Visit to Evergreen Brick Works

You know how I realllly don't like the cold so this past weekend had the perfect, warm fall weather when we went took a visit to Evergreen Brick Works. I just love the feeling of being in touch with nature again when we visit there. 

One of the play areas for children had these outdoor bongo drums that was so fun to hear as the kids tapped them to their mood. I had never seen anything like it before and would LOVE to have some of those in my future dream garden :) There was also a sand play area surrounded by tree stumps (I have always wanted tree stumps used as seats) as well as a little walkway tunnel created from plants (kind of reminds me of a secret garden).

 

In their children's garden, there was so much going on-a camp fire, teepees, a yurt, walking on rocks, climbing up hills, and an exploration of colour.

It was wonderful being outdoors 

as we sipped away at a warm smoked turkey, bacon, split pea soup against the sounds of the farmer's market and young families enjoying their day off.

Changing Seasons

It's been cold these days as if it's already winter. I can still remember summer but it already seems like a distant memory blurred with only a few short months passing.

Although I didn't get to craft much during the summer at the trailer park and food truck, I did have one chance to enter into an art/craft contest at the Sarnia Craft Supply store. They gave a small bag of materials and we had to make something out of it. The materials were the 2 mini canvases with the small easels, mini beads, white paper flowers, blue flakes, jewel stickers, and a glitter tape. I had a lot of fun creating it as I challenged myself to utilize all the materials as much as possible. The result is a creation showing the changing of seasons.

Stay warm as autumn catches a glimpse of winter these days.

Handmade Gifts from the Heart

My 3 yr old daughter has been looking forward to one of her best friend's birthday party for the past week. So much so that she's been working on making gifts for her at any craft time we get. It's really touching and cute to see her come up with an idea and make it from start to finish with little adult influence.

The first gift she made was while I was washing dishes. When I was all done tidying the kitchen and went to the playroom, I was surprised to see a sticker decorated container with a drawn on coffee filter in the middle. It's a bowl for her friend to play with she said. The part I assisted with was adding glitter glue into the centre of the coffee filter.

The next gift is a necklace we stringed together from clear pony beads. She decided on the colour combination as well as how to package the necklace when it was complete. She decided on tissue paper with sticker decorations, and a ribbon around it. Also, it was funny to see how she remembered we had a little girly loot bag hanging around and decided to put the entire tissue package into that bag.

The last gift was inspired from a craft she made over a year ago at the Early Years Centre. At the time, she decorated already made toilet paper roll binoculars with stickers. It is surprisingly the most played with handmade craft toy. She decided on making one of these for her friend. This time around, we glued squares of tissue paper around the toilet paper rolls, let it dry, and adhered the two rolls together with hot glue.

There really is nothing quite like handmade gifts especially when it's instilled in the little ones. 

The party's tomorrow so it's going to be a fun weekend.

Hope your weekend's looking good too!

New Etsy Card Shop

Hi Everyone! I'm back with some exciting news. 

I've finally opened up my own little card shop over at Etsy!

Here's how it looks right now. Hop on over to take a look.

Although there's just 4 cards right now, I feel that I can check mark something off my to-do list for the longest time. I'm hoping to add more cards and items in the coming weeks. In the meantime, enjoy! :)

Summer Adventure

It's been a LONGG time since I last blogged. I don't even know where to start about my adventures in the last 5 months. Actually, it's kind of strange blogging right now since I've had limited internet access all this time. 

To summarize my summer, I thought I'd use a picture to speak for me.

I moved from the city to the rural countryside at a trailer park for the summer.
Why?
 Because my husband embarked on his first business venture and opened a food truck there. It was definitely a challenge at times venturing into uncertainty and the unknown.
It felt like an uphill battle but the summer wasn't all tough.
We had fun along the way...
...climbing sand dunes, ample outdoor nature time, going to a beautiful beach, swimming, visits to local farms for various fruit picking, meeting the nicest neighbours ever, visits to neighbouring towns, and just experiencing something totally new.
I can't say we always conquered that sand dune in terms of the food truck business but at the end of some days, it did feel like we were at the top and accomplished something we didn't think
we could do.

Now I'll have to adjust back to city life and since I've been hardly crafting this summer, it's going to take some time to get those creative juices flowing again.

My spring/summer adventure!

 

It's been awhile since I last posted. That's because I'm busy packing and getting ready to make my way to Grand Bend. My husband is opening up a food truck! So exciting but also nervous until everything is up and running more smoothly. I'm really happy for him though 'cuz he finally gets to do something that he's passionate about. I hope all goes well in this venture.

It's also going to be a huge change. We're going to be living from a trailer! Being the pack rat that I am, packing for the trailer is not easy. I've still yet to cut the clothing I've stacked up high in half. I'm still in the process of packing some art/craft materials as I'm also going to be running some camps and hopefully some yoga classes too. I'm really excited and nervous at the same time. 

