Silly Eagle Books

I love crafting with geometric shapes and these teepees were really easy to set up and embellish.

We found inspiration from a vintage golden book illustrated by Leonard Weisgard.

Using mod podge, we glued triangles onto some cardboard from the recycle box and embellished them with paper scraps, jewels, and pine straw.

Perfect quick craft to squeeze in during little sister’s nap time.

A bundle of old newspaper, a thick paint brush, glue and glitter paint, I had collected all the items required to give life to the craft idea in mind. I had placed them high enough on the table so that the troubling little sis would not be able to reach on my raw materials in case she woke up before I finish off with my craft. I knew that she was a terrible sleeper and the faint sound of tearing the newspaper in the far-off room is enough to wake her up from her sleep, no matter how deep it is.

I would have thought about a million other ideas to make this rare free time most fruitful, like going for a ride on my brand new motorcycle, or calling over my best friend and playing with our multi-elemental video game. These things, however, had a cumulative effect on the game and once I start them, it is difficult to stop suddenly if my sis suddenly pops in, the disappointment of stopping them midway will never leave my mind.

The adults should be able to relate to this easily when a sudden troubling call from home spoils their high-energy casino game or the pain caused by the slipping of the best deal in the trade market in a matter of seconds when you attended your family’s call. You will in such a rage when the reason for the call might be the breaking of crockery and you have to patiently listen to their explanation of the event that led to it. You have to show the same seriousness to it with which you read the instructions before starting your trade on a new online robot.

The undesirable break in these activities may force to limit your recreational activity to a magazine scanning or a power nap. My choice is far more creative than this. A quick craft will be easy to finish off before the little mischief appears from nowhere.

🙂

I’m always seeing fun art projects where people use fruits and vegetables as stamps. We decided to get in on the fun for this week’s art project inspired by A Pocketful Of Cricket illustrated by Evaline Ness.

Public ladger known as the blockchain is the place where Bitcoin transactions are stored. These transactions are verified and added to the public ladger and this process is known as Bitcoin mining. This is also the place where new bitcoins are released. To participate in bitcoin mining anyone who has suitable hardware as well as internet access can do so. Compiling recent transactions into the blocks and trying to solve a computationally difficult puzzle is the process involved in mining. The first participate who solves the puzzle gets to place the next block on the blockchain and claim the rewards. Ethereum Code review will explain in detail. Newly released bitcoin as well as transaction fees that are associated with the transaction compiled in the block encourages mining.

Block reward is the number of new bitcoins released with mined block. Every 4 years the block reward is halved. This is every 210,000 block reward. In the initial days the block reward was 50 which was in 2009, by 2014 it had become 25 and said to be decreasing even further. This decreasing block reward result in a total release of bitcoins that are said to approach 21 million

Solving Puzzles Involved In Mining

How hard it is going to be to solve the puzzle depends on how much effort is being put into mining across the network. Every 2016 block by the protocol the difficulty of mining is adjusted, which is roughly every 2 weeks. The aim of adjusting the difficulty by itself is to achieve the rate of block discovery constant.

Juliet became captivated by this “sweet and sour” apple tree (one side grows sweet apples, the other sour) and has been asking if we could make it together.

For our stamps, we used a grape cut in half (for the apples) and a few gardenia leaves in various sizes from our garden (for the apple tree leaves.) The trunk is cut from wood grained contact paper.

As she was stamping, Juliet was suddenly inspired to try out another art medium–her chalk pastels….

So she ended up with two fall apple pieces.

There are so many great apple books. Two of my favorites are:

Do you have any plans for apple-picking, apple pie baking or apple crafting this fall?

Can you stand another peacock craft this week? I promise it’s the last one. This is actually the craft that started it all.

After reading Counting Birds by Alice Melvin, Juliet asked if we could make “peacock fans.” Not one to turn down a craft request, I set on a quest to find some doilies to use as the fan.

I looked everywhere (and by “everywhere” I mean the dollar store and walmart), but couldn’t find any round paper doilies. I ended up pulling out my Valentines box from the garage where I knew we had some paper heart ones left over from February.)

We just pulled out our water colors and went to town. The process was a lot like painting coffee filters–the doily just soaks up the paint and it kind of spreads and blends nicely.

