This one’s a crowd pleaser. There’s something about funneling layers of rainbow sand into an old glass bottle that brings out the mad scientist in everyone. There’s not much to it:
Materials
Colored sand (you can also use natural sand or salt and color it with food dye)
Recycled bottles
1″ to 1 1/2″ corks (recycled wine bottle corks also work)
funnel (we only had a single metal one so we also rolled paper into funnels)
That’s it. You just pour and layer!
See what I mean about mad scientists?
Inspired by this woven heart badminton racket by Bloesem kids, I had to try my hand at the (very) rare art of tennis racket embroidery. What was I going to do with that old warped, wooden tennis racket anyway? I had found this one at a garage sale years ago and bought it for no reason except that I loved that it was a “Lady” Slazenger.
I can’t really imagine anyone else trying this project, but here is a tip in case you are so moved: center your design! I thought I had, but somehow it’s one row from being centered. I may add a skinny row for balance, or I may make peace with imperfection. Two other tips: I used masking tape to anchor one end of the floss to keep it taut and flat while I was “stitching,” and I ran my embroidery needle under the stitches to knot in the back (see center picture first row). That’s it. Point, game, match.
Time for a new matchbox house! This one is a Brooklyn brownstone, pre-gentrification. Get out your fine-point Sharpies, because the free printable coloring page is here: Brownstone Matchbox by homemadecity.com. Note: I printed the page at 115% to fit the matchbox I had on hand. You may have to do the same. Happy Spring!
We didn’t reinvent the wheel this year. Or the valentine. We trotted out last year’s idea and produced in bulk. My third-grader and I used one of our six snow days here in Boston to assembly-line these valentine matchboxes. I glue-sticked and covered in red construction paper and Zeke heart-stamped. The boxes fit exactly 12 M&Ms each. We ate the extra. (I’m not sure what to do with the surplus matches.)
Happy Valentine’s Day!
I’m not patient enough to take a Before Photo. Once I have a project-induced adrenaline surge, I can barely pause to snap a decent photo or two. So here’s my best:
You get the idea. Vintage black card file drawers. Actually, I think they were originally army green, and I painted them black a while ago when my husband and I were going through a “drag any old discarded file cabinet off the sidewalk” phase. Does everyone go through this phase? Is it developmental? It’s definitely a pre-kids condition. Anyway, I was inspired by this Land of Nod item to dig the old thing out of the closet and give it some new paint.
After spraying the file drawers with enamel white paint (and then laying down for a while due to resulting asphyxiation), I got to work on the fun part. I used tiny bottles of model paint to color the drawer fronts.
The After Photos:
I don’t know if you can tell but there are actually two different file boxes with two file drawers each. The top box is made of wood, the bottom of metal. They sit on top of each other nicely though, and their differences add to a general funkiness, I think. I haven’t quite figured out where to put the drawers–they are 17″ deep!
homemadecity.com 