A couple of crafts Varun and I did recently as part of craft projects in school:
A paper bag:
A shirt made from chart paper
… with Cricket and the Cricketer Ashwin, everything gets painted blue. Including a school project. The convo went thus:
Varun: Amma, I’ve got to make a t-shirt from a chart. Need your help.
Me: Done. I’ll do the sketching.
Varun: Okay. A round-neck t-shirt, Okay?
Me: Can we do one with a cute collar?
Varun: No ma. You just draw the shape and cut. I’ll do the ‘detailing’. (he said that!)
Me: Alright. What ‘details’ are you going to add.
Varun: I have an idea. You first cut the shape.
I draw the outline, and cut the shape. And then this chap brings out the model t-shirt and takes my help with fine-tuning his drawing. We finally end up adding a collar too because the model t-shirt has one:)
And here is output:
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Varun attended a terracotta craft workshop for kids the weekend that just went by. Here are some wonders he created and will surely feature in our Golu next year. Thanks to Suja Shrikanth for teaching this amazing craft to the kids.
Much to the mommy’s chagrin, the little man fancies guns among other things. He also thinks shooting is kinda cool 😦 When I try and make him see how it is all wrong, he is quick to clarify that there is good shooting and bad shooting. When police aims at the thieves or the ‘bad mens’, it is good shooting. When ‘bad mens’ shoot police or at the ‘good peoples’, well , it is bad shooting. Phew!
The sacrifice mommy has made so far includes a brand new Oriflame kajal stick. The kajal now adorns the walls as ‘black- arts’, and the case is now a part of the many pieces of random objects that go into assembling a gun. Yes, he has taken a fancy to making guns, mostly using clothes clips, pen caps, twigs, legos, et al. Here are some pics of what he created. Mommy now thinks guns need not always be lethal, but can just be beautiful.
Long pending. So bombarding you folks with them :
Ganesha- Drawing by yours truly (don’t smirk now!), colouring, the little fellow. The kids were asked to color a Ganesha pic during Ganesh Chathurti. So this:
Some wax crayon colourings he did in the class. Ever since, he’z been insisting that cakes MUST be like this, colour and all!:
This one is my favorite. A catterpillar craft he did in school:
Sharing a school craft after a very long time! Varun’s class was asked to do a ‘corn on cob’ craft on an A4 sheet and this is what we did.
Materials used: Yellow oil paper, A4 sheet, glue, Green color pencils
Just rolled tiny strips of yellow oil paper for the corn kernels. Varun and I stuck them on to a drawing of corn. Varun started out with a lot of promise and mid-way ditched the sticking effort. He colored the leaf though:)
What you think about these art works by my colleagues?
By colleague K: Guess the objects in these pics. Besides the coolers of course!
By colleague A: He did this for a modern Christmas theme contest in his Church. It measures around 8 ft. in length- nose to tail!!! Loved it! What say you people? See, am surrounded by creative people:)
Its a sin if you don’t contribute anything to your cubicle’s creativity or at least make an attempt. So signing off with this humble drawing by yours truly around the laptop-lock-hole on my desk to avoid yawing post a heavy lunch- meant to be a ‘kaala-tika/dhristi pottu’ for above arts:
Wish you all a happy, rocking year ahead!!
We made a couple of cards and puppets. The cards were easy to make and took less than 15 minutes each. Vyas took a little longer to cut out the puppet shapes, but did that fully on his own.. Seems like a nice craft for the age group 5 to 9..
Flower:
Materials used: Shells of pistachios for the petals, green grams for the leaves, yellow mustard seeds for the pollen, a thread colored green for the stalk (did not have a green thread, so colored it) . Just stuck all these together using fevicol glue.
Ice cream:
Materials used: Pencil shaves for the ice cream scoops, a small piece of yellow scrap paper for the cup.
Puppets: Lion and the Frog
Materials used: Paper plates, a night-bulb carton, crayons for coloring
Vyas drew the faces of a lioness and a frog onto a paper plate. Colored and cut the shapes and ‘dug’ holes for the eyes. Then glued a strip each cut from the carton for the puppet handle….
