If you'd like a guide to help you, click here. We did this with our elementary school kids because we felt it was a bit more difficult than the ghost.

Thanksgiving! Luckily, we have die-cuts to help us with this feat! :D A couple of years we've done a banner made of paper turkeys and fall leaves, and the kids wrote things they were thankful for on each.  Last year we decided to make a turkey hat.  Easy with our cut-outs. If you don't have one, ask around. We let people use ours as long as they bring their own paper.

HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS!!!

Last year we decided to switch up our decorations a bit. We used to have these giant Martha Stewart fans hanging in our picture book section. (See below) In junior fiction, we had gigantic spiders and spiderwebs everywhere, and in young adult we had huge scary bat wall clings. So we decided to make everything a bit nicer and prettier and not so scary. (Though I love the scary, trust me)

In our YA area, I decided to do a Dia de los Muertos banner.  I made all these little skull cut-outs, and then my coworker and I had a blast decorating them!

For the picture book section, I found a couple of banner tutorials to try out. The "Happy Halloween" banner I did based on this tutorial I found about using coffee filters. The one in the back (which is hard to see, I know) is mainly using our cutouts of a cat, owl, and jack o'lantern against different backgrounds.  If you want a tutorial, I found one here, but that person gets REALLY in-depth on the process.  I think I may have used it just for the measurements.

Finally, in our junior fiction section, we decided to keep it simple and just went with a ton of hanging bats.  Also - some bats taped to the windows for depth of field or something.  Who is it by?  Martha Stewart, of course.  Though if you look at the bats on her page, and the ones on ours, you can see a noticeable size difference.  I don't know why you'd want them as big as she has them.

Hope you enjoy and maybe use some!  I plan on posting more crafts soon! 

Tinkerlab

This summer, we decided to try something a little different.  For the past 4+ years, we had been doing some kind of variation on story and a craft or budding artists.  It was an hour long craft program for ages 8 & up (or 5 & up after we lowered it).  In fact, you can read a bit about it in this post.  However we still had people who insisted on bringing younger children to the program.  At first we countered that by having an alternate craft for them.  Then, we turned it into story and a craft, where we read a story and then did simpler crafts.  At least I thought they were simpler - and for the most part they were, until last year during the science themed summer when we got to optical illusions and I saw children having meltdowns because they weren't getting it "right".  That was way too much stress for what was supposed to just be a fun art class.  So I started looking around.

The first thing I found was this:  Art Lab for Little Kids: 52 Playful Projects for Preschoolers by Susan Schwake.  Awesome, right?  Actually, yes - it is.  However, it was still a little too structured for my tastes.  Side note:  you should check out the other books in this series.  I ordered this one, the painting one, and the drawing one for my library and I think they are SO cool.

I started clicking through the list on the bottom - you know the "other users bought" list, and I found this book: Tinkerlab: A Hands-On Guide for Little Inventors by Rachelle Doorley.  Hmmmm.  Sounds interesting.  So I click on the look inside and read for awhile and I love it!  This mom (who is also an artist and arts educator) started a blog called Tinkerlab that got turned into a book, and it's all about letting kids be as creative as possible - giving them the supplies to do their own projects, and the freedom to make them.  She has guides on showing children how certain new materials can be used, but that freedom of creativity really stuck with me.  (Yes, I ordered the book for my library).

Inspired, I thought "I can do that"!  So rather than do led projects this year, we did our own version of Tinkerlab.  We set out supplies every week, and the children could just come and make *whatever* they wanted.  We had a jar full of ideas and some pattern and color dice in case they needed a nudge, but in the 10 weeks and 20 programs we did?  They were used maybe twice.  Different supplies were set out the initial 6 weeks of our main summer programming, and boy - did things get interesting.  I learned never to trust a group of children with glue guns.  While they can certainly learn not to touch it themselves, they have almost no awareness outside of themselves, and there were a few close-calls.  We had a core group of supplies that were always on hand (glue, scissors, paper, crayons, markers), but here's the 6 weeks (plus the only one we did later that had a theme):

1.Sensory - kinetic sand, water beads, beans.  Mostly this was in case there were really small children who showed up and it was a chance for kids to play.  Once set listened really well about not mixing the water beads and beans.  One did not. :/

2.Ooh Shiny - feathers, sequins, rhinestones, pom-poms, felt, and ribbons.  The children really enjoyed this one - especially the girly-girls.

