Mask-Making Workshop

In cooperation with Play Park Kujira Yama ( a weekly pop-up adventure playground in Tokyo) I'll be leading a Halloween mask-making workshop culminating with a cardboard pinata we'll decorate the day of the event. Oide!

Who: preschool and elementary aged children and their parents

What: recyclable Halloween hat and mask making

Where: Koganei Musashino Park next to Kujira Yama

When: Friday, October 24th, 2014 from 2pm - 4:30pm

Please bring some light weight cardboard, a stapler and scissors (with your name on them) and okashi/snacks to fill  our pinata!

Cardboard Coin Bank

Steam-y, sweet taiyaki, is a well-loved treat here in Japan. It's a food that gives everybody a warm, happy thought just dreaming about it. If you've never tried it, or even heard of it, I would describe it as something like a stuffed waffle. Typical fillings are cream, custard or sweet bean, but I've also seen an ice cream version.

You can use this bank to collect the coins you need to buy taiyaki with 10 and five yen coins, but even if you never do try taiyaki, I hope you use the idea to make a new kind of bank of your own. Think of the possibilities!

This is also the last project for my collaboration with Eco + waza for their Tomorrow Box subscription. It has been an exciting challenge to come up with projects that can be made from product packaging, and I hope to do more of this type of work in the future!

To make taiyaki you will need the template, scissors, utility knife, glue, clips and cardboard.

Simple steps:

1. Use the template to trace and cut two fish and one set of fins from the cardboard.

2. Use a utility knife to cut the slits and hole for the eye on one of the fish.

3. Glue the two halves of the fish together, using clips to secure until dry.

4. Attach fin and insert coins.

Our favorite place to get taiyaki in Tokyo is at Takane's in Mitaka (after we dig seashells, by the seashore, Whew!) They've been making taiyaki and traditional Japanese sweets since the 50's, and they are really really delicious!

Cardboard Bear Desk Organizer

I've been playing around with making templates and shapes from things you find in the kitchen, so here's a funny little animal that was born out of that process, and was inspired by some similar wood and ceramic pieces I've seen on the internet as of late.

You'll need a cardboard tube, corrugated cardboard, scissors, white glue, a drinking glass and a spoon.

Simple Steps:

1. Flatten the toilet paper tube and cut along both creases to cut the tube in half. 2. Layer the two halves of the tube together to make the cradle for the organizer.

3. Use the mouth of the drinking glass as a form to trace the curves for the front and back  of the bear's hips and shoulders. Cut.

4. Trim the tube to the desired length and assemble the organizer by gluing the tube to the hip and shoulder pieces. Secure with a rubber band while drying.

5. Use the base of the drinking glass as a form to trace the bear face, add ears, cut. Glue face to the front of the organizer.

6. To make the nose, trace the curve of a teaspoon, cut in half and glue to the cardboard face.

Spoon, glass, plate, spatula...... hmmm. What else can we make?

Cardboard & Newsprint Unicorn Costume

To make the costume you'll need:

• white paper egg cartons

• white newsprint or tissue paper (rainbow colors would be great!)

• toilet paper tubes

• metallic cardboard, (or rainbow paint your regular cardboard)

• stapler

Simple Steps:

1. cut a rectangular strip of cardboard about 4 inches wide and 10 inches long

2. fringe newsprint, then fold the ends over the cardboard and staple

3. cut ears from egg cartons and attach with stapler

4. create cone shaped horn from metallic cardboard and staple down

5. cut toilet paper tubes so that they can fit over your wrists and ankles like a cuff

6. fringe more newsprint and staple to cuffs (place tape over staples to avoid irritation)

7. shape the ends of the toilet paper tubes to look like hooves.

Cardboard for Stools & Tabletops

It was a pleasant discovery to find out that old album covers can be opened up to create a large, 4 paneled piece of cardboard for the Totem Box table and stool tops.

You may or may not have noticed from my previous pictures that Stevie Wonder is gracing the surface of our Totem Box table. If my daughter does in deed learn to read from constant exposure to "Master Blaster" lyrics, I'll be the first to let you know.