There was an another card that Vyas made using the pencil shaves and he’d written : HAPPY EX-DEPENDENCE DAY! on it. Whatever that is!! He put it away somewhere and scooted to his cousin’s place last night. Could not find it in the ‘possible’ holes, so no pics:-( Now, over to Shruti!
Vyas and his classmate Teju had to represent their class for an inter-class competition in a general assembly and each had to come up with a chart in keeping with the theme of a poem. He was informed just 2 days before the event which was a very short notice and it was in the mid of the week. And as usual, our man forgot to tell me about it. He remembered the day before the event and called me up saying I must buy a chart on my way home. He wouldn’t tell me why and what he had put on the chart. Just that he had to do it for a poem. I could not think up any ideas as he wouldn’t give me any further information.
I reached home at around 8.00 PM with a chart paper and asked him to recite the poem to help me think up some ideas. It happened to be a prayer thanking God for all the niceties in life! I asked him what we were supposed to do. “Something ma. Let us make it simple. Let’s draw the night, the morning, and a person being kind to somebody, and just some kids playing”. “And haaaannn, also someone eating or sleeping”. And he calls that ‘simple’. As usual, with Varun around, there was no way we could roll out the chart on the floor or open a color pencils box. He loves to ‘contribute’ that way! He will exactly choose such days to stay awake well past his bedtime. Thatha is the default savior during such a crisis. Having locked up thatha and Varun in thatha’s bedroom, we settled down to start on the project.
More ideas kept coming from the man like I should have got a blue colored chart or a white one instead of yellow. I could have thought of buying 2 -3 colors, including a black chart. Would have been easier to represent the night! Thank you. It was 10.30 PM and he was yawing away and a lot of effort went into keeping his eyes open. By this time, I had the picture encyclopedia, digest, comics, storybooks, a dozen random stuff spread around me for ideas. I cannot draw anything ‘extempore’, especially when there is a deadline! And here he was ushering me to draw a thin outline fast and that he would color it. I asked him to go to bed and let me ‘think’ and come up with something. “Are you sure ma?” asked the cheeky fellow, too glad for the offer despite my earlier warning. So, off he went and hit the bed.
After rummaging through half-a-dozen books for ideas, came up with this. It was 1.45 AM when I finished and was still not sleepy:). It is not professional I know but thoroughly enjoyed doing it and was certified -SUPER by my son. And he happily passed on the credit to his mom when his teacher asked him!! Now how can I stay away from such opportunities? Tell me!
PS: The title of this post was the title on the chart and is the only connection to the post!
My son Vyas isn’t the ‘crafty’ kind and used to run away from crayons when he was in kindergarten classes! Somehow, he seems to be enjoying artsy-craftsy and has been volunteering to do the coloring all by himself:)
So here is to ‘Shruti -aunty’ from Vyas- a candle stand made out of coconut shell and another small painted mutka (pot) after licking away the last bit of Malai Kulfi in it:)
Candle Stand
What is South Indian cooking (specially Tamilnadu and Kerala) without coconuts? Two shells made it to our shelf instead of the dust-bin this time.
Procedure:
1. Two empty shells scrapped cleaned from inside and outside. My MIL grated the coconut and handed out the empty shells of different sizes. But the coconuts would not break into two neat halves just when you want them to! I dipped the shells in water and scrapped the outer surface using a peeler. Did not know a better way of doing it and no time to google!
2. Vyas colored the inside and outside of both the shells, one with green and the other with brown. I’d planned to put on metallic colors but the darling had left the bottles half open after previous use and what I found in the bottles were just the cakes!
3. I stuck the two shells using M-Seal!.
4. The rangoli like design on the shells is by me. I used fabric color with glue to paint the design.
The Mutka
Vyas insisted on coloring it red (fabric color) despite the color choices! Ne’er mind. The end product did look good:) Again, I made that flower design using M-seal and colored the leaves green and the buds yellow. Wanted to put some colored twigs with flowers made of sharpened pencil remains, but no time.
The final products
life under the sky 