3. Beads - we have SO many beads stocked up, I haven't bought any in years.  We needed to get rid of some and this was the best way to do it.  It barely put a dent in our stock.

4.Old Tech - audio cassettes, microfilm, DVD cases, computer keys, floppy disks.  This was the glue gun week.  It was cute b/c they wanted to make their own "computers".  I had to show them the tape inside the cassettes.  A couple got creative with it - most just wanted to pull it out and cut it up.

5. Paper Goods - mat board cutouts, wrapping paper, tissue paper, coffee filters, confetti, scrap paper. We had lots of leftover cutouts from our die-cut machine and inexplicable wrapping paper from the 80s.  This helped get rid of that.  Unfortunately it generated a LOT of scrap paper.  Later in the summer, I restricted them to 1 whole sheet of paper per project and forced them to use scraps for anything else they needed.

6.  Mixed bag - we put anything and everything out.

7.  Food - beans (black, pinto, lentils, split peas [yellow and green]), barley, dyed rice, cinnamon sticks, dried peppers, pasta (macaroni, shells, farfalle, ditalini, linguini).  It can be controversial, and Rachel addresses that in her book and on her blog, but really?  It's just an awful mess.  Everyone really loved that week though, and one of the 10 habits of Tinkerlab is "Embrace a Good Mess".  *sigh*

The biggest stress of this program was setting up the room every week - and even that wasn't that bad.  It can get a little expensive, but if you stick to construction paper and the basics, it doesn't have to be.  Ask people for donations.  Or you know what?  They'll hear about your program and just start giving them to you anyway.  Have fun!

Halloween Crafts

Originally, I had planned on doing this cool glowing necklace for a craft with my teens, but when it came down to the wire, I had forgotten to order the mini 1.5" glowsticks that I needed, and thus ended up having to come up with something to do at the last minute. Here is where I have to confess: I love Martha Stewart. Well, not necessarily her, but all the people that work for her and come up with all the cute ideas in her website/magazine/tv show. Going to her website and browsing around a little totally saved my butt - especially when I found the

fanged pumpkins.

Walmart had these bags of mini pumpkins  - 3 for $3, so I snapped a few of those up.  The pumpkins were a pretty decent size - about 7 inches or so in diameter and about 4 inches tall.  All you have to do is use the template from Martha Stewart to cut out a mouth and then use that opening to thoroughly scrape out the pumpkin.  (The better you can get it scraped out, the longer it will last.  I think I had mine sitting on my computer til at least Thanksgiving.)  Pop in a set of plastic vampire teeth, use some pins for eyes and voila!  A really cute pumpkin that's super-easy.  The ones I did lasted on my desk for quite awhile too.  If I can find it, I'll post the after picture.  It's pretty funny.

The other craft I did was inspired by Martha Stewart, but not taken directly from there. The website had instructions on making a ghost necklace by allowing a blob of glue to dry and then punching a hole in it. At a horror con awhile back, I had seen someone selling latex jewelry and I thought - why not merge the two? So using food coloring, I mixed up a bottle of dark purple and red dye apiece. Using wax paper, I drew out my design for a bracelet. (An easy way to fasten it is to

 draw a loop on one end and an arrow on the other. Pull the arrow through the hole, and the wings of the arrows catch, holding it closed)

From what I remember the teens liked this, but maybe had a little trouble with the bracelets.  Understandable.  Maybe try it with Tacky glue?  The food coloring will thin it some, and you can thin it with a little water if you need to, but maybe if it doesn't run as much, they'll have an easier time.

Collaged Notebooks

As it was back-to-school time when my programs started off, I decided to kick off my teen programs with a collaged notebook. It was after the major sales, but Office Max still had some crazy sales going on, and I was able to nab several packs of notebooks (3/pack - only $2)!

