I have been doing these big colour & play drawings for my kids over the last couple years… I find attention spans of toddlers & preschoolers can dwindle pretty quickly, so I draw a big picture that we can work together on a bit each day until it’s finished. We start off with a slice of recycled paper from a big pad, butcher paper or big pieces of coloured paper.  My daughter loves mixed media, so the markers, crayons & pencils all come out. When the colouring’s done the glitter or cut paper come into play. (I love the mix of kid scribble and adult colouring… I try to stick to the big boring areas like sky while Hera does the fun bits, makes the kid’s part really stand out).
The play aspect comes in with stickers and paper dolls. Kids love to decorate and stick (and peel, and stick, and peel) stickers, and this big play surface is fun for their imagination. Once they get unsticky, we glue them to stiff paper and cut them out and reuse them as paper dolls.

(This is the first one we ever did, Hera drew the first hill and the rest evolved from there!)
A few of the big colour & play drawing ideas we have done (again and again!) are :

• • Underwater scenes (Octonauts!)
• • Castles (with paper princess stickers)
• • Roads with hills and ponds (Great one for driving cars on afterwards!)

Once all the creative play is done, the big drawings make great posters for rooms. And once they come down from the wall, they can be potato-stamped to make into home made wrapping paper.

(Lifecycle of this craft : Tree > Paper > Big Colour & Play Drawing > Poster > Wrapping Paper to ?!)

I stumbled across this tip at Stubby Pencil Studios… breathe life back into dried out water based markers by dipping them in water! I had a bag full of dried out markers I hadn’t quite found another use for, so gave it a go. The method I used was :

• • Put just enough water in the bottom of a container cover the tips of the markers (In hindsight, tall glasses would have worked better as they won’t tip!)
• •  Dip the marker tip in and leave it for a few minutes.
• • Remove from marker and put the cap back on. I only waited a few more minutes before testing them out, and they worked wonderfully.

Not sure how many times this trick will work, but my daughter was pleased having a dozen old markers back into the fold and has been colouring up a storm! (And for those curious, the coloured water from runoff ink was too watered down to reuse as paint.)

I’ve wanted to do this for years, and having a 3-year-old to do it with gave me the perfect excuse to have a go at making potato stamp holiday paper. Was an easy, quick craft… all you need is a small potato and knife to cut the pattern out of it, a little paint and a flat container to put it in, and large paper. We reused Hera’s old drawings, which added a quirky flare with creepy stick figures peeking through the trees! Hank was too busy practicing crawling up and down off the ottoman to join us ;)

This is a great article for authors / childrens book illustrators who want to get their books out there digitally. To sum up, authors are making their e-books available through app stores at affordable prices… and making it big.

E-books are the next generation of self-publishing… or e-publishing. It’s inexpensive to create an e-book, and as easy as creating a PDF… do a quick google search and there are many articles on how to build your own e-book. I also love the fact that the impact on the environment is low… you aren’t wasting paper by printing thousands of books, are saving the cost of fuel in distributing the books, etc. Because authors are saving on the up front costs of printing their books, as well as publishing themselves and cutting out the middle-men (printers, publishers & shipping), they are able to price their books lower and reach a wider audience.

“While traditional novelists only see a very small amount of royalties on their book if it’s not a best seller, Hocking gets 70% of all money from her book sales. Since she sells around 100,000 copies of her books per month, that’s a lot of money.”

I bought my first e-book this week (Ready, Set, Green : Treehugger.com), and I must say I was miffed that it was priced the same as the printed paper version… if I have the choice between a paper book and a digital book at the same price, I would pick the paper book hands down. It just doesn’t make sense why publishers would price these e-books at the same price as printed books if they are saving so much money on printing & distribution. (Who wants to spend a lot of money on something that can be duplicated with as little effort as typing Apple-C-Apple-V?)
There are ebooks also available as iPad apps for kids… iBook comes with a free copy of Milne’s classic Winnie the Pooh, and in the app store there are many free picture books for kids (The Grouchies by Debbie Wagenbach.) Children’s book authors/illustrators have a great opportunity to add e-books alongside their printed book offerings.

P.S. If anyone comes across a great how-to for building a picture e-book, please let me know! I’m going to give it a go myself at some point on my own picture books, but being on maternity leave it’s not exactly a high priority over changing diapers at the moment ;)

“Kindle indie author is making millions by selling the App Store way” via Geek.com

An easy craft that’s fun for kids is reusing paper bags by drawing on them and using them as gift bags. If your kids are really little, draw some fun characters on them, tape them down on a firm surface, and let them colour away. You can write a message on one side of the bag and skip buying a card altogether. Aside from being a lovely personalized giftbag, it also saves you from buying gift bags, and is also good for the environment if you reuse paper bags. It’s a great craft for toddlers, Hera loved colouring in these bags for her cousins, especially drawing pictures of them on the dinosaurs!

Ok, I had never heard of a “freegan” before being sent this link to “50 Freegan Living Blog Posts We Can All Live From.” So I Wiki’d “Freeganism“, and the super short definition of a freegan would be someone whose diet is comprised of tossed away vegetarian food… so basically, dumpster-diver-diners.

While I’m more than a bit grossed out by that idea (there’s a big difference between day old food sold at the bakery/grocery store and sifting it out of the bin beside someones snotty kleenex!)… I’m more than ok with the idea of salvaging others trash, which a lot of the Blogs listed in the above article are about. From rescuing clothing to furniture, the freegan attitude can be part of your lifestyle (even if the diet isn’t!)
I’ll put my hand up and admit to being a dumpster-diver-at-heart, having rescued discarded wood and metal from scrap piles for artwork (the above painting was done on scrap wood I found in the bin, and the paper from this Hera’s Stuff Bébe illustration was also recovered material.) There’s something super satisfying about making artwork out of something that was free and thrown away. Not to mention damaged and scrap materials often have a wonderful distressed look which gives paintings quite a bit of texture and genuine character. If you’re keen to become a freegan artist but you’re a little shy to poke your head in someone else’s trash bin… check out Freecycle, where people constantly list items free for the taking.

Guest article by Ink and Media

Instead of throwing away used ink cartridges have you ever wondered what else you could do with them? Wickford based ink cartridges retailer Ink and Media Ltd with the help of Midlands based artist Faith Pearson have fused a love of sci-fi and film with ink cartridges. The result is a series of recycled art pieces that recreate a range of cinematic moments - including King Kong, Godzilla and even a model of the Star Trek enterprise. The scenes were all created by hand and a series of background installations were designed before the final pieces were complete.

This will be the third year I’ve supported Earth Hour... last year we met up with the rest of our family here in Adelaide, and spent our hour by candle light celebrating my birthday and playing cards! Don’t forget to pledge your support here and be counted among the millions turning off their lights for one hour during Earth Hour, 8.30pm, Saturday 27th March 2010.

Just stumbled across Eco Emporia, a UK company selling handmade gifts from all reclaimed materials, such as Beas Beasties (above… so cool!)

With all my encouragement to go green, one thing I hadn’t thought of was offsetting the carbon used by having a blog! I read here that a blog with an average of about 15,000 visits a month would use about 3,6kg (8lb.) of carbon dioxide yearly (caused by the blogs being hosted on their mainframe computers, servers & cooling systems.)

Making it easy to make your blog carbon neutral is the “Make It Green!” team over at kauf-DA. They have a great (and free!) initiative going where they offer to plant one tree for your blog on Arbor Day Foundation in the Plumas National Forest in Northern California. (And you get to sport a swanky seal like this one on your blog!)

It’s free to sign up here and enjoy a tree being planted for your blog!