Making the Woozy and the Sawhorse

These are two of Calvin's favorite characters from the original Oz series by L. Frank Baum and ever since I'd ordered the hand painted wood dolls from Fancie Fannies I'd been trying to think of a way to make these two critters come to life as well. These ideas came to me at the last minute, mostly because at that point I was forced to actually do something or give in. I made the Woozy last night (the night before the party) and the Sawhorse this morning while Calvin and his dad were out shopping for the party food. I am very pleased wtih them, and Calvin absolutely loved them.

The Woozy

He's a blue blocky character. Actually, he's described as being made entirely of squared off shapes, right down to his tail, on which he has exactly three hairs. I bought blue foam letters on clearance at Joann's and cut them to size using a kitchen knife. I joined the pieces together with toothpicks, adding a dab of hot glue to hold them. I painted on the eyes, nose, ears, and pink inside the mouth, and used a needle and thread to add his three tail hairs. When finished I gave the whole creature a good coating of Modge Podge. Voila—Woozy!

The Sawhorse

I raided the kindling pile for a few appropriately sized sticks. I used small saw to cut the body size. The first cuts for the mouth I also made with the saw, but I finished the mouth by whittling with a craft knife. The tail and legs I selected and cut to size and whittled their tips down to points. I used a drill to make holes in the body and inserted the limbs, using a dab of wood glue in each. I painted his eyes on and then coated him in a large helping of Modge Podge as well. The bridle was made with floss and the ears with felt.

Voila—Sawhorse! Shown here with Jack Pumpkinhead, painted by Fancie Fannies.

Construction paper mosaics

We've been wending our way through ancient Rome these past many weeks, and with all the rain clouding our days recently we've taken to the craft room more than we usually do during spring and summer. Or actually, this week's mosaic making found us on the kitchen floor where it was not only flat, but also more naturally lit right next to the sliding door (and these were very dark days indeed).

I had asked Calvin to go through our library books on Ancient Rome and pick out some fun activities. Mosaics were one of the things that had caught his eye. The book directions were for using clay, and some day we'd like to try that, but this time we created a fish mosaic of construction paper, cut into relatively equal squares with a paper cutter, adhered to poster board by glue stick. Calvin penciled in the design first while I started cutting squares. He found that it was easier to apply the glue to the poster board than to the small squares (less glue on the fingers that way, he says, although not by much). He glued small areas, then affixed as many squares as needed to cover that glue, then moved on to the next small area. I did most, but not all, of the cutting, and his favorite part was using the tiny scraps from specifically cut shapes to fill in gaps.

This was a three day project, mostly because all that cutting and gluing gets very tedious, and it was a great way to spend a few really crummy days.

Ancient Rome—clay face pots

Okay, ours weren't clay. When Calvin brought me the book that he'd been reading about ancient Rome and said that he wanted to make "these face pots" all we had in the house was playdough, both homemade and store bought, so that's what we used. It's a matter of making it up as we go along, isn't it?

Clay face pots have been found mostly in British Roman ruins and are believed to have had a religious purpose. Many have been found with ashes in them. That's about all I can tell you about them right now, except that Calvin found them interesting and wanted to give them a try.

Obviously play dough was not the best choice for this, and we'll probably give this another try in the future with real honest-to-goodness clay, but the upside to starting with play dough was getting to do it over, and over, and over again by squishing and rebuilding, squishing and rebuilding.

The big pot was made with mostly homemade play dough, which wasn't as firm and didn't keep its shape as well, plus it was the first. The smaller, more colorful pot was the last pot made, after much practice, and is one we made together. I rolled all the blue and I made the mouth while Calvin assembled and did all the other rolling and mashing and shaping.

I think they were both adorable, and now they're both blobs of dough again waiting to be remade or made into something else.

Egyptian volcanoes

It has been a really long time since I shared any of Calvin's art, or really anything at all in this space other than book reviews. I wish I could say that was just a matter of not posting, but actually we haven't done much art as of late—we've been reading a lot of and playing make-believe, but other than that we've been outside and most of our activities have just been general day to day things that I've written about in the journal. I've been trying to sort out how I'll use this space on the site now that I use the journal space so much more, and so much more inclusively. Right now it's becoming mostly a book review site, and we're even in a transition on that front. Now that Calvin reads so much more on his own we are going through our read alouds more slowly and in the past I've only asked him to write reviews on the read alouds. Though we usually talk about the books he's read after he finishes them, and sometimes he still reads to me, he's not excessively fond of writing reviews so I haven't asked him to do so more often than before. So that leaves us with the weekly bookshelf post, lots of my own book reviews, and a handful of Calvin's for right now. But I have other plans in the works. I think we just go in spurts, that's all.

And today Calvin has some art to share. He specifically asked for these to be posted here. These drawings are a result of a rediscovery of the Egyptian hieroglyph stamps and a still active fascination with volcanoes. Note his creation of hieroglyphs for "volcano" and "dangerous lava", or so he tells me they mean.

Arbor Day sketches

Yesterday being Arbor Day we did a lot of talking about trees—about how they invite wildlife to our yard, about how they provide us with shade, about how they clean our air and beautify our space—and we did a lot of looking at trees, too, so we decided to try sketching them. With lead and colored pencils in hand we set up our chairs in the front yard and started sketching. In her illustrated version of Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, Susan Jeffers wrote about growing up with her artist mother, about learning from a young age that shadows are not simply black, that the tea kettle on the stove was not a solid color after all, the reflection in it not merely a rectangle. What we actually see is difficult to commute onto our paper, and to get started we first have to see. To actually see. We talked about shapes—is a tree really a ball on a stick? We talked about colors—is a trunk really brown? I haven't sketched like that since my days of wildlife observation in college, but it was something I always loved and it felt special to share it. We had a good time.