This is a really easy craft to do, of course, and it requires very little work on your part! All I do is give them the notebooks, paintbrushes, glue, magazines, and scissors and let them go to town. Note: this may need to be a two-parter b/ it takes a long time to pick and cut out the pictures you want. The kids may have to leave the notebooks behind so they can dry.

For those of you not familiar with collaging, the process is simple. Once you have your pictures cut out, take a small amount of water and add it to some regular, white glue. Paint the glue solution onto the area you want you pic, lay

the picture down, and then do another coat of glue on top of it (this helps seal it in). You can buy official Mod-podge at craft stores, but the glue and water works just as well. The only difficulty I had this go-round was that the glue/water solution wanted to bead up - which is an issue I've never had before. I just kept running my brush over it to spread it out, and eventually it dried alright. If you look at my notebook really closely, you can see where the glue is. I also had a problem with my paper wanting to wrinkle up, but again, I just kept smoothing it out with my brush, and didn't seem to turn out too badly.

The kids really liked it, but they ran out of time. Most of them got their notebooks done, they just had to leave them here to dry.

Geek Love

I was very fortunate that at my library, I used to have a tech person that kept everything - and I mean EVERYTHING. She retired almost a year ago now, but we still have all this old equipment taking up space. I'm talking Macs from the 80s. Yeah - that's something we're going to be using again real soon. Anyways - there were a lot of old keyboards, and since a lot of them didn't have the county inventory tags on them, we claimed for youth services.

If you haven't ever had the chance to do any deconstruction, do it. Now. It's very cathartic to rip something apart and keyboards are no exception. Frustrated with the tons of spam you get or the file you just lost? Rip apart a keyboard and you'll feel better.

So, how did I come to make this particular craft? Not to pat myself on the back, but this is an original creation. After seeing (and using) the heart emoticon, I decided I needed to make a valentine that said I {heart} you. (I can't type the actual emoticon here, because I did, and it messed up the html- this is a rewrite of this part of the post.) The green is part of the circuit board, the plastic "paper" is from the inside, and the letters are keys, of course, all ripped from the keyboards. The circuit board came that size, but if you have others that are larger, you should be able to cut them to size with scissors.

The tweens really liked this one, though apparently I don't have the most tech-savvy ones coming because it took them awhile to figure out what the letters said. If you can get your hands on old keyboards or computers, this is a fun one to try. Next time, I'm going to try to make something bigger using bits we ripped from some old CPUs.

Cassette tape wallets

Well after the Tween Programming workshop I attended yesterday, I am riding high on a wave of good feelings and am ready to get back to writing on here! A quick explanation: I went to a workshop yesterday, and before it began I was thumbing through the powerpoint presentation that had been printed out for us. I was quite surprised to find a number of pictures from this very blog on the slideshow! I said something to the presenter, the awesome Kio Fuller, and she told me she loved this blog! Sweet!

So one of my more recent projects that I thought was totally rad are these cassette tape wallets. Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Cassette tapes? Who has those?". Well - have you looked around your library? I had at least a drawer full of these things in my office from back when they would use them during storytime. I only use CDs or mp3s now, so having them around was only a waste of space until (ta-da!) I stumbled across this craft.

Step 1: Get a small screwdriver (like for glasses) and remove the screws

from the cassette. Some cassette tapes are glued together - esp. the professional ones. If you have any that were original bought as blanks, then those are the ones that have screws (and they're also the easiest to use in this case).

Step 2: Once you have the cassette taken apart, remove the magnetic tape from the inside.

Step 3: Take a zipper, preferably 12 inch, and (starting in the middle, where the magnetic tape would be exposed) glue it to the separate cassette sides. If you can't get a 12 inch zipper, a 9 inch one will do, but you'll have to glue some ribbon to the bottom of the wallet (the "bottom" being where you started and ended the zipper). Hot glue works best.

That's a really basic summary of how to do it. I'm not even sure if I had instructions, but really, if you look at the pictures, I think you can see what you're supposed to do.

