How to Start a Cardboard Head, Hat or Helmet

These are the beginnings of the head pieces the girls will wear for their butterfly and moth costumes.  We will be attaching antennas and textured cardboard to complete them.

Simple Steps:

1. Cut strips of cardboard about 1.5" wide and longer than you need to wrap around your head.

2. Measure cut and glue a strip of cardboard together so it fits around your head.

3. Attach 2 more cardboard strips so that they cross over the mid point of your head.

4. Add additional strips as desired.

5. Use this base for attaching ears, horns, antennas, or a mask.

DIY Cardboard Camera

There are so many adorable ideas for cardboard cameras on the internet, but this one comes from the first post I ever published on The Cardboard Collective about cardboard beads. When I got my new camera, I had the paper camera brochure left over, and glued it to some cardboard. We strung it with some cardboard beads on paper twine to make one of the more popular items in the girl's jewelery box.

Recently I joined up with about 15 other mothers from my daughter's yochien (Japanese preschool) and we made cardboard camera necklaces for all the kids at her school. The cameras were a prize from our fishing booth at the summer festival.

It was SO fun to see the kids snapping photos of each other. Since most of the parents were also walking around with their cameras slung around their necks, there was the slight excited air of a press conference announcing the magic of summer; more kiddie pools and popsicles to come....

Some of the kids know I helped make the cardboard cameras, so it was cute when they pretended to take my picture. A sweet way of trying to communicate and be playful with me. Of course I love kids AND cardboard, so I was pretty smitten the entire day.

Say "チーズ!"

Starry Cardboard Birthday Crown

An easy beautiful birthday crown that my daughter put together on her big day. She wants to wear it again next year, and I agree it turned out beautifully. There is definitely a Glinda, Good Witch of the North quality there.

If you can't find gold cardboard, try jarred gold paint and pizza box lids........

Paper Bag Hat

I'm literally AND figuratively wearing a new hat these days.

Two actually. The first one is a partnership with the Japanese company eco+waza, which puts out a magazine and sells eco-friendly products from Japan. I'm designing cardboard projects for their packaging, (a cardboard box) and I'll be posting a few of the projects here on The Cardboard Collective in the coming months.

The second is a project working as the Japan correspondent for Playscapes, a blog about the world's best playgrounds. As you know I'm raising two eager young playground testers, and love play and design, so what better job is there? Find the most beautiful, inspiring and creative playgrounds near you HERE.

As for the paper bag hat that I'm wearing, I created it from a brown Kraft paper bag with this pattern by Angellea Designs. As a fledgling pattern designer myself, I have to say this pattern is just excellent. I made paper hats for the girls too, and they are going to provide perfect full sun coverage when we're out foraging for summer berries this year. Although this hat isn't water resistant, a sun hat is meant to be worn in the sun, and what hat could be lighter and easier to fold up?

I didn't do anything special to sew the paper hat other than use the longest stitch length on my machine and add a bias paper trim to the edge. They sew up really fast, since there's no lining, and hey they're just fun.

How to Pin an Insect

At the risk of loosing part of my readership, I have a few confessions to make.....the first is that this is not my first blog.

My first blog, swallowed somewhere in the darkness of internet cloud storage, was a digital archive called, "Tiny Architects." I didn't work on it for very long. I'm sure you're envisioning a sweet little blog about kids building and playing, making their own stuff, designing.......actually "Tiny Architects," was a reference to another breed of little builders.....insects. Which is where my second confession comes in: I love, and am deeply fascinated by insects.......

Ichneumon Wasps on the Appalachain Trail by Amber

As a kid, I was an avid collector. I reared monster silk worm caterpillars, and staged sleep overs in our camper trailer with a white sheet and black light to attract night flyers at the back of our family's sheep farm.

A good portion of every summer was spent in pursuit of the elusive and luminescent Green Tiger beetle; not to mention the lightening fast, Green Darner dragonfly. Once I was thrown into a tree (butterfly net in hand) by our ill-tempered pony during an attempt to ride him bare-back to one of my favorite collecting spots.

In the back of my mind, I always thought that I would someday become an entomologist, and truth be told, maybe someday I still will. Until then, I feel it's time to begin to share my bug collecting passion with my young daughters, and hopefully you too, as insect collecting relates to cardboard... and hey! you will be surprised.....

First of all a few notes on the evolution of entomology. While insects are some of the most populous creatures on earth, I no longer believe that it's a good idea to continue the old catch and kill practices that I learned as a kid. Save that job for real entomologists.

For one, we now have the ability to capture beautiful images of insects with smart phones and digital cameras. Photos last longer and I would argue are even more informative because they can capture the insect in it's natural habitat, practicing it's natural behavior.

If your child is an insect lover, I highly recommend the gift of a child-friendly digital camera with a good macro feature. It could also become a springboard for them to document their collection online in a blog, or through some other kind of digital format.

That being said, I do think it's still valuable for children to handle and examine both living and deceased insects and I think it's still entirely possible to do both of those things with a conservationist mindset. When it comes to live insects, we practice catch and release, and the girls use small nets I made them from re-purposed Badminton rackets. If we find something really interesting we observe it for no more than a day, and then release it again.

In terms of collecting, we have amassed a great little collection of insects that were found dead during various walks and bike rides. Those finds have been more than adequate for building a specimen collection.

Our prized creatures have been sitting in a small jar at the back of our freezer for quite a while now though, so if you're ready to learn how to pin an insect, right here, right now, we're primed to get started........of course, we'll need to build a little something out of cardboard first.

A spreading board is used to get the body of the insect into the correct position. The wings should rest at their natural level so that they can be arranged and left to harden. First put a pin through the body of the insect. (Pinning position diagrams here) Next, use insect pins and strips of paper to gently leverage the wings into the desired arrangement. Never puncture a wing with a needle as it will damage your specimen. Extra information about pinning different types of insects HERE

To make the spreading board:

• Cut a base piece 14cm x 20cm.

• Glue 2 more piece of cardboard (6.5 cm x 20 cm) on top so that you create a gap that is 1-1.5 cm wide and about 1 cm deep.

If your insect's body has hardened, it's a good idea to sandwich it between 2 pieces of a dampened cloth and wait (usually overnight) for the body to soften and become easier to work with.

This is a collection for my daughters who are 2 and 4, so we've tried to keep it simple. I haven't added labels, (but you can) And we did not arrange our insects by scientific order. The girls chose the groupings of "Black Beetles,"  "Shiny Green Beetles," and " Bees."

To mount the collection, we found an old container that held craft supplies, and glued cardboard to the base so we could stick our pins in it. To preserve the insects and protect them from an infestation, make sure you have a tight fitting lid for your case. Add cedar oil either on a cotton ball nestled in a plastic cap or by wiping the insides of your wooden display case with it.

This is just our little starter collection, but it's fun to remember when we found these  insects and have funny conversations about what ants eat, and where caterpillars sleep at night.

I hope I can nurture in the girls the same love for nature that my parents gave me, even if they don't go as far as someday staging a bug collecting sleep-over. I've already got the perfect one planned.

Cardboard Washi Tape Holder

Now that we are getting deep into the Christmas crafting and gift wrapping, we've been pulling the washi tape out everyday. I used to keep our tapes in a box in the drawer, but I thought it would be great to have them organized in a way that I could easily see all the colors, as well as take them out and put them back without disturbing the whole lot.

Just plain old white glue should do the trick. You might try a couple of clothespins to keep everything together while it's drying.

You can use this template to create a washi tape holder that would fit in a drawer or sit on a shelf nicely. Of course you can decorate the whole darn thing with washi tape when you're done.

So do you remember life before washi tape? I don't.