The album cover cardboard is pretty durable. It can recover from a spill as long as it isn't left standing too long, but if you're after something that you can truly pass a rag over, I suggest re-purposing shiny, plasticized paper shopping bags.

The plastic is not recyclable, but I'm pretty sure that these bags are processed without a problem at most paper recyclers. We are able to put them out here in Japan, and I pick them up from other people's recycling piles for the odd project here and there.

While cardboard still rules, it's nice to have options...

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!"

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 Playground circa 1967

Big Play back top Rescan

LIFE Magazine - November 3, 1967 (Volume 63, Number 18) Page 3

LIFE Magazine - November 3, 1967 (Volume 63, Number 18) Page 2

LIFE Magazine - November 3, 1967 (Volume 63, Number 18) Page 1

LIFE Magazine - November 3, 1967 (Volume 63, Number 18) Modern Living -- The Big Play in Paper, from Giraffes to Gazebos

Wow, check out this 1967 LIFE magazine article entitled, "The Big Play in Paper", that was lovingly rescued and scanned by my friend Miss Meryl Ann Butler during a recent Spring cleaning.

Meryl Ann and I met while taking online classes from Diane Gilleland at Crafty Pod, (I learned almost everything I know about blogging from those classes) and I got to know Meryl Ann by her spit-your-tea-out-hilarious sense of humor and from the really helpful stuff she posted in the forums (she has a long and distinguished career in the craft industry.) She is the author of the book 90 Minute Quilts among, many others and she has an intensely joyful, vibrant style with a personality to match.

Meryl Ann recently sent me an email message explaining that:

"This clipping was in my "morgue file" which was a file we had in the olden days before electronic files… with clippings of images that might inspire future artwork. My file had thousands of clippings, and I just threw most of it away a couple of days ago - a hard thing to do, since I had collected images for a long time - well, at least from 1967, lol!  I only saved a couple of them, and of course the second I saw this I thought of you, Amber!"

How very thoughtful, and how entirely awesome. Enjoy a trip back to the glory days of cardboard......................we'll relive them again soon?

Beautiful DIY Cardboard Storage is HERE!

All I can say, is it's a great feeling to start with an idea, work with it for more than 6 months, and get to this place.

I'm so excited to share

this pattern

with you! It started basically as a way to solve a problem I was having:

How do I organize my kid's toys? (the little ones)

which led to other problems:

How can I make something that's just right for them?

How can I make it out of cardboard?

How can I make it strong?

How can I make it recyclable?

How can I make it beautiful?

Well, curiosity can lead you down a long and winding path.

Mine included a re-acquaintance with high school geometry, learning more about photography and lighting, the search for affordable copyright free music, video editing, cardboard sourcing, explorations in color and pattern (ultimately inspired by the divine Japanese kimono), tool and material testing and lots and lots of watching kids play (the best part)!

I ended up with

Totem Boxes.

A set of sculptural stacking boxes (the base of one box fits the top of another) that double as a nightstand, stool, ottoman or table and stool set for children. You can leave them plain, or decoupage them with decorative paper.

What do you do with them?

Put your favorite stuff inside. Yarn, yo-yos, matchbox cars and trucks, Legos, rubber stamps, fancy hats, scarves, alphabet magnets, musical instruments, play-dough, cookie cutters, wooden blocks...

I don't exactly understand the magic, but my kids love cleaning up with the Totem Boxes. They make sorting the toys like another way to play.  You can easily move the boxes to where the mess is because they are modular, and then stack them up as you go. They look good sitting in the corner of your room, if you do nothing else. To me, they are functional sculpture.

And they're not just for kids. Someday when I'm a knitter, I'm going to make a set with a hole on the side for the yarn to feed out while I knit. I'll prop up my heels on the boxes as I relax and make gorgeous socks....

But are they durable enough for kids to use?

Months of testing and strength to support the sitting weight of a 150lb. adult makes me say YES.

What do I need to make them?