As far as the reactions from my tweens? Well, I only had one attend the program. That's my biggest problem. I have plenty of cool ideas, but I don't have that many tweens actually show up. Anyways - the one who came really liked it, and when I put it up on my facebook wall, my friends went nuts over it, so I'm sure if you decided to try it at your library, it would be a big hit.

Thai String Dolls

Around Halloween, I decided to try these Thai string dolls that I had seen on another website. There are several different ways to make them. Some have wooden bases, other have wire and still others have string, but the end product is fairly similar. Basically you take your base, and just start wrapping layers and layers of string around to make the limbs and head. I provided some felt so the teens could dress their dolls if they liked, but I think the more successful ones were the ones without clothes.

Here is the link to the blog that inspired me to do this craft.

The teens enjoyed this one, but I think they had a bit of a difficult time with it. Sometimes what they just wrapped would unravel a bit, and they got pretty frustrated with it. To the left are the couple that I made. The top one is supposed to be a zombie Charlie Brown, but it doesn't look quite like I hoped it would. The devil came off very well, I think.

Recycled T-shirt Bags

I've been wanting to do this craft for quite some time. Teen programs can be really expensive after awhile, so during this spring semester, I'm trying to focus on recycled crafts again.

This is probably one of the easiest things you can do with your teens, and cheap too - if you do it right. I went to a local thrift store and picked up a bunch of T-shirts for under $10. At first, I was a little disappointed b/c there didn't seem to be much of a selection of shirts w/cool logos or designs. I then decided to try the kids' section - and cha-ching! Jackpot! Now, these shirts are smaller than the adult (obviously), so you wouldn't be able to use them as a grocery bag like most others I've seen online. However, for a teenage girl, it's the perfect purse-sized bag.

If you want to save money, you can always ask the teens to bring in their own T-shirts. I have found that they tend for forget a lot of things, so you might just save yourself the headache and buy the shirts yourself. The way to make these is super simple - you just cut the sleeves off (leaving the seam intact on the shirt), flip it inside-out, and sew the shirt closed along the hemline. The teens can sew that by hand, and all in all the craft should only take about a 1/2 hour to complete.

My teens really seemed to like this craft. One of my coworkers has a daughter that comes to my program, and she told me the next day that her daughter had taken her bag to school. Success!

Boat Building Competiton

This was the project we used to kick-off our summer teen programming. It's a great one if you need something to just throw together because all you have to do is gather a bit of odds and ends and see what they can make out of it. Items we used included:

water bottles

egg cartons

aluminum foil

Ivory soap

cork

paper clips

balloons

duct tape

straws

pint fruit baskets

They had half an hour to make a boat (we also provided Goldfish

and blue Hawaiian Punch during that time), after which we tested it's buoyancy by submerging it in a large plastic container filled with water. We judged boats on looks, buoyancy, and motility and then awarded certificates to the winners. I think the teens had a good time with this, though I didn't see too many of the boys after this one. Weird.

Bath Jellies and Bombs

So - now that I've gotten back into the swing of things, it's time to catch up on summer.

Bath jelly!

I had never heard of that stuff until a couple of years ago, when I went into a LUSH store for the first time. Never heard of it either? It's basically a gelatin soap. Well at some point in time this summer, I was in a scramble for something to do with my teens, when I stumbled across a recipe for bath jelly. (I was actually looking for a craft to do with school age - they were my test subjects) The recipe is as follows:

1 pkg unflavored gelatin

1/2 c liquid soap

3/4 c hot water

food coloring

scented essential oils

Empty gelatin packet in bowl and add hot water. Stir until gelatin is dissolved and add the liquid soap. Also add any food coloring and essential oil (if desired). Stir gently (so you don't create too many bubbles) and then pour into a container. In the stores it looks like the jelly's been made in large pans and cut into chunks. In this recipe you can just pour it straight into a baby food jar or a plastic container. As long as it's kept cool, it should last for awhile. (I think I've had the one sitting in my office for well over 2 months now). If you see any mould, you should obviously throw it away. I used a pink grapefruit scented grapeseed oil that was leftover from the bath bombs we made at Christmas, which was great because there are a number of grapefruit scented soaps on the market.