After they dried, we glued on a giant popsicle stick and a paper body and head. A googly eye and feather on top finished him off. (Juliet’s is pink–again, at her request.) A nice pink P makes it educational.

Well, the P can stand for anything. You can take that for peacock, or just pink. This is just like the usage of the symbol R for a robot which helps you to trade online but doesn’t actually stand as the standard acronym for the same.

Why do want to create such a symbolic imprint on your item? One, it may be to show our possession or to produce an effect of fashion as a style icon. Second, it may help in creating a kind of authenticity to the item, like the bar code or standardization mark on regular household appliances. When the robot is standardized, we are less worried about using it to play with our money.

How else will we console ourselves that the platform we are using can do justice to our money? Reading reviews will help in some way or the other, as they often conclude by saying that Ethereum Code is not a scam, and many of us do take that statement into account. The name and presentation of the software also matter to us, like a long fancy name may catch our attention, but not our trust. At the same time, a small yet symbolic letter may be enough to reveal a sense of security with the item in other cases.

🙂

I used mine as a plant stake.

Ever the lady, Juliet’s been using her as a fan. 🙂

Linking to Strut your stuff!

Juliet is a huge Rapunzel fan, so we made this toy together this weekend.

To create forex trading strategy the traders must see how big each position is so that they can control the risk that they have taken for each individual trade. The entry point must be decided very carefully. It is better that the trader develops some certain rules that will govern when we should enter a long position and when to enter short position for the given currency pair. In a similar manner the exit point also must have certain set of rules which will help them in telling when to exit a long or short position. Along with this it will also help them to get out of a losing position. You can click here to read more about trading. Selecting the right execution technologies, the traders will be able to understand how to buy and sell more appropriately. Having a set of rules for this as well will help the traders.

Usually, I get craft inspiration from books, but this time we took our cues from this gorgeous Heather Ross fabric from a pillow in Lucia’s nursery.

All you need is a paper towel tube, a toothpick, some pretty paper, and glue or tape. Oh, yes. And glitter. Lots of glitter.

Juliet applied the glue and we wrapped the paper around the tube. Then, we formed the tower roof by tracing a large circle onto a piece of paper and then cutting out a triangle from it. (Then we glued it into a cone.)

While it dried, we fashioned a flag with a toothpick and some paper.

After it dried completely, I cut the window hole with a craft knife. Then Juliet applied the shutters. She also took the opportunity to sprinkle glitter on the roof. (Because it’s not really craft time until you dump an entire container of glitterall over the floor.)

My original plan was to make a clothespin Rapunzel doll complete with flowing yarn hair–but we discovered this cardboard cutout from the package of a Tangled toy and thought she fit perfectly.

Aside from the Tangled book that we own, the only other Rapunzel book we’ve read is Falling For Rapunzel.

I’d love to happen upon a copy of this little golden book version: Rapunzel: Classic Fable  by Marianna Mayer. But no luck so far.

If you are looking for some more options, Brimful Curiosities has a great list and detailed reviews of several Rapunzel books.

Georgia has some serious skills when it comes to bottle cap art! Aren’t these animals adorable? Inspired by some Juliet and I made a while ago, she made these into cards. (What a great idea!)

She has a few others that she made that are just as cute–I especially love her caterpillar version. It’s perfect for Very Hungry Caterpillar craft.

The penguin reminds me of Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World and the fish would be cute for One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish  (remake the cover with bottle cap fish?)

How cute are the sequin bubbles? I think that is such a clever idea. 🙂

Check out the rest of her animals on her blog Love and Lollipops. Thanks again for sharing these with me, Georgia!

If you haven’t yet, there’s still time to enter my jewelry giveaway!

So, we’re still on our popsicle stick kick. Here’s what inspired us.

A great way of learning numbers as well as reading is by having a counting book. Learning math can go anywhere if you just carry one such counting book with yourself where ever you go. You can have counting books that illustrate area of a field which means that these books start off with a single picture which will count as one and in the next page they will add another picture that matches the previous one which will count as 2 and in the third page another picture and so on. This help the kids in future if they want to trade and learn Via Top 10 Binary Demo

Another type of book to learn counting which is useful for different age group of kids is having a book which has 2 levels of math in a single page. There is simple counting of animals and addition of numbers whose result will show the number of animals.

