A Craft Hell of My Own Making

The little one said he wanted some craft projects.

I made sure to cover my bases.

     Mike's 3 sons stayed with us for the last 2 weeks of their summer and while the teenagers are eerily content to stare at their laptops all day and night, the youngest boy wanted to make some art.  He's always churning out Minecraft implements composed of melted fuse beads but I threw a couple of new ideas into the mix.

     Hard to believe, but mixing Elmer's glue and liquid starch will create a serviceable home-made gak (softer than Silly Putty, firmer than good old-fashioned slime).  By sticking a straw into the gak and blowing, we created this creepy purple bladder.  Success!  The gak sat in a bowl on my counter for days, revisited and played with often by the child so it's definitely a cost-effective project.

     I admit, I scoffed at the idea of melting cheap plastic beads in the oven to make suncatchers but the finished product was surprisingly pretty.  Wear an aerator, though, because the fumes have a deadly reek.

     I was afraid I would regret the tie dye mess but it wasn't too bad.  The resulting t-shirts, tank tops, and bandanas made me want to embrace my inner hippie and he couldn't wait to hand them out as gifts.

     Reading the instructions for something we were putting together, I made note of the fact that the manufacturer felt it necessary to indicate that the screwdriver was not drawn to scale.  Wish I'd read that BEFORE I spent an hour scouring the box for a tiny 1" Phillips screwdriver.

     A project I did NOT show him was this Post-it note prank carried out on the car of a friend for his 50th birthday.  Something like 4000 Post-it notes were used.  Big clean-up but you could probably just remove the paper from the windows and mirrors and drive down the interstate at 80mph to take care of the rest.

I also worked on some of my crafts, turning this:

Into this:

A necklace a million years in the making.

Awww!

I've also been working on hand-knotted necklaces using silk or cotton bead cord.  

Every so often he looks at my fossils and beads but I do whatever I can to divert his attention.

He knows I would be very displeased if he started digging around in my beads.

Not to worry, he has plenty left to do next time he has a break from school.  There's still jars of glitter, paint pots, poster board, a face painting kit, etc, etc...