If this is you, you’re not alone! We constantly have friends and family asking us how to adjust for low light or take a better-than-average portrait. A little know-how can get you a long way, so we’ve decided to put together a workshop for the person who’s ready to take the next step and start fiddling with the settings on their cameras.

In our three hours, we’ll cover:
- how your camera operates, including ISO, shutter speed and aperture
- composition and shooting techniques
- an overview of post-processing using Photoshop Elements

In order to ensure the quality of the experience, we’ll be limiting the class to 12 participants. We ask that you bring your camera and the accompanying manual to the workshop. Feel free to bring a laptop if you’d like to follow along during the Photoshop portion, but it is not required.

Saturday, June 26th, 1–4pm
The Wire & Twine Studio (Oxford, OH)
$30/person

Register online to reserve your spot. Hope to see you there!

In an informal poll of my teacher friends, they say you can’t miss with a gift card, so I tend to stick with that, but I feel it’s a bit underwhelming to simply hand over an envelope. So this year, I bought some inexpensive flowering plants and potted them in simple plastic containers. I used these envelopes (purchased at my local craft sore) to write a nice note, taped them to a colorful straw, and tucked a gift card in the envelope. For less than a dollar per gift, plus the cost of the card, I had gifts for all the fantastic educators in our lives.

Hooray for simple solutions!

My sister, Susie, and I ran into this problem time after time. Our children greeted us with the same question in the morning, “What are we doing today?” Sometimes we had an answer, but other times we were at a loss. And we began to think, what if the time we spent with our kids was sometimes played by ear, but other times was a bit more intentional.

With this thought in mind, we began to develop a small curriculum around a subject that interested our kids. Things you could fit in a week or stretch out over the course of a month. This would include various sources, such as books, DVDs, activities, cooking, and outings. Snuggle up with a good movie one day, and hit the road the next, but end the day having learned something new in a fun way. When we tried it out on our own kids we discovered that not only were they entertained and happy, but so were we!

Another aspect to a curriculum is that we attempt to keep them as cost-effective as possible. The week prior to a curriculum, we hop on our local library website and reserve all the books and DVDs. Most of the materials needed for activities can be found around the house. We wanted this to be as easy as possible to prep for.

We thought we’d share our ideas every now and then. Feel free to contribute other ideas and resources!

Our first post? Art! Clearly a huge topic, but a fun one to explore both in practice and in theory.

Dig in and enjoy!

ACTIVITIES

Color Mixing with JELL-O
Color mixing with a twist. Create JELL-O cubes in primary colors and then squish to mix. We ultimately gave up on the plastic bags and just took the whole mess into the bath tub.

Painting with kid-friendly tools
Try using marbles, trucks, or spray bottles.

Food painting
Paint cookies or bagels with food coloring and a brush or food-safe markers.

Kitchen table art show
Spend an hour or so creating fine works of art with whatever media you have on hand, and then create a gallery of work on your kitchen table. Fabricating signage and indicating the artist and title of works always makes it feel much more official.

OUTINGS

The Art Museum
Our art museum is currently free to the public, and with a little planning ahead, we had a docent give us a full hour session tailored specifically to a preschool audience.

Find local art
Charley Harper lived in our neck of the woods, so one day we set out on foot to find one of his murals. When we finally found it, the kids were amazed at its size and complexity. What can you find in your neighborhood?

Have a collaborative messy art party
Why wait for a birthday? Hold a messy art party with friends in a back yard or park, with each family bringing an activity to do with the group.

BOOKS

Art, Patrick McDonnell

The Art Lesson, Tomie dePaola

The Dot, Peter H. Reynolds

Make a World, Ed Emberley

Mona Lisa: The Secret Smile, Letizia Galli

More than Meets the Eye: Seeing Art with All Five Senses, Bob Raczka

Mouse Paint, Ellen Stoll Walsh

Oooh! Matisse, Mil Niepold (also available, Oooh! Picasso)

Tell Me a Picture, Quentin Blake

The Year with Grandma Moses, W. Nikola-Lisa

DVDS

Linnea in Monet’s Garden

Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists Series

Dropping in on Grandma Moses

And so I began searching for a bed and linens that integrated into our play area. Something minimalist and simple, but still fun. And after much searching, I couldn’t find a single thing that I liked. Particularly something gender-neutral. I sighed a lot.

Fast-forward a few years, and I had taken a brief summer course about quilting. I quickly learned that I could never be a traditional quilter. I have the utmost respect for those who have the precision and patience to make all the pieces come together just so. It really is an amazing skill.

But after doing a little hunting around, I discovered there were many folks doing a much more free-form version of quilting, starting with the Quilters of Gee’s Bend and moving on forward. I loved this no-rules kind of quilting. Just throw together some fabrics and run with it.

So I made a few doll quilts, and found they are a joy to produce. If you’ve got a little sewing know-how, you can knock one out in no time.

Of course, this process can be applied to all kinds of things—larger quilts, table runners, bags, etc. I’ve included my process below. I’m sure it would make some more experienced sewers cringe, but, hey, this is how I go about it.

Don’t wish to embark on this crafty journey but would still like a modern doll quilt? I’ve got these two for sale: Birds & Cars

Feeling brave? Grab your fabric, and jump in! After all, it’s small. If you screw it up, you can always start over. Please note, I haven’t included all the minutia, making the assumption that you’ve done a bit of sewing before.

My quilts measure 21″ wide by 18″ tall, a perfect size for this affordable doll bed. Remember to measure your bed to see what size would work best, making sure it’s wide enough to accomodate whomever will be sleeping under it.

As I hunted around, I stumbled upon this template for a three-dimensional model of a volcano, which unfolds to illustrate the inner workings. A few clicks later I discovered I’d stumbled upon Canon’s Creative Park, which offers templates for hundreds of paper models. From dinosaurs to the Taj Mahal, there’s a paper craft for everyone. Some of them are pretty spectacular.

We set to work on building the volcano model. The design is beautiful and the instructions were easy to follow, but this is definitely for those with advanced paper skills and a good chunk of time on their hands.

It took us well over an hour to get it all together. (We’d like to blame our sluggish pace on the fact that in the midst of turning the office upside down, we couldn’t put our hands on a single bottle of glue.) But it was fun diversion, and I think I know far more about volcanos this evening than I did this morning.

One day I had a flash of inspiration when I remembered the drawer organizers I purchased for our closet. I found a few extras in the basement, and I swear, when I installed them, the clouds parted and the sun shone with a brilliance we hadn’t seen in years. Peace and order was restored to the produce, and we declared it good. A very simple way to start the new year just a bit more organized.

It’s isometric!

We start by drawing an object straight up in a vector program, then transform it with the methods below to extrapolate each element. (It’s always a good idea to copy your flat artwork off to the side while you work on the isometric piece. Just in case).

There are several ways to go about this:

The Easy Way (with Illustrator)

If you don’t have Adobe Illustrator or prefer more manual control, fret not.

There are other ways.

The Long Way

So that’s the basics. You can do rectangles and other objects this way. To make a cylinder it’s simply a matter of duplicating a top and bottom piece and connecting them with vertical lines.

BONUS LINKS:

Still using Freehand? See how to make isometric transformations in Freehand
Looking to get more advanced? Check out this extensive tutorial on VectorTuts