— Seema Brain Openers
Crafting is like meditation, it allows you to focus your mind and release your stress.
— Unknown
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
— Maya Angelou
My son-in-law’s shift changed last week, so I had the pleasure of my granddaughter’s company. The weather turned cool and rainy, so we didn’t use the pool once. But who needs a pool to have a good time?
We started by making some jewelry. I have a large supply of jewelry supplies, and the granddaughter was more than happy to help me use some up. ;-) First up, we have her jewelry:
Two necklaces and a . . . um . . . decoration to hang on stuff. LOL The pink and blue necklace was the most difficult of all the pieces we made. Not because it was hard to do, on the contrary, the beads were strung on wire so it was pretty easy to do. Except I had the idea of using seed beads as spacers between the larger beads, but they were too small. Then I thought to use bugle beads, but the holes in the larger beads were so big that the smaller beads slipped right into them. Third time was the charm though and I found a larger glass bead that worked fine.
You might notice the granddaughter really liked the mermaid scale charms. She made a necklace with just the charm on it, and put one on either end of her decoration. And then she decided her mom needed mermaid scale earrings to go with the necklace we made her.
I thought that was a pretty good idea, so I made myself a mermaid scale necklace to go with my earrings.
I like the fact that all the mermaid scale charms are different, although we were able to find a matching pair for the earrings. I still have a few of them left – we’ll have to figure out something different to do with them.
Next we tried a craft that I promised her in the spring we’d do in the summer. The dreaded tie dye. Well, it wasn’t nearly as messy as I thought it would be, and we didn’t have to take everything outside to do it.
The kit I got used powdered dye and ice. You basically tie up whatever you’re dyeing, sprinkle the powder over it, and then cover it with ice. Weird, or what? I was kind of skeptical that it would work. But it did. sort of.
Of the two items we dyed, I think the back pack turned out best. We actually had four colours in the kit, but because I figured we should use all of the powder, the dark dye kind of took right over. Oh, well. Better luck next time.
I have to admit, it pays to have a vivid imagination. When we weren’t doing crafts or watching TV, the granddaughter was happy to invent her own games. Like “store,” where she set up a table and was selling cats and cat toys.
Only one of the cats pictured is a real cat. The beauty of her set-up was that it was our stuff we were buying, and we had to give it back when the store closed. And she got to keep the money. LOL
She also set up a restaurant in the living room, but that was strictly for the squishmallows to enjoy. And, apparently, Khaos, who helped herself.
There was also a brief real estate game, where she took pillows from the living room upstairs and re-decorated the bedrooms to become condos. There was one for each of us, and they included a free cat. Fortunately, we never got around to discussing prices.
We also enjoyed a girls road trip to the Michaels Craft store in Peterborough, and while we were there, we naturally had to stop at Spirit Halloween, which just opened in the mall.
The granddaughter was a little disappointed that they didn’t have much in the way of Stranger Things merchandise (her current obsession – she wants to be a demigorgon for Halloween), but they did have a lot of Beetlejuice stuff (a close second).
All in all, we had a fun-filled week. We’ll have to see if we can do as well this week.