We'll see where this adventure takes us. I'm sure we're going to be outdoors lots for the next 5 months so I better pack some sidewalk chalk for my little one. It looks like my little blog will be taking a little vacation too. I'm thinking of getting a little 5 year paper journal to jot down my daily thoughts old school style :)

I told my daughter that she can choose 5 toys to pack and she told me, "Scissors, glue, crayons." Sounds like she's well on her way to being fully fledged artist/crafter :D 

See you all in October (or earlier if I can sneak some internet time).

:)

Sushi Birthday

Yet another birthday card-that's the 4th one this week! I promise to give it a rest after this one :)

I'm celebrating my friend's birthday with an all-you-can-eat sushi dinner tonight. 

I thought this card would be fitting.

This is probably the biggest quilled object I've made. It took awhile to make it but it was well worth it. I love seeing cute things (especially if I made them :)) I'm so glad I tried it out. I also finally used some handmade Japanese paper as it seems to go with the whole theme.

 

Looking forward tonight :)

Happy Weekend Everyone!

Challenge:

City Crafter Blog Challenge: Happy Birthday

Snail Mail

Late wishing someone a happy birthday? How about some snail mail birthday card? :) I'm giving this to a friend I'm meeting today who also had her birthday in March. 

Inside the card says, 

"...but I made it! Happy Belated Birthday!"

I'm really happy with how the chevron washi tape goes with the snail :) 

and such a cute a little guy <3

Challenge:

City Crafter Challenge Blog: Happy Birthday

Another Birthday Card

Like I said, there seems to be a lot of birthdays around this time. I made this for my aunt when she celebrated her birthday in March.

I finally got to use some uninked stamps. Yay!

Also, a very happy birthday to the City Crafter Challenge blog. They have a fun blog hop with amazing card inspirations there. I'd like to link my card up to this week's challenge but I apologize for the cropped card as when I took it, I didn't know I'd be linking it up to any challenges. Hope it's still eligible! 

Birthday Card

There seems to be lots of birthdays around this time. This is a card I made for a friend.

 

Since I haven't been cardmaking as much as I would like for the last while, all the items on this card have been hoarded for at least 6 months+....washi tape, uninked stamp, ribbon, and the designer paper. I'm really happy about finally figuring out a use for the ribbon...it seems to add a softness to contrast the chevron washi tape and designer paper flower. 

Challenges

CAS-ual Fridays: Chevrons and Flowers
City Crafter Challenge Blog: Happy Birthday

Chocolate Play Dough

Happy Easter everyone! I hope you're all having a wonderful long weekend and for me, it's especially longgg with a 6 day weekend! lol. I don't think I've had that long of a break in ages. So far my weekend can be summed up as follows:

Day 1- One of a Kind Show

Day 2- Hot Yoga with music using Passport To Prana plus walked for 1 hour

Day 3- Music class with the little one and a little bit of spring cleaning to match the spring weather

Day 4- Easter hunt plus playdate for the little one

Day 5- Family Day

Day 6-TBD

:)

Anyway, my initial purpose for this post is to share the chocolate play dough we made earlier this month and I'm thinking of making again today for Easter. It is worth all the aromatherapy you can get from the chocolatey goodness! :)

Just use a no cook play dough recipe and then add cocoa powder. 

Voila!

Happy Weekend Folks!

Dress Inspired Card

I had a long overdue thank you card to make for a dress that was given to my daughter last month. 

I've finally made the card. I'm quite happy with how cute it looks :)

I miss cardmaking, creating, and cutting paper. I need to get back into the creative groove of things but lately I've been busy with either yoga, getting enough sleep, thinking about the summer months ahead (which includes moving to a trailer for the summer), and organizing my basement into an art studio of some sort.

That's it for now. Until next time!

A little paint

I haven't done painting with my daughter in what seems like a long while (maybe a few weeks) so I was very happy about starting that again. This is one of her recent paintings now hanging up in her playroom. I love how children's art is so expressive in their lines and full of energy. I also find it very fascinating watching her paint. Do you see the little dabs of black paint? She says those are footprints :)

Preschool Name Art

I got this idea when I supply taught at a preschool recently and I thought I'd try it out with my daughter. I told my 3 yr old that we're making name art. The steps were:

1. Trace name

2. Cut out paper following dotted lines

3. Glue onto a big sheet of paper in the way that he/she likes

4. Decorate!

I found that this was a great way to get her to work on some fine motor skills. I'd like to enter this into the Sunday Showcase over at Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas, where you'll have an endless list of other literacy/writing activities for the little ones.

Postcards!

I love postcards especially handmade art postcards. 

When these postcards arrived in the mail, I couldn't stop admiring every detail about them and be inspired. 

These were sent through the postcard swap earlier this month.

Enjoy!

