Saturday, January 12, 2008

Will Craft for College fund

My Seven Year Old has a serious craft obsession. We're thinking of finding a twelve step program, but he'd probably wind up using all their coffee cans to make yet another craft with. Get it? Because those Twelve-Steppers are notorious for drinking lots of coffee? Ahem. Right. As I tell Ten all the time, if you have to stop and explain the joke, then it really wasn't all that funny to begin with. And I just ended TWO sentences in that paragraph with a preposition. My grammar teacher is fluffing my pillows in hell right now.

Anywho...the boy, he is crafty. I think he's genetically predisposed to craftiness because my mom is the queen of crafts. She does crafts with her Key to the City and Red Hat groups all the time. She even used to sell her crafts on TV when they did the Action Auction for channel eight (the local PBS station). Obviously this skill skipped a generation.

Seven has always loved to make crafts. In preschool he was always the last child finished because he had to make it "just right." I blame his Aunt Cathy for turning what was a perfectly fine little hobby into an obsession worthy of electroshock therapy. She's the kind of aunt every family wishes they had. She stops to "pick up a few things" on the way to family reunions so that when she arrives, her car doors fly open and bags from Michael's and Hobby Lobby spill out all over the pavement. All the kids in the family run to her car and follow her around like the Pied Piper for the rest of the vacation. I've never known anyone else who travels with an emergency set of glitter glue and watercolors, pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks. Aunt Cathy rocks.

The downside of this is that Seven is constantly asking us to "do a craft" with him. This morning--before I'd even had my first sip of coffee, people!--he insisted that we make a snowman. Since it's in the sixties here and there's nary a snowflake in the sky, I knew that he meant a craft snowman. Behold the crafty cuteness:


Because the crafts threaten to take over the house sometimes, I told him we could take pictures of them and put them in a Crafts file in the computer. Just in case something happens to them. Like if Mommy decides to throw them away in a few months when you've forgotten about them and you're at school so you'll never know. So here are a few more of Seven's lovely crafts. Enjoy.

These are some piggy banks that he painted. Very cute, don't you think?

And here's the tin can man, "Tinny," that he made with Aunt Cathy in Ohio last summer. Yes, last summer. And he still has it. He'll probably take it to college with him.



These are some Paint Pal statues that he painted. They sit in a place of honor on his dresser.




This is a "hamster base" that he made out of shoeboxes. Luckily, we don't have a hamster because, did you notice the lack of a cage door? Yep, that hamster would be Lily-food by now.








This is a desert scene that he created for his cowboys to play in. This was after learning the Round Up song at children's church.






This is the castle that he made at school for Oktoberfest in first grade.




These are some of the many clay sculptures he's made that are all over the house. I display these in my kitchen window.




Maybe someday he can supplement his college fund by selling his crafts on Etsy. Anybody wanna buy a slightly used tin can man?



2 comments:

Sanna said...

He seems to be very talented in what he does. I like it when children are doing 'good stuff', such as crafts or music. Very creative!

Sanna

Shosh said...

Teble, can we send your 7 and my 10 for that program. My daughter's room is so full of craft, I don't even know where to start....so in my usual super mommy method of dealing with it...I stayed away from her room for weeks now until I can either build another room for her craft or have her catalogued and warehoused her various projects!