But we didn't stop there, no! We also made bath bombs. As I just mentioned, we had actually done this craft before at Christmas. The bath jellies hardly took any time to make, and we had a lot of the supplies leftover from the last time, so I decided to add this to the lot. This craft is a little harder, and takes some supplies that needed to be specially ordered. Here is a basic recipe:

2 parts baking soda

1 part citric acid

1 part cornstarch

essential oil

food coloring

water

The whole process of making a bath bomb is very much dependent on how things feel. Basically, you mix the dry ingredients (set a bit aside for an emergency stash), then add just a couple of drops of food coloring. The mixture will fizz but just mix it in as best you can. Add a teaspoon of oil for scent and continue mixing. Then to add the water. You want to add the most minute amounts that you can b/c if you add too much, the bomb won't set correctly. As you add water, you'll want to mix with your fingers, and you'll know it's perfect when you can squeeze your mixture and it will hold it's shape. Pack it into a mold, turn the mold out onto some cardboard and leave it to dry for 24 hrs. If your mixture was too dry, the mold will fall apart (but you can always add water and remold) - too wet, and it will grow - the bomb will be soft and bubbly and bigger than when you first turned it out (add the emergency dry mix and re-mold). There are guides you can find online that are a lot more detailed than this, but I figured this is a good overview.

The teens LOVED this. It's a bit precise, so you really have to watch out and help them, but it's cool because they can personalize it with the scents and colors they want. We did it at Christmas the first time because they make great gifts, but it's also a great craft to do anytime.

Recycled Picture Frames

Sorry about the hiatus folks, the summer was pretty hectic and I honestly forgot about this blog until just yesterday. However - I am excited to be writing again and sharing the cool stuff we've done with other people. Our first teen programs of the school year were this week, and we started them off by making picture frames out of recycled library cards. Why we have all these cards from other libraries, I'm not sure. We got new cards awhile back, so these must have been sent as samples, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. It's always nice to do recycled crafts - so cheap!

All you have to do is cut the cards up and glue them on to a frame. We have a frame die for our Accucut machine and we get mat board donated from a nearby

framery, so that was no cost to us either. I'm sure other picture frames would work well, we were just going with what we've got. The first one I did, I tried to do even sized squares (top right pic), but I think I like having all the different sizes better. The few kids that showed up really liked it (this first one wasn't really well advertised), and I think I'll use it again in the future.

Stay tuned - I'm going to try to catch up on the last few months that I missed!

Dyed Easter Eggs

So I didn't last the entire month doing teen tech stuff. Honestly, I kinda forgot there were more than 4 Tuesdays this month, and so I didn't plan as far enough ahead as I should have. However, with Easter coming up this Sunday, it wasn't hard to figure out what to do with them. Everyone loved dyeing eggs, don't they? One of my coworkers directed me to Martha Stewart's website where she has tons of different ways to decorate eggs.


The first way, (and not found on Martha's site) is of the hippie tie-dyed variety. You can find those tie-dye egg kits at the supermarket, but I wasn't really satisfied with the way they do it. The kit that I bought had you putting the dye on, but then rubbing it around to make it look tie-dyed. Lame. So I searched online and found some hints. If you dip a paper towel in a water and vinegar solution, wrap it around the egg, and then drop the color onto the towel, the colors bleed and have a much more realistic effect. When done with your design, take the paper towel off and let the egg dry.

The second technique is marbleizing. Basically, you dye the egg in a light color and let dry. Then, make another darker colored dye in a shallow pan and swirl a bit of oil in it. Take the egg and roll it once through the oil and dye and then pat dry! Easy as pie!

The third (and coolest) technique we used was silk tie-dyeing. You can go to Martha Stewart to get the tutorial. The basics are this: Blow out the eggs (Idk why she doesn't say this, but why put all this work into something so beautiful just to have it destroyed?). Take the egg and wrap it in the silk. Wrap that in a bit of white cloth and secure with string or a rubber band. Pop into boiling water for 20 minutes. Take out, unwrap, and presto! Beautiful eggs. The blue one on the right was made with a singe piece of silk - the white parts are where the fabric creased and it didn't touch. The bottom two on the right were made using several ties (the skinny end) and wrapping it around the egg.