Terrie Purkey from Creative Explorer

I just love the collaging and use of mix media in this piece. The corrugated textured heart really stands out against the neat text background.

Anita from Zafaran's Dream Doses
This postcard is so beautifully painted and the detail is astonishing. I can't stop looking at this!

Lorinda Fraser from Everyday Endeavours

I love the mixed media background and the collaging of the different pieces especially the stamps. This reminded me of when I used to collect stamps and now I would love to incorporate stamps into a future art piece.

Thanks to all these talented for the postcards! It certainly made my day when I received it :)

love

"We are all a little weird, 

and life's a little weird, 

and when we find someone's weirdness whose compatible with ours, 

we join up with them and fall into mutual weirdness 

and we call this 

love."

-Dr. Suess

This is my last postcard out of the three that I've sent through postcard swap. I've definitely had a lot of fun with it and it gave me a chance to actually try watercolour (believe it or not, I haven't really used watercolour except for a few recent times with my daughter). I think out of the three postcards, I like this one best just because I love the simplicity and white space. I think I have a thing for admiring beautiful watercolour paper :D I can't wait to share the postcards I received in my next post :)

Splash

A splash of colour to wake up your Monday morning.  :)

This is another postcard I sent off in the postcard swap. Even though the watercolour paper was already 140 lbs, it still got really warped. I guess I just love splashing on that water. Maybe next time I'll try taping the paper down to help minimize the warping.

Happy Monday Everyone!

Breathe

No matter how busy you are, don't forget to breathe. 

Happy World Yoga Day!

I sent this postcard earlier this month as part of a postcard swap (I really hope it doesn't get lost in the mail and reaches the recipient!) The postcard swap really gave me a chance to finally break into the watercolour set my husband got me for my Christmas present.

My blog posts seem to be more sparse again as things have been busy on my end. Last weekend, my daughter just turned 3. We had a nice little celebration with a big family dinner as well as a family outing to the ROM on Family Day. I was also called in to supply teach a couple times in the last 2 weeks so my regular routine seemed out of the swing of things. Recently, I started up on yoga again but practicing at home this time around. I've been trying to practice everyday and I found it's a great way to wake up in the morning. I think that's what inspired this postcard painting of mine. Anyway, I hope I'll have more time to blog and craft soon!

I Heart Stamping

I saw this cute little activity over at a little artsy. With just Valentine's Day just around the corner, I just had to try it with my daughter. (I got my husband to try it too :D) The above art pieces were created from my daughter, my husband, and me (left to right).

Simply take a toilet paper roll, bend into the shape of a heart, and use tape to secure the shape.

Then stamp away!

Simple and fun <3

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year!

新年快樂 ! 

It's the year of the snake soo 

I made a card to celebrate the occasion. :)

I would say that my card doesn't have the same grandeur and festivity of most Chinese New Year cards but it's my own little simple version so I'm pretty happy with it. The only part I'd like to improve is my Chinese writing :P

Happy Chinese New Year Everyone!

Happy February!

It's a new month and I just LOVE February. 

Not only is there Valentine's Day, it's also going to be Chinese New Year, my dad's birthday, Family Day and most important of all, my daughter's birthday all jammed packed into the shortest month of the year. It's going to be a busy one especially with me and my husband's recent organizing/clean sweeping spree of the house (soon I'll have a more proper art/craft space to get some creativity done-yay!)

The above picture was a collaboration between my daughter and I. It is created from Playmais pellets which I absolutely love and you can see more about it from this post. I simply drew a heart on cardboard and had my daughter help stick the pellets on with just a dab of water. My daughter further added her own design beside the heart which I think gave it a nice movement for the piece.

Happy February Everyone!

Construction Paper Play

Every week I have the opportunity to teach a children's art class. Right now, there are only 2 students (Grade 1 & 3) which is perfectly fine with me because that just means I'm able to try a wider variety of lessons since materials for two students wouldn't cost so much.

A recent project I did with them was using construction paper to create 3D sculptures. This was inspired from one of my favourite art teacher blogs, Organized Chaos. In my lesson, I gave the students 5 minutes to draw with markers as many kinds of lines as possible. From these drawings, we talked about the variety of lines (wavy, zigzag, dotted, straight, diagonal, curly, swirly, etc). 

 

Using these drawings as our inspiration, we constructed 3D lines using strips of construction paper. My students loved this idea and had a whole lot of fun constructing a "park" or "skateboard park."

After the success of this lesson, I decided to try it on my almost 3 yr old daughter by just using the strips of paper to make a "park". She seemed to somewhat enjoy it but it required a lot more help in gluing the 3D parts and folding (which meant frustration for my daughter). I would say perhaps this activity might be best left for at least 3.5 year olds but it's worth a try if you're keen on this idea. 

