Content Versus Skill Level

Over the past several weeks, I've been puzzled by the craft selections for some of our Saturday morning "Kids Club" projects.

At its best, Kids Club is a lot of fun. Pay a couple of bucks, let your kid get creative for a half-hour, possibly meet new friends, and at the end of it they'll have a craft they can show-and-tell, give as a gift, or keep for themselves. They may have even learned a new skill in the process.

At its worst, any one-size-fits-all children's craft program can be an exercise in frustration.

As any parent or teacher will tell you, the key to a successful kids craft is providing interesting content at an appropriate skill level. That's not always as straightforward as it seems — especially for "drop-in" teachers and leaders who are not acquainted with your individual child's development level.
(This is why, when suggesting appropriate craft kits and supplies, I always tell parents, "The ages listed are guidelines: you know your own child's development level and attention span best." It's also why planning a craft that spans a large range of ages and development levels (our Kids Club is aimed at ages 3-12) is a considerable challenge.)

The challenge I've seen over the early part of October has been a mismatch between content and skill level. We've been pushing licensing relationships with Sprout and Disney Junior, whose progamming is aimed at the preschool set. The crafts we've featured included cutting out a number of very small pieces of felt, foam, and cardboard, and sticking them together in a very specific order — a skillset better suited towards pre-teens or older. As expected, the content drew only preschoolers and kindergarteners. The parents ended up doing most of the drawing and cutting, while the kids quickly got bored (even with Vampirina scenes to color in). The craft took the parents more than a half-hour to complete.

Thankfully, our child-friendly events aren't limited to Kids Club. Most recently, we had a couple of slime events, a pumpkin-decorating event, and a Hallowe'en T-shirt painting event. While these were meant for all ages, it was mostly kids participating with parents looking on and helping when needed. Corporate templates given as jump-off points were ignored beyond my introduction of them, and creativity was completely unleashed. Last month's two-hour Emoji Cupcake Decorating class, aimed at adults, was a largely parent-child bonding event, with everyone riffing after the original three emojis (heart eyes, poop, and crazy) were completed. Our annual Gingerbread House event is similar. The keys to success are a match of content (kid friendly) with skill level, and parental involvement.

To Fabric-Medium or Not to Fabric Medium?

Our local Michaels decided that rather than have folk create detailed costumes to a theme such as Alice in Wonderland (2013) or The (Steampunk) Wizard of Oz, we would focus our 2017 Halloween effort on something simple: Emoji T-shirts. This follows on the popularity of emojis: last month, we had a very popular "Emoji Cupcake" class, and Emoji versions 5.0 through 5.2 have been making their way into mobile devices and computer operating systems throughout the summer and fall.

Most of our T-shirt decorating events — we had two this month — tend to have a strong painting component to it. Mostly, we use regular craft acrylic paints such as the CraftSmart paints we sell for about $0.70 per two-ounce bottle, with nothing added. Since most of our T-shirts are wear-once items, the cardboard feel of painted cloth and the durability of the design is not an issue — but for those with a longer expected lifespan, there are techniques for making the painted fabric more flexible and, well, washable. These involve using more expensive paints designed for use on fabric, adding "fabric medium" to regular acrylic paints, and/or heat-setting the painted designs.

[A side note for those of us who are not avid painters: "mediums" are materials added into acrylic paints to change their texture, appearance, and properties. "Gloss" mediums make paints glossy; "matte" mediums remove their shine; "slow-dry" mediums extend a paint's drying time; "crackle" mediums give the finished item a cracked and aged appearance.]

For the most part, I've not had success with fabric medium. Then again, it wasn't until reading the instructions on the fabric mediums we sell that I learned I needed to heat set the painted fabric to activate its effects. While I remain skeptical about the flexibility of craft-project paint (as opposed to professional silkscreen-printing fabric paint), I was (largely) diligent about adding it to the three T-shirts I created for our Halloween dress-up. (FWIW, I did two different fake emojis — a portmanteau of "Star Struck" and "Person With Headscarf", and a World Diabetes Day version of "Face With Open Mouth and Cold Sweat" — and a T-shirt version of our mobile app just for fun.) The portmanteauji made it through the wash with little damage, but my Michaels app cracked and lost much of its top paint layer, despite the using fabric medium according to package directions, and some of the dimensional fabric paint stuck to itself and had to be peeled off. (That said, the areas that felt most like cardboard before washing came out less stiff and minimally damaged. They were also the areas that were heat treated almost to the point of burning.)

Portmanteauji Detail -
after washing
(heat-treated)

App Shirt Detail:
White-on-Red cracking, paint loss
after washing

Dimensional Paint damage
after washing

Gray-over-White and Red-on-White
paint loss (non-heat-set)
Dark Red over Red consistency
(heat-set) after washing

While I'm debating whether or not to touch up the failed parts of that T-shirt, I'm very much wondering about how one's choices of paints, fabric medium, and proportions of one to the other affect a T-shirt project that one might actually want to have a life beyond the washing machine. I'm in the process of gathering materials to do a "sampler" T-shirt that should (hopefully) give me some answers.

What's This "Slime" Thing All About?