There is a counting book which has a person who travels around the world collects souvenirs. Now counting this souvenir will help in learning numbers, and also about the country’s culture and values because each souvenir has printed on it that particular country’s information. This is a perfect combination for small and big kids.

Another great book for toddlers is a book that has counting animals which involve different types of noises they make, since kids will love to make the same noises and learning becomes fun.

Having accounting book which has rhyming sentences written in the form of a story which illustrates about a shop and the number of people who visit it keeps increasing. First only one person arrives in the first page then in the second page one person more is included and so on. It not only helps in accounting but also has a hidden message which says there is always room for everyone.

One Some Many by Martha Jocelyn and Tom Slaughter is a gorgeous counting book.

Slaughter is an acclaimed artist whose works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art. I love the bright colors–so inspiring. In fact, Juliet started making pencils and ended up painting a picture of a flower and a bee from another page in this book.

We turned them into magnets. (Just like the ones from yesterday.)

We’ve been reading a bunch of “back to school books”. This is an illustration from A Pocketful of Cricket by Rebecca Caudill (illustrated by Evaline Ness).


The Rattlesnake Who Went to School is another fun one for back-to-school.

Do you have any favorites to recommend?

Linking to link and learn,

I saw a picture of some painted popsicle stick magnets on flickr (via the crafty crow) and have been wanting to make them for awhile. Juliet and I finally got around to working on them this past week.

There are a lot of things that you can recycle and make something useful from them either decorative item or something that you can use to store similar to this robot about which we got information straight from the source. Popsicle sticks are one such recyclable thing. One of the things that you can do using this popsicle sticks are

• Make A Geometric Shelf: This is a hexagon shape shelf and to make this you will require

1. Popsicle sticks, 100 in number
2. Any type of glue but tacky glue is most preferred
3. Paint brush
4. Wax stain
5. Photo hanger which is optional
6. A template to make hexagon shape shelf.

Start off by adding a drop of glue to both the ends of the sticks and lay them on the alternate lines of the template. Lay 3 more sticks on the glued ends of the sticks. Continue layering and gluing until your hexagon shelf is so deep that you can place whatever you want in it. Once the glue is dried using a brush apply the stain making sure you even cover the gaps in between. Once this is dried glue a picture hanger so that you can hang it and your hexagon shelf is ready.

We had a lot of fun painting designs–there was no real rhyme or reason to it.

A little magnetic strip on the back (the kinds with a sticky backing) turned them into fridge art.

They ended up being really fun to play with–Juliet has enjoyed making them into shapes and patterns.

I had a few extra and I thought it would be fun to write some messages on them. I envisioned dropping them into Juliet’s lunchbox once school starts up again. (You know, instead of writing a note on a napkin, write it on a popsicle stick!) I also wrote a few to send to our sponsored kids.

I love the idea of her slowly growing a collection of these “I love you sticks” and keeping them in a stash in her room somewhere. Hopefully, they’ll encourage her on the days when she needs an uplifting word or two.

They are the perfect size and they feel substantial in your hand. I like that it’s something tangible that she can hold onto and feel my love for her even when we are apart. (Kind of like the mommy doll we made last year, but it fits in her pocket a bit more easily.)

I’m telling you, popsicle sticks are really fun! They might be my new favorite craft staple. Do you have any fun popsicle stick projects that you love?

I came across this post about Montessori-style library baskets at The Sleepytime Gal the other day and have been inspired to declutter and rearrange our own library space.

There are a lot of ways to arrange the bookshelf which depends on how many books you have, just like you have lot of trading software which you can discover more here. If you have too many books it is always better that you have a separate room for this and make it like a library with shelves where you can arrange your books according to your will. You can use this option in case you are home schooling your kids which will need a lot of space that too if you have more than 1 kids.

If you are a bookworm and have been collecting books from a very long time you would have figured out a way to keep the books well arranged. When we consider arranging books one must be oh so well organised person and must enjoy to elaborate the home library or school library. There are few tips which you can follow to organise your home library or school library.

• if you are running a day-care as well as a school you need not worry much about the books used for toddlers. It is always better to keep toddler and baby books at the lowermost shelf so that they can reach them and choose what they want. You can also use baskets to keep books instead of shelf.
• It is always better not to label the books because nowadays all books come with labelled covers. Not labelling will come in handy when you are willing to resell or donate them because they will be in excellent condition. Apart from this it is important that you teach the kids how to handle the books so that they are not torn and well maintained.