I also found that my husband started making one when he had some father-daughter time :)

3 Cheers

Last night I met up with some old friends to celebrate one of my friend's birthday. I don't know why I'm up at 5:30am this morning...better make good use of this time... Anyway, it's been awhile since I've been out with friends just on my own (my daughter went on a date with her dada-so cute!). We had a whole lot of fun and laughter just going to a Korean restaurant and dessert afterwards.

 This is the simple card I made for my friend.

 

I ended up using an unused clearance stamp I picked up from Micheal's ages ago. The stamp said "Cheers to you" but I just masked out "to you." It was a little tricky trying to stamp straight with a wooden stamp (hence the last cheers being slightly not aligned :( )...Also, I just ran out of the yellow cardstock so this had to do.

 I embossed it and also scored a few underlines. I'd like to enter this card into CAS-ual Fridays' Long & Short challenge this week.

12 Things in 12 Months

During the last week, I was very inspired by the project 365 things in 365 days. This is a project where a couple, Laura and John embark on the challenge of completing 365 things that they have never done together before within the timeframe of 365 days.

With the new year just settling in, I thought I would do something similar but on a much smaller scale. After all, being a mom is not an easy task and doesn't leave too much time for anything else. My idea is to accomplish 12 Things in 12 Months for my personal challenge but I'm hoping to drag my husband into it to complete a couple's 12 Things too.

Here's my list so far but I have a few backup ideas in case one of these don't pull through for whatever reason.

1. Illustrate a book for my daughter

2. Knit a scarf

3. Try a new food every month

4. Sew a piece of clothing for my daughter

5. Hand stitch a glove doll

6. Learn to swim

7. Make photo album of my daughter's 2nd year (plus 1st and newborn year later)

8. Climb the CN Tower

9. Run a race

10. Try pole dancing

11. Open an Etsy shop

12. Play a song fluently on the harp

PlayMais Sculptures

Yesterday my husband kindly drove me to a kids craft store quite a distance away. I was hoping to pick up some student grade watercolour paper for a really good price but unfortunately, it wasn't the quality I expected :(. We did end up picking up some other really neat things (actually my husband picked them out).

One of them is a box of PlayMais. When I first saw them a couple of months ago, I was skeptical so I never even thought about buying them (I thought they looked just like the packaging peanuts you get from delivery boxes plus it costed almost $20 for a box of them). When I started playing with them today with my daughter, I was very wrong about them. They are FABULOUS!  It's 100% biodegradable (made from corn) and very easy to use (a small dab of water sticks them together). The best part is it's non-toxic (I admit that in the past I did try making sculptures with the styrofoam peanuts using glue and they made this funky smell so I knew not to use it again for kids crafts :S).


A dab of water sticks them together. My daughter is almost 3 and it was easy for her to use.

It came with a little plastic butter knife and my daughter loved cutting the PlayMais in half. She said she's making "a cool nut tree."

My husband and I had as much fun with it as my daughter. Here are our collaborative creations :)

I love the hungry caterpillar. My husband made a hamburger tree :D

I'd recommend this product to children almost 3 and up-that includes big children like me ;)

Pay it Forward 2013

Earlier this month, I saw a clever post on Facebook from a past DT colleague, Marjolaine. Since I had trouble getting people to comment on my status on Facebook, I thought I'd bring it to the blogosphere and the creative people here :)

Pay it forward 2013! 

I promise to make something handmade for the first five people who comment. They must in turn post this and make something for the first five who comment on their blog post.

*The rules are it has to be handmade by you, and they must receive it before 2013 ends. You must repost this and pay it forward. 

* It can be something simple!

Please leave your email so I may contact you for shipping details. 

Circle of Moms

I recently discovered Circle of Moms, a website full of information on all topics related to being a mom and an opportunity to connect with other moms from all other the world.

Right now, they have a vote for the Top 25 Creative Moms blog so I thought I'd give my blog a little try in the running. If you enjoy reading my blog, please vote by clicking below or the side bar. 

Thanks! :)

Winter in Disguise

It was such a warm winter day that it felt like Winter was pretending to be Spring today (that's what I told my daughter).  Of course we had to go out for a walk 'cuz if you know me, I dread cold winter days. Even if it's a fake spring day, I'll jump on this opportunity for some outdoor fun with my daughter.

My daughter was super excited about going to the park. Upon arriving at the park, we saw some strange sculptures that I never saw before. I thought the school added a new sculpture so we had to go check it out.

It turns out they were giant snowballs that haven't melted away yet. lol.

That's the oddest thing I've seen.

Then we went to explore the rest of the park and playground.

Isn't this the neatest thing? We had some fun taking turns finding letters.

That's my highlight of the day. Tomorrow I'm back to work. Oh, I'm also finally better from my 3 week flu or whatever it was but it looks like my husband caught it :( Hope he gets better soon.

 Happy Weekend Everyone!