You will need lots of strong cardboard (like the kind that banana boxes or diaper boxes are made out of) and basic supplies like a pencil, white glue, a metal ruler, binder clips or clothespins and a utility knife. You will also need access to the internet, a computer and a printer to print out your pattern pieces and directions.

How long does it take?

Anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour for the first box, but after making about 20 of them, I've got it down to about 30 minutes a box (without decoupage). Best thought of as a weekend project. Say, if you wanted to make an amazing gift for your 2-5 year old niece or nephew's birthday.

Where can I buy the pattern?

The pattern costs $12 and is currently available in my Etsy Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/cardboardcollect

It includes instructional PDFs in US Standard and Metric with written directions and a pictorial guide with links to 3 original video tutorials. The elementary school teacher in me did my best to appeal to audio and visual learners, so if you get frustrated by traditional patterns, fear not.

Fort Building with Banana Boxes

I've been doing a lot of work with banana boxes recently and we've had so much fun  building little places to hang out in....and then knocking them down!

Cardboard Kid's Chair Makeover

Our beloved cardboard kid's chairs are almost 3 years old. They've been in desperate need of a makeover for a while now, and I thought those of you who read the blog would be interested in seeing how cardboard furniture wears over time.

These chairs are regularly used as vaulting boxes by my two little ones so I can't imagine a better stress test.

I started by addressing the corners that had worn, and cut small strips of cardboard to use as shims.

I glued them into the worn areas to give the chair corner rigidity again and reshape the edge.

Next I trimmed off any loose cardboard and traced the different pieces of the chair one at a time onto (new) post consumer cardboard and cut the pieces out. After some gluing and clamping, this is what we got:

Not bad huh? Almost as good as new......and the chairs will be even more smashing after we treat their exteriors to a new look:

.....catch that in my next post.

Stackable Cardboard Dressers for Kids

My daughters are young and their needs are always changing. They wear a pair of shoes for 6 months then need a new pair.

They use a little chair, or a booster seat for a year or a month or 2 and then we have to replace it and either throw out the old one, find a friend who happens to need the same thing at the same moment we want to get rid of it, or put it on Craig's List. (We have no charity shops here in Tokyo and limited recycling opportunities for large items.)

I find this kind of turnover exhausting. I wanted to create a dresser system for the girls that accomplished 3 things:

1. Recyclable so that we could recycle the whole thing, or just parts of it as the girls' needs changed. I didn't want the guilt of throwing away something that was perfectly good and I didn't want the extra work of finding someone to take on our old stuff.

2. Facilitates Independence. I wanted a piece of furniture that was easy to use and functional so the girls could easily pick out their own clothes and put them away starting from an early age (about 18 months-2 years ).

3. Beautiful. I believe that the things in our life should be beautiful and functional. I want my daughters to value beauty, design, the arts, and momma moxie, so we tried to accomplish all of those things when we made the dressers. If you like hot pink and pattern as much as I do I hope you agree on our definition of beautiful....

To make the dressers, we collected kiwi boxes over the course of a few weeks, as well as beautiful papers; a mix of washi papers, origami paper, paper bags and Gallery Opening flyers.

I then decoupaged the papers onto the fronts of the boxes with water and white glue. I made a door in each box by cutting two sides about a ruler's width from the edges of the box, and and then scored the bottom to create the door opening.

The doors of the dressers always stay shut and close easily. In a year and a half of using these boxes, the doors have never flopped open or gotten flimsy.

The girls can easily open and close the drawers. By decorating each box differently they quickly have memorized what kind of clothing each box holds. (Only Dad is still struggling with this.)

Another benefit of these dressers is that they are not a hazard if they fall over in the event of an earthquake - an important consideration living here in Japan.

If you're wondering where you can get kiwi boxes, check out your local produce department. This past summer I wrote a post about how to find free cardboard here. We also use these boxes for storing our toys, puzzles, and art supplies. Yes, kiwi boxes are a definite favorite here in our apartment.

