Crafts for the Uncrafty

So Fishy: A(nother) Valentine’s Day Solution For Last-Minute Moms

February 8, 2017

Remember Monday's post about potato-stamp Valentine's Day cards? The ones you can make with your kids minus the miserable stroll through the craft-store aisles? The inspiration behind it was what you see here: my daughter was napping and all of a sudden my son announced that he was willing to make Valentines for his classmates, and I had exactly two seconds to conceive of a doable plan before losing him to the living room rug, where the epic battle between Mini Cons and random dragon figurines that my mother bought at the Met had finally been put on pause for a moment.

And so this is what I decided to do: help him make school (of fish! whee, puns!)-themed Valentines that ticked all of my personal boxes: inexpensive (check), easy (check), witty (eh, sort of), and (seemingly) original (checkity check check check).

(It is not lost on me that I have an addiction to parentheticals. Moving on.)

Crafts for the Uncrafty

Potato-Stamp Valentines: A DIY For Procrastinators (Like Me)

February 6, 2017

What's more fun than painting potatoes? NOTHING.

My feeling about Valentine's Day, in a nutshell: I want to be all "Ooh! A teachable moment wherein my child can learn the value of giving and receiving love, albeit via paper cutouts!" But I also do not want to put any real effort into the Valentine's Day-celebrating process, because few things are less fun than dragging two children through Rite Aid in search of something - anything - that doesn't have a picture of a Minion and "You're One In A Minion!" written on it.

Regardless of your personal attitude towards Valentine's Day, here is a fact: When you have a kindergartener, you have to help him or her make and distribute Valentines, because that's in the contract you sign when you procreate. Fortunately for the begrudgingly-participatory Valentine's Day celebrators among us, I have a friend named Mollie who is about as interested in fussy DIYs as I am...and yet seems to be always creating beautiful things. When I want to look like a crafty genius (but don't want to, you know, try too hard), it is Mollie to whom I turn - and so it only made sense to ask her to start publishing her (actually completely for-real accessible) ideas to RG.

Crafts for the Uncrafty

Pom-Pom Pinecone Ornaments

December 7, 2016

Remember the crafting ~~afternoon~~ disaster I wrote about last week? It wasn't entirely unsuccessful. There was one craft that turned out so beautifully that we're actually planning on going back and revisiting it tomorrow, because pom-pom pinecone ornaments are so cute that I kiiiind of need to make baskets of them.

Crafts for the Uncrafty

Crafting With Rabid Monkeys

December 1, 2016

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Erin asked if I wanted to set up a crafting afternoon for our kids, so they could make gifts for their grandparents (and anyone else who might prefer a fingerpainted snowman to, say, a Dyptique candle, which would be no one, but that's besides the point). We started a Pinterest board to find projects that seemed doable without looking too much like...you know...crafts. Our goal was to make things that the recipients might actually enjoy, as opposed to things that they feel obligated to display in perpetuity because said thing was made by a child.

This entire post is going to come with a massive caveat, and the caveat is this: If you have children under the age of...I don't know, I've only been a parent for five years. At what age do children start sitting still? Five-year-olds don't, in any case. So here's the caveat: if you have kids aged five or under and decide to make a fucking wind chime, please be aware that you will end up being the one making it. (My five-year-old did, in fact, bead his very own wind chime strand...and then picked it up to show it to me, at which point all the beads fell off, transforming a happy crafting afternoon into a trauma likely to halt further beading experiments for two years, at minimum. Because that is what happens when you try to force a five-year-old to make a fucking wind chime.) (My two-year-old, in contrast, applied herself with spectacular concentration and perseverance. Except what she was concentrating on and persevering in was ensuring that every single piece of berry bunny cereal, including the ones she dropped on the floor, were eaten.)

Crafts for the Uncrafty

The Season Of Lazy Is Upon Me

October 4, 2016

bohemian outfit for a renaissance faire with wings

Bag (similar) | Skirt | Blouse (similar)

The overt purpose of this photograph, taken at last weekend's Renaissance Faire, is to show you the wings that I am wearing. But before we get to that, I think that you should be aware that as relatively serene as I appear in this image, approximately five minutes after this was taken our daughter commenced what was literally - LITERALLY - the most epic meltdown she has ever had. And she is two years old, so we're talking about a serious achievement.

See, what happened was that we did nothing at all, and this made her so furious that she decided to do a sort of full-body whiplash-thing while cracking her skull against my eye socket and chin (over and over) while I tried desperately to calm her via the delivery of things with sugar in them and an uncomfortably loud public rendition of Part Of Your World, and while passers-by looked on in what was unquestionably horror mixed with intense judgment of our parenting skills.

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