making a truck costume

Halloween is done and dusted for another year. But I know next year there will be a new crop of mums & dads making vehicle costumes out of cardboard boxes and so I put together some notes on ours. It's definitely easier to figure out homemade costumes in this blogging age — we quickly looked at a handful of truck costumes before making our yellow tractor trailer costume and it definitely sped it up.

One thing we did which turned out to be really fun (and useful and safety-ish) was adding headlights, reflectors and headlights. We did the whole thing very cheaply and fairly quickly.

My notes are here. I've put a few more pictures after the jump. As usual Auggie looks very serious while holding still and all the smiling shots are super blurry ^_^

Happy day

It's cinco de mayo tomorrow...

You could make a fruit balloon garland, oh happy day via pinterest

Make a pull piñata garland, love + cupcakes via pinterest

My favourite piñata by lieschenmueller flickr, via pinterest

Textile crafts from the Brooklyn Children's Museum

This post has moved here.

Match Box Advent Calendar

As there's less than a week before the start of Advent, we thought we'd quickly offer a classic project that your kids can enjoy all the way until Christmas.
Here are our directions for an advent calendar made of matchboxes.

Another Yarn Giveaway

We had such a positive response to our last yarn giveaway, that we thought we'd do another.

If you'd like to be updated about our next project or giveaway, you can subscribe to our blog by entering your email address on the upper-right corner of this page. We keep our mailing list private.

You could use the yarn from this giveaway for some finger knitting or even pair it with some of your own leftover chunky or worsted yarn for our Lonely Doll Scarf.

Robot Paper Dolls

These are very easy to make, and fun! If you know how to make paper dolls, you can do this freehand, using our instructions below, but we've made up instructions and templates with 2 sizes (PDF).

How to make a real kite, too

One of our most popular posts is How to make a mini kite, but it looks like some of you are looking to make a general sort of kite (the kind you fly in sky).

We have directions for a real kite, too, here. The original directions for making a kite are on the dust jacket of our first book, Windy.

Making little stickers

This is a very easy, little project. It's so quick, you will have lots of time leftover to go outside and play! You can make your own stickers out of your doodles. If you're not sure what to draw, this is a perfect opportunity to make some Ed Emberley doodles or thumbprint drawings.

Materials
·Unsealed envelopes (maybe you can reuse envelopes from greeting cards you've been given, which are often nice paper and unsealed)
·Pens, pencils or crayons
·Tape (optional)

Directions
Draw a little doodle on the bottom-back of an envelope flap (the sticky part of the envelope has to be on the reverse side of your drawing). Cut out your drawing, preferably in a nice shape, lick back, stick. That's it! If you would like your sticker to be glossy, you can place some clear tape over your drawing before cutting it out (we didn't in these pictures). You should get 8-10 stickers out of an envelope.




We experimented with different surfaces and envelopes to see how well they stayed fast. Stickers stuck very well to uncoated paper, unvarnished wood; medium well to coated paper and poorly to hard surfaces like plastic and stainless steel (they fell off after a few hours).

Have fun!

How to make a mini kite

This post has moved.

Chirp outtakes (wheel painting)

Last May we made a story about wheels for Chirp magazine. We tried all sorts of wheels and cars, but we only had room for a few of our vehicles in the story. Some of the tests we did were quite funny. Our favourite one is probably the cherry-tomato-tin-can car. The tape-dispenser-jalopy and the bananamobile are quite funny, too. What would you use to make wheels?

These are are some more of the vehicles from the cutting room floor.