A Cardboard Toolbox for Kids

As a family of makers, a kids' cardboard toolbox was next up on our cardboard making list. I found a smaller box with smaller handholds for the toolbox with real tools, real nuts and bolts and other real stuff, for real cardboard projects...

Child sized tools: embellishment hammer, round tipped serrated cutting blade, spackling blade, screwdriver and safety scissors

Assorted screws, bolts, nuts and washers

Here's a peek at our first project. I originally saw this idea in what I believe was a February 2012 issue of Family Fun Magazine. They used dry wall screws and a rock for pounding, which would work too.

We enjoyed the opportunity to do some parallel "making". It was great to all be focused on different cardboard projects while we pounded, sawed and glued to our heart's content.

The accordion cardboard drop cloth is a great addition to this ensemble. I blogged about it last fall here.

Do you have a cardboard tool kit or set of tools for your kids? I'd love to hear how others are making cardboard construction play accessible for kids of all ages...

Cardboard Finger Puppet Book

This Christmas present  was a team project. I got lots of guidance while I was sewing the facial features on "wiggle worm." My daughter also wrote the story for the book, which strangely enough changes every time you read it... you can catch the "text" below.

Stitch your wiggle worm together from a fabric scrap.

Cut holes in the middle of the pages of a cardboard book. Cardboard book how to here. Tape your worm in place.

Glue a cardboard page over top, to secure the "wiggle worm."

Looking a little smug after the photo shoot isn't he?

Tokyo Maker Faire 2012

Sunday was the last day of Tokyo's first ever Maker Faire.

It's safe to say I was pretty blown away by the whole event. Imagine squeezing shoulder to shoulder step by step through a space as big as a football field, chock a bloc with little tables, thousands of people, and tons of blinking, flashing, gyrating electronic gizmos.

[slideshow_deploy id='3058']

I came knowing nothing about Arduinos, Rasberry piis, and flying drones, and left knowing nothing more ... sadly, I was way too intimidated to ask a programmer to explain basic coding and circuitry to me in Japanese.

I did however, do a lot of googling when I got home, and learned enough to have a semi intelligent conversation (in English) with someone next time I need to, which could be quite soon considering I'm now planning on building one of these to do my grocery shopping for me...

This is a giant cardboard giraffe robot that was designed and built by kids using a program developed at MIT called Scratch.

The folks at a design group here in Tokyo called Otomo held a series of workshops for kids earlier this year where this noble beast was conceived and built.

The giraffe has a camera in it's head and a controller in it's tail. As the giraffe's head "looks" around, video streams to an old-school, Wizard of Oz-style monitor nearby.

I don't think I could have dreamed of something that would have captured my imagination more than this amazing cardboard safari creature.

I basically had to pick my jaw up off the floor, and embarrassingly said "This is so cool" way too many times while talking to the couple from Otomo.

How to make cardboard bug eyes

These cardboard apple box liners have so much potential. I love their color and texture which works perfectly for insect or reptilian costumes. I've seen these liners in pink, yellow, purple, white and brown. Ask the stockist at your grocery store's produce department if you can take a few home.

This a costume component easily made by any child who can handle scissors, so a perfect start for a kid's first self made costume.

How great would these be for a bed bug costume?

Our Cardboard Swiss Cheese Chalet

A new watermelon box creation!  A hideout for my two little pipsqueaks.

This little place was a lot of fun to build, and I love the idea of a hideout that's triangular in shape.  I spent about 2 days working on this project off and on, because I had to take breaks when my arm got tired of sawing through all that cardboard.

The watermelon box I started with already had lots of holes in it, so I enlarged some of them to create my  "Swiss cheese matrix" on all three sides.

I started by figuring out the rough dimensions of the little fort by folding the box in different places until I found what worked best for a roomy wedge of cheese.

This box had about eight creased corners, so I cut cardboard strips about 6 inches wide and glued them over the unwanted creased portions so the cardboard wouldn't bend in the places I didn't want it to.

After securing the cardboard and cutting out all the holes from the sides, I put a nut and bolt with a washer in the side to keep everything together and make it easy to disassemble.