If you've been anywhere around primary-school children this past year, you've heard them wax poetic about slime.

We're not talking here about the oozing texture of decomposing vegetables, but a complex colloid usually* made from copious amounts of white or clear glue (particularly Elmer's glue products) that has been partially solidified by the reaction of baking soda (a mild acid) with borax, detergent, or contact lens solution (mild bases), and given color and texture with food dyes, acrylic paints, glitter, pompoms, miniature styrofoam balls, pony beads, pieces of string, googly eyes, and pretty much anything these youngsters can get a hold of.

Slime has been a strong component of Michaels' children's craft supply sales and family events since the beginning of the summer, along with a number of slime-themed events. Parents have been purchasing gallon upon gallon of glue for slime-making; kids have been trading slime, giving it away, and even starting their own slime businesses. Some have become YouTube stars, demonstrating new or different slime recipes.

Like most adults, I didn't get the attraction of slime — so I asked some of our young customers. At its most basic, playing with slime gives kids the same sort of hand-stress release that adults get from foam-filled stress balls (and other-shaped promotional items). But it goes a bit further, and as "they" say, you really have to play with it a bit to understand the attraction. I got a chance to do this as "leader" for our October 7 "MAKEbreak: Customize Pumpkin Slime" event.

Slime is not as stiff as stress-ball foam. It can be stretched out like dough (even thinner than many doughs!), and plain slime is great for massaging the spaces between your fingers. The texturizers (those beads and pompoms and stuff) can stimulate small areas like the pads of one's fingers. Except for leaving my fingers feeling covered in glue residue, I can easily understand how kids like to keep kneading, squeezing, and stretching those balls of slime.

Slime's visual and tactile stimulation brings to mind Twiddlemuffs, a leftover-yarn charity project discussed on the LoveKnitting and LoveCrochet blogs. These muffs, made from multiple colors and textures of yarn, with buttons and notions sewn inside and out, help calm Alzheimer's and dementia patients and help them focus. (They are in some ways low-tech versions of the "fidget boxes" that were popular these past two summers.)

In addition to our earlier pumpkin slime event, we'll be having a free MAKEbreak: Customize Glow in the Dark Slime event this coming Saturday (the 21st) from 1 to 3PM, and a tuition-free (you will need to purchase supplies) Make-Your-Own Slime Cupcake event on the the evening of October 30th.


*YouTube videos have recipes for slime made from other ingredients such as liquid or colloidal soaps and sugar or salt, nail polish and vegetable oil, or Crayola Model Magic and hand lotion, but most of these require a couple days' standing plus freezer time in order to cure.

Koala Basket, finished

The Bernat Koala Crochet Basket worked up a lot faster than I expected it to. I finished putting the parts together and adding the finishing touches to the paws this morning.

I set the koala facing a little to the side for a more realistic look

(Note, the pattern called for the arms to remian unstuffed. It looks like they really needed some stuffing in there, though.)

And here's a detail photo of the stitching for the claws:

I gave Yarnspirations a review of the pattern, but I didn't post photos because I used Red Heart Soft Essentials for the pattern instead of Bernat Beyond.

Koala Ears and Other Details

I'm in the process of working on the Yarnspirations' Bernat Koala Crochet Basket for a friend. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've substituted Red Heart Soft Essentials for Bernat Beyond. Soft Essentials is a less tightly-spun yarn than Beyond, which means that I have to be more careful about the yarn untwisting and splitting — but I can also use that quality to my advantage to improve the appearance of my koala.

If you Google images of (real) koalas, you'll note that they have kind of fluffy ears. Both the inside and outside of the ear seem to have long furry hairs which are missing from Yarnspirations' pattern. With an easily-untwisting yarn like Soft Essentials, I'm able to add that effect back in.

Here's how:

Fluffy Koala Ears

Step 1:

Once I joined the inner ear to the outer ear and sewed it onto the head, I threaded a long length of yarn (about a yard or so — it really doesn't matter if it's too short; you can always thread another length to complete this) in the color of the inner ear. At the edge of the ear where I joined the two pieces, I stitched a number of individual double buttonhole stitches, close together.

Double buttonhole stitch:

• Start in the direction from the inner ear to the outer ear, leaving a 1" tail.
• Hold the yarn tail so that it lies parallel to the seam, the end laying on the outer ear.
• The second half of the stitch goes right next to the first, going from the outer ear to the inner ear. Keep the stitch above the loop of thread from the first half of the stitch.
• Pull the yarn taut, creating a knot with both ends of the yarn lying along the outer ear.
• Cut the needle yarn about 1" from the knot.

I did this for the outer edge of the ear, using a photo of a real koala as a guide.

Step 2:

When I finished making my knots, I used a wire brush to untwist, despin, and fluff out the yarn tails, creating a fur-like, hairy ear.

Step 3:

I trimmed the edges of the "fur" roughly even. 

Unfortunately, my first go at this was a bit too short, and I should have probably started with a row of double buttonhole stitches in the outer-ear yarn, just outside of where I added the inner-ear stitches.

More Details

I'm added a bit more detail to my finished koala by using my dark nose color to stitch claws at the end of the koala's paws as a finishing touch.