Robot Day!

The boys and I taped together cardboard boxes and cut out arm and face holes. I mentioned this to our buddy Melanie (the art teacher who lives down the block). She said, "Bring them over tomorrow!" The next day our next door neighbor asked if her son could come over for a while so she could run errands. Absolutely! Plenty of boxes to go around. So we threw together a box combination for him, too.

An hour or so of kid-led painting and construction-paper-ing later:

Even more T-shirt stencils!

Fun Christmas gifts for the boys' friends for only $2! Gotta love the sales at Michael's.

For Silas next door:

For Silas' sister Bird:

For cousin Hadley (a real-life Texan cowboy, according to the boys)

X-wing fighter shoes

My son needed new tennis shoes. He really wanted some with Star Wars on them. But they haven't made those in years, and eBay has been really hit and miss (mostly miss) for me.

So I got these $6 shoes and made a freezer paper stencil, and this is what I ended up with.

I've only made a freezer paper stencil once before (for, um, an interesting T-shirt experiment), so I was pleased that careful cutting really did pay off here. The biggest problem is that it was difficult to center the stencil on the shoes; if I divided the stencil where I had originally wanted to, I would have created many unattached bits that would have been a nightmare to realign. Overall, though, it was pretty cool.

Tom's response: "Do they have lights?"