Last step was creating a top piece out of lighter cardboard so that the girls could open it easily.

I added a coat of yellow paint, but I think it would be just as nice plain brown.  I also thought  pink washi tape would liven up the holes, but you can see where that's all going to end up.

I'm looking forward to the day when they'll be building their own little cardboard nests... And hey, did I tell you where some of our other watermelon box scraps have ended up?

These came shipped in a cardboard box that we picked up at the local post office.

They're not ours to keep.  We're just babysitting for grandma...

Pop-Up Cardboard Garden

UPDATE: Our first big harvest! That little cucumber grew up!

Electra has had her cardboard garden for over a month and a half now, and seeing that the cardboard is still in great shape after 6 weeks of rain, watering and sunshine, I thought it was OK to officially let it be known that our pop-up cardboard garden is a keeper.

When I was on a cardboard finding expedition at my local grocery store, the produce manager asked me if I was interested in any of the watermelon boxes they had out behind the store. Watermelon boxes, I thought, why didn't I think of that before?

Watermelon boxes are made of triple-walled cardboard with a slight waxy finish, and they are super sturdy, even when exposed to rain. This garden isn't intended to last for more than a summer season, but the cardboard should easily last that long. After we finish picking our tomatoes the plan is to distribute the soil onto the other needy beds in our front yard,  and pack up our watermelon box for curbside recycling.

I used a serrated bread knife that I got from a nearby thrift shop to cut the box down to 12.5" high. Then I just positioned the box in a bright and sunny area of our front yard.

My husband kindly screened several wheelbarrow loads of compost from our backyard and added it to the garden. The last step was cutting off the little triangles of cardboard on the sides that center the watermelon box onto pallets for shipping.

We decided this would be the perfect first garden for Electra so I let her pick out all of her own plants at the local greenhouse. I encouraged her to choose a variety of vegetables, flowers and herbs. She chose cucumbers, tomatoes, chives, basil, cilantro, rosemary, zinnias and her favorite, geraniums.

She LOVED handling and smelling her plants and breaking up their roots to get them ready for planting.

Here she is watering the new crop, and facing a few skeptic neighbors who were sure we were preparing for failure.

We watered the garden as needed trying to let it dry out as much as possible to encourage deep root growth and preserve the box. I notice after one month of watering the box is starting to break down a little where the bottom  seam is touching the soil. It looks like it's not to much of a problem at this point, so I'm leaving well enough alone.

After a big rain the cardboard gets a little damp and softens. It will harden up as it dries out, so try not to disturb the cardboard too much when it's wet. I'm not promising invincibility here folks, but this IS a means of getting a few more cherry tomatoes into your little ones hands, and a great way to kindle a budding love of gardening.

Isn't this tiny cucumber the cutest thing you've ever seen? Seeing it all nestled up next to the side of the triple wall cardboard just about breaks my heart.

Giant Cardboard Cubes and the Adjacent Possible

In the spirit of modeling creativity and inspiring play, I wanted to share with you a little bit about some of the "play" that I engage in here in my cardboard lab/home.

I made these giant cardboard cubes after spending an hour or so playing with a stack of cardboard banana boxes that I had collected.

Each cube is made from the tops and bottoms of two banana boxes and two cam straps.

Remember this stage in your kids? Everything down the rabbit hole...

We discovered that the cube has these pockets that are the perfect place for Isis to keep her favorite board books. (We have to keep our other books out of reach for now, otherwise we would spend all of our days re-shelving books instead of reading them.)

Last year I read the book, "Where Good Ideas Come From", by Steven Johnson and started thinking about how I could become more innovative in my day-to-day life.

In Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson talks about an idea called "the adjacent possible." The concept goes something like this:  We seldom have fully formed ideas or creative solutions that come to us in a moment of brilliance. These ideas build up as slow hunches that we compile over time.

So in effect, it's all the little experiences that lead us to those  genius ideas.

I imagine these adjacent experiences as stepping-stones. You can't get to that big idea, without first leaping from little idea to little idea.