We have the very same Ikea Expedit bookshelf, the same baskets, and many of the same books and toys. Yet ours is nowhere nearly as functional because it is more of a “place to keep things” rather than a place to learn things.

Nicole has chosen to organize interesting books and toys in a way that is appealing to her children and in a way that lets them discover them on their own.

I love taking a peek into her baskets–she has several–and seeing which books she has inside. I’ve already added several to my library list.

So, I am resolved to tackle our bookcase and toy baskets very soon. I’ll try to take some before and after pictures to show you.

How do you encourage learning and discovery in your home?

Juliet’s been asking to do the old baking soda/vinegar volcano trick lately, so we finally went outside and gave it a go. (The first time we tried it in the kitchen and yeah, that was messy!)

All the kids are very amused with this very old experiment of using baking soda and vinegar for creating volcano eruption. This experiment takes about 3 minutes to prepare and so does registering for this software, you can learn even more here. It makes Use of 6 ingredients which are commonly available in every household and it does not create any mess as well.

The Ingredients You Will Require Are

1. Plastic cup. You can use water bottle, Sippy cups as well.
2. Water
3. Minimum 3-4 tablespoon of baking soda. Use more tablespoon of baking soda to make it more foamy.
4. One tablespoon of dishwashing soap
5. 1/2 oz to 2 oz of washable paint of your desired colour
6. One cup of vinegar to start the eruption.

Choose a location that has sand, dirt or gravel. For the base ingredients put some water inside the plastic cup. Fill it about three fourth then the baking soda, dishwashing soap and paint. Mix all these base ingredients together and make a small mountain inside which you can place this plastic cup. Just give a good stir before adding the last ingredient and then it’s time for eruption. Pour in the vinegar until it starts foaming over which will start pouring out and seem like lava erupting out of the rocks.

I dug up some old toiletry caps, let her fill them with baking soda and then we covered them with cupcake liners. (Why not, right?)

It leant the caps more of a “volcano-ish” feel, so we went for it. Ripping small holes in the tops allowed space for the vinegar to go in and the lava to come out.

The effect was quite dramatic–baking soda and vinegar never disappoint! The nice thing about the caps is that they contained the baking soda nicely and allowed Juliet to continue pouring more and more vinegar to bring on more and more lava.

The fun would probably still be going on if we hadn’t run out of vinegar.

An unexpected piece of fun for Juliet was the varying sizes of the caps–this gave her a small, medium, and large volcano which she enjoyed comparing to one another. As in, “Okay, now it’s the small’s turn! Wow–that’s good. Okay, now it’s the largest one’s turn! Woo-hoo!”

Good cheap fun on a hot summer day. 🙂

This project was inspired by the “Earth” book we got in a chik-fil-a kids meal. Now we are looking for these:

Time For Kids: Volcanoes!

The Best Book of Volcanoes

Volcanoes (Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2)

Any volcano favorites to share with us?

You need to find some of these buttons with the one hole on the back (not sure what they are called.) We just looked through our button stash and found some. This part is perfect for a four year old as looking through the button box is an activity in its own right.

Next, I cut out some flower shapes from some scrapbook paper. Juliet matched up which button would go with which flower.

I cut a slit in the middle and asked Juliet to place the button in it. This proved too difficult for her tiny fingers. But maybe a 5 or 6 year old could do it.

Next, cut slits around the petals–just define about 5 or 6 petals. The kitty was very interested in this part.

After cutting the slits, Juliet bent and crumpled the petals so they curled up.

Lastly, I threaded some ribbon through the hole and we had bracelets and necklaces. Juliet asked if she could wear one–so, I may not be getting any for Mother’s day….

I found that a few of the buttons could accommodate a bobby pin, so we made a few hairpins, too. I wanted to take a picture of a bracelet, but couldn’t tie one on with one hand. Juliet hasn’t learned how to tie yet, and the cat, well, she was all paws.

So, sorry. But they do look cute around the wrist as well. 🙂

Linking to: Show and Tell, Trash to Treasure, Amaze me August, We Play, Get Your Craft On, Making Monday Marvelous, Just Something I whipped up,