Can I just tell you?
We are having so much fun creating summer. And it is so much easier than I thought it was going to be. We have scheduled in time to create every single day, and it's just fun.
I'll share more on our schedule next week, but today I wanted to show you a little peek at one of our more adventurous creating days. The girls were begging me to take them to McDonald's to play on the playground and for a new toy. Which: I know. Don't start.
I've been camping out in the pages of The Creative Family
So we raided an old clothes bin and found some materials for creating our toys. Dacey picked an old pair of khakis of mine and decided to she wanted to make a penguin. Dacey's interpretation of Amanda's original instructions are a little different from mine, but whatever.
She first sketched out her idea on paper and then traced the outline onto the material with a permanent fabric pen:
Next she pinned him down:
And then she cut him out:
Then I pinned him on another piece of material and we cut that out, too, then pinned the pieces together to begin sewing:
She did almost all of the sewing herself:
But when the thread got knotted near the end, I took over and promptly stuck myself. And then I bled onto the penguin's wing. Surprisingly, she wasn't mad. She just decided to color him in (and didn't complain when you could still see the drop of blood!):
And then we ended up with the finished penguin you see in the first shot above. She named him Tuxedo Sam (inspired by the vintage Hello Kitty cartoon series that we watch waaaaaaaay more than I can bear on Netflix).
Aliza Joy didn't want to do her own art. She didn't want to draw or cut or do much of anything other than pick the material. She picked a pair of fleece pants I had gotten when Dacey was a baby. I love those pants so much! I have hung on to them through the years because I always imagined we could use them for something.
She stepped into the role of artistic director with natural ease and began making clear her vision. And it was not like what she saw in the book. She didn't want a drawing of a puppy. She wanted a real puppy with four legs and floppy ears and a short little tail.
I probably should have dug up a pattern or a tutorial or something somewhere, but I'm lazy. So I free-handed it. As you can plainly see:
I cut off a leg and used the outside seam for the back. After I cut out the legs, I didn't know what to do next:
So I just kept looking and fiddling and guessing, and by the end of the day, we came up with Sally the Striped Doggy:
Last night, when I finished Sally up after dinner, I showed her to Kyle and said, "Can you believe I made this?" Friends, it was one of only a handful of times he has been so overcome with laughter that he literally spit out his drink.
I guess he could believe that I made this:
We also made a big mess, but we had tons of fun.
I love what Sarah wrote yesterday at Emerging Mummy on raising artists and being artists and making art and messes and all the good stuff of creation.
Yep. We are having lots and lots of fun creating summer here.
And sometimes we wear pink hats.