I'm trying to spend more time stepping away from the computer and actually playing and experimenting with cardboard as my way of building a path towards new ideas and designs in cardboard.

Future Parkour enthusiast?

I have to say, it's a lot of fun.

I get so much joy out of just playing with cardboard, with no obvious intent, just for the joy of it. Sometimes it comes of nothing, and sometimes you get giant cardboard cubes; a happy accident.

As Steven Johnson says, "Chance favors the connected mind."......

So now I invite you to comment!

What materials do you like to play and experiment with as an adult? Fabric, wood, flour, clay, fiber, dye, paper?

What machines do you work on and repair? bikes, sewing machine, cars, cameras, computers? (This year I replaced the hard drive on this very iMac that I write the blog on. Talk about empowering! You have to check out iFixit.com.)

Do you let yourself drift off into that elementary school aged daze, where nothing mattered beyond the sandbox or your paper and paste pot?

Ikebana-Inspired Teacup Arrangements

I snapped this photo of Electra playing with some leftover flowers from my Ikebana class  earlier this week and started thinking about how I could downsize this "Big Box" arrangement into something that would be more easily displayed.

Enter the teacup.

I always love arranging in open-mouthed containers and teacups are just the right size to display at dinnertime without overwhelming the food and conversation.

So, here's my post about cardboard, teacups, and toddler flower arranging for the fabulous TinkerLab's flower challenge that starts today. If you haven't seen Rachelle's site, I highly encourage you to head on over there and check it out. She's got amazing activities and lots of ideas for turning your home into a creativity and innovation haven for your whole family.

You might be familiar with some of these traditional kinds of Japanese kenzan or "frogs" as my mom calls them. There are also glass and iron versions in beautiful shapes, and some are highly collectible.

The only problem with these types of kenzan is that they don't sit well in the bottom of a teacup. The tapered shape of the cup makes them wobbly and difficult to work with. For that reason, I came up with two different kinds of cardboard fixtures that could be used to stabilize the flowers, and were easy for little hands to use as well.

The first fixture is made out of a rubber band and cut up cardboard tubes. This style worked well for our white teacup that was relatively small in diameter. It's hard to construct this style if the diameter of the container is too big without ending up with a bunch of rubber bands and cardboard pieces shooting all over your kitchen. You also need to be careful not to let the cardboard tubes touch the water. They will melt.

The second fixture is made by tracing the mouth of the teacup onto waxy fruit box cardboard, and then cutting it down until it fits securely inside the cup. I poked holes in the cardboard with an awl but you can easily use a Phillips head screw driver or a nail. You want to make holes big enough for flower and foliage stems to easily fit through.

Negative Space

Don't fill the entire fixture with holes. You want to leave some negative space that you can later cover up with moss or some other kind of low-lying ground plant. If you use the cardboard tube style kenza, just leave about half of the space empty. This can really open up the arrangement and make it more pleasing to the eye.

We had a great time going out to collect plant materials together. Electra is learning to use scissors, so this was a great way for her to put her new skills to use. I have a pair of clippers that are spring-loaded, so they were very easy for her to use and I just carefully supervised her, helping point out stems that were a little easier to cut through.

We chose a large variety of foliage and flowers searching for as many different shapes and textures as we could find. We had so many great conversations when we were out flower picking in the little neglected spaces around our neighborhood. Electra cried, "Momma, you have to smell this one!" and "Feel how fuzzy this leaf is!"

When we got home we laid down newspaper and trimmed some of the stems, removing any leaves that would come close to the water. It was wonderful to finally just sit back and let Electra create her own arrangement.

After Electra finished arranging the flowers we covered the remaining part of the fixture with some luscious green moss. She was so proud of her arrangement!

I know she'll be eager to try again next week, perhaps with some clippings from our balcony garden? Nasturtium, fennel, mint and lavender sound like a delicious combination for celebrating summer vacation at this time next week!

Be sure to check out other blogger's submission at TinkerLab's Flower Challenge Blog Hop / Linky Party.