How did the teens like this? Disappointingly, I only had one come today. However, with Spring Break looming this weekend, it's to be expected. My girl really liked dyeing the eggs, though she wasn't too interested in the marbleizing or the silk ties. However, after she saw the results of mine, she wanted to do one. Luckily we had just enough time that she could, but seriously? I kinda wanted to strangle her. All in all it's been good so far - and hey, after blowing out a dozen eggs for my teens to use, I've now got enough quiche to last a week.

Teen Tech Month: Week 4

This week's project: felt iPod/mp3 player/cell phone covers! I was super psyched for this one, but was a little underwhelmed by the response I got. My first group wanted to make them, but maybe had a bit of trouble in the execution.

I set out paper and card stock so they could sketch and make templates before they cut (thereby saving tons of felt being wasted by making wrong cuts or drawing directly on the felt and not liking the design and scrapping it). I told them what it was for, but they didn't listen. I had one girl place her design smack dab in the middle of the felt and cut it. Alright, I didn't clarify that ahead of time, so I corrected her - no problem - except on of my other girls wasn't listening and not only drew a design in the middle directly on the felt, but she messed it up and had to draw another - again, in the middle of the felt. This might normally not really be an issue, but with these holders, it takes a lot of felt from one sheet to make, so she rendered that sheet useless for that purpose. This was a day for banging my head against a wall. (To make envelopes- just take a long sheet of felt, width a little larger than your iPod, fold in half, and glue along two sides)

The first girl (who is also the youngest - she's 10), kept saying she didn't know how to do it, and was just in general not trying very hard at all. I had to hold her hand through the entire thing. Then my kid who's, well, special came and since he doesn't have an iPod and wouldn't know the first thing on how to make much of anything, I started cutting out a finger puppet for him. After I was done with his, I thought it was really cute, so I made a Domo puppet for myself. (Domo finger puppet not pictured b/c I don't know what happened to him). It was a difficult program, and I wasn't looking forward to Thursday.

Thursday crowd didn't really want to make iPod covers either. I suspect this has more to do with their ludicrous idea that any thing Apple makes is junk, rather than lack of wanting to craft. I took out my Domo finger puppet and showed it to them, and some of them got on board. One kid made a whole set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (really basic, stylized puppets, but cool). Once they got started, they really got into making them. I decided to to Spongebob and I think he came out quite nicely.

I guess you really have to know your audience for this one. If your teens are as obsessed with their iPods as I am, this is probably a good project - otherwise I'd skip it. I searched a lot online for a great assortment of felt colors, but for the most part I wasn't satisfied until I found Felt-O-Rama. They have a great variety pack of recycled eco-felt for only $15. I used Liquid Stitch to hold together, but it takes a long time to dry (and teens are often impatient), so I would use a hot glue gun instead.

Teen Tech Month: Part 2

For our second week we did the most low-tech thing possible: video game sprites. I still counted it though, as we were making video game characters. For a more detailed explanation on how to make them, you can read my post called 8 -bit love, or go to the4yablog.com. She's got a pdf you can download and everything. Be forewarned that one of the links, for smashworldforum or something like that doesn't work anymore, and though I tried finding the emblems on their new forums, I couldn't.

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Never fear! I searched tirelessly and found a couple of other great links! There's a bead sprites forum full of people doing this very same thing. Great resource for pictures. All you have to do it use their designs and count the beads, and voila! Sprite recreated! The other is and 8-bit gallery on devianart. I couldn't print out the pics, but if you have a laptop, you can always pull up the site and use that for a reference while you're crafting. I'm so inspired, I think I'm going to make a set of Mario magnets for a couple of friends who are getting married (don't worry - I'm getting them a gift card too).

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So far, these things have been a hit, and the teens have made some really amazing stuff. One of my girls did a Sailor Moon character (she changed the colors) that looked amazing. Unfortunately, she finished late and I was cleaning and didn't get a picture of it before she left. so far the consensus seems to be that they can't wait to do it again. This is definitely a program I will use over and over again.