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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Go Fly a Kite.





I'm not a crafty girl but I'm willing to indulge my kid when she requests most art projects. The other day she was chatting up about kites and I'm sure it's because kites are one of the pictures on her precious Zingo game.

*Sidenote: if you have a toddler, rush out and buy Zingo. It's a Bingo-like board game that keeps a tot happy for hours and can be used as a bargaining tool for naps, bed and picking up toys. Not that I would ever bribe my kid.

So I wondered if we could fashion a kite without any sort of shopping trip. Turns out, it's easy. I grabbed a piece of posterboard and cut the shape and then handed it over to Laney for decorating. She's into stickers right now, so that kept her busy for at least an hour, no exaggeration. Pretty helpful since she sprained her foot--kept her sitting/lounging/sprawled on the floor for an impressive amount of time.

After she was satisfied with her kite, she very sweetly requested a canvas to decorate a kite for Mia. So I cut a minikite with the scraps from the big kite.

After the decorating was complete, I needed to reinforce the back of the diamond. It occurred to me that chopsticks would be perfect. I have a strong dislike (fear, ongoing battle...) with chopsticks so I didn't have any in the house. I started thinking about ordering some sushi but Koko's isn't open for lunch anymore. After being irritated about that for a while, I moved on. Something I DO have in the house--diapers. I cut the cardboard diaper box to make the reinforcing cross for the back of the diamond. I used wood glue to attach the cardboard and put the kite out of reach and let it dry during naptime.

In the afternoon, I dug out Christmas wrapping ribbons and let Laney choose colors for the streamers and the "string". I cut a hole to tie the string and reinforced with a roll and a half of Scotch tape.

It was a very windy day yesterday so we headed outside to fly the kites. It actually worked (I had no expectations.) Laney couldn't run because of her limpy foot but the wind picked it up anyway. It was super-functional when I ran with it.

Extra bonus--early evening when I started making dinner she went back to her kite and spent another hour improving its sticker count by oh, 150 stickers.

So there you go. It's not the prettiest kite in the world but Laney was excited about it and spent the day customizing it with her stickers and crayons. And I didn't have to buy single thing to make it! Happy I didn't buy the kite-making kit for $20:)

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