Last week Reiley and I plopped ourselves in my studio and had some fun while watching nature shows on PBS online. I never even knew you could watch so many videos on PBS online. It is really neat (we love nature shows around here).
I won this book on Donna Downey's blog a few years ago. I have pretty much never won anything my entire life (besides this book) so it was quite exciting for me. Of course, I gave the book to Reiley and she was so excited to have won something also. In fact, she probably could not have picked a better recipient for the book because Reiley goes through it all the time and picks out projects she wants to do and we see what we have, what we need and she gets to work on them. She has several post it notes sticking through the top right now to bookmark her next project.
This project was also in the book. Reiley always is complaining that we don't have most of the items to make the projects- but for this one we did. Go figure.
For this project she used crayon shavings and sandwiched them in between two pieces of wax paper. Then we covered the wax paper with some 'parchment paper' (we did not have parchment paper so we just used some paper and ironed it on low to melt the crayon. I used the little Heidi Swapp iron and it worked perfect (it comes in so handy because I hate ironing normally). Then after she got quite a selection of these going we cut them out (her using scissors- I used an exacto knife for the center), punched a hole in the shop and tied them to an embroidery hoop. You could probably spray paint the embroidery hoop or pick up a cool plastic one...but Reiley is somewhat impatient like me and wants to see results fast. We can't wait on spray paint.
She wanted it hung over her bed in front of her 'canopy'. Her canopy is made up of a couple of extra curtains and a curtain rod I had lying around. She is the type of kid who loves taking out massive amounts of blankets and building forts so I surprised her one day by using the curtains to create a canopy. She loves it...although I think something other than black would fit her room a lot better.
All in all the mobile took us about one nature show (which is about 50 minutes long). Most of the time was Reiley making crayon shavings. After that it went fairly quick because I jumped in to use the iron and helped her with cutting and stringing. It looks really neat hanging and it is just below her light so it does look somewhat transparent. She was very happy with her creation and we have marked one more of the projects off her list.
