Waiving the White Flag

Don’t you just love princesses? This Halloween my home was inundated with young girls hoping to live in the lap of luxury, marry rich, wear beautiful clothes, and have people wait on them hand and foot despite having few useful skills and zero talent whatsoever. Gee, does that remind you of anyone…

…I just can’t think of who that reminds me of.

Oh, well. I’m certain it will come to me later.

A good 30 princesses (and some adults who knew better) showed up on my porch before I got tired and poured enough candy into that last trick-or-treater’s pillow case to send her into a diabetic coma. I wasn’t feeling the whole royalty thing. Maybe it has something to do with that when a 5 year old boy dresses up as Spiderman, he won’t want to be Spiderman at age 18; but when a 5 year old girl dresses up as a princess, there’s a 1 in 3 chance she’ll be on a cable wedding show at age 30 throwing a tantrum over tiaras. Plus, if you really pay attention to the plotlines of any Disney movie, you’ll realize the message they send out, for lack of a better term, sucks.



See what I mean?

That said, this past summer reading we made princess flags.

Okay, they were really birthday flags, but I found all these crown stickers in the storage room that I needed to get rid of. Old craft material is like pencils---if you keep putting off using it one day you’ll take it out and discover the eraser is so old it’s hard enough to fly across the room and poke someone’s eye out, and then you’ll have to do paperwork. How awful! The birthday flag idea came out of the SR2011 binder. You know what they say, if all else fails, read the manual/directions/street sign. The thing is, if you look through your old binder (if it’s not buried in a pile of recycling) there are no actual directions on how to make them. So here it goes:

Birthday/Princess/Pirate/Dream Flags

Supplies:

Paper (old letterhead anyone?)
Scissors
Stickers
Chopsticks
Stapler (hopefully with staples actually in it)
Colored pencils, crayons and/or pens
Volunteers OR music to make the time go faster (Craft prep can be tedious...)

1. Wash your hands and wipe the inside of the stapler.
2. Fold paper in half lengthwise. Cut along the fold two make two sheets. Set one aside for later.

3. Fold your half sheet in half. If it’s used, make sure the writing is on the inside.

4. Wrap the paper around the narrower end of the chopstick (to prevent the paper from falling off).
5. Staple the top and bottom near the chopstick. You may have to (gently) fold the paper in half to do this. Place on staple in the center right-side opening.
6. Rinse and repeat.

The nice thing about this craft is you can have volunteers prep the flags weeks ahead of time, set them in a box, and have everything ready for label. Just be sure to label the box, so as not to forget and leave the box laying around until 2014.

Enjoy!