Thursday, December 20, 2007

Crafting with kids

Several years ago, I bought my boys potholder looms. They tried it once and immediately gave it up. I made myself two potholders - one in cool colors and one in warm colors.

When my inlaws were in town, my father-in-law saw them and asked the boys to make him some.

So we pulled it out last night. One was set up with a mix of colors, so I finished it off to have the looms ready for them today.

To start I told them to pick out 2-3 colors of loops (the multicolor one doesn't look that great). Hyperion picked navy blue, baby blue, pink and red. Surprisingly, it looks pretty good. He did blue for the warp and the pink and red for the weft. He's used mostly light blue and pink with the red and dark blue scattered randomly.

Oceanus picked the two blues and white. He did a little more placing of colors to try to get a specific effect. It's turning out well.

I predict that they'll finish these in 2 days. They are slow! They aren't used to crafting so they just don't have the dexterity they need.

After we got that started, I finished cleaning the kitchen so that we could make haystack cookies. I'm not sure what I think of these - chocolate chips, peanut butter and chow mein noodles. But it's a good project for the kids. I melted the chips and peanut butter in my microwave safe bowl, letting the boys mix them as they melted. They added the chow mein noodles and mixed them up, then spooned out a few cookies each. Then they were bored with it and went back to weaving.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love doing crafts with my kids. Today we're working on graham cracker houses. They don't like gingerbread, so this makes sure the final result will eventually be eaten.

Tanya Brown said...

This sounds like good stuff. It seems like a good thing, exposing kids to a variety of activities. Some things they'll have more affinity for than others, and in some cases they may discover an interest they wouldn't have otherwise known about.