Easiest. Craft. Ever.

It’s nearly Valentine’s Day---time for chocolate, cards, and/or burning all of your ex’s stuff. It used to be you only hosted parties for happy events. “Look, I’m getting married/having a baby/cured my bad case of hangnails!” Now you can celebrate Anti-Valentine’s Day or throw a divorce party with a “Bring Your Own Bottle” note in the invitation. (Though technically speaking, many would say divorcing someone you loathe is a happy event, too.) Honestly, I was ready to leave that one after the cops showed up, but I was vetoed and had to stay until I crawled out to the car at 2 am while complaining, “I went to work today! Or yesterday! What day is it? Why did you have to put ‘no kids’ in the invite? What kind of crappy parent would even think to bring their kids to this type of party anyway?”

Don’t answer that.

Typically we make cards for Valentines, but depending on whom you send cards to (males), it can be a complete waste. My mother was ready to strangle my brother through the phone when she discovered he’d tossed her beautiful $6 Christmas card. In his defense he said, “What else did you want me to do with it?” Survey says: she wanted you to keep it. Not forever. But at least until January 1st. “From now on he gets the cheap cards!” Another relative didn’t even bother to open his card. His response: “Oh, I threw it away. Thanks for the gift.” I wish I had been there to see him digging through the dumpster when he discovered I’d put money in it. Had he not found the envelope I was completely ready to lie and say, “There was $500 in that envelope! I can’t believe you threw away $500! I should be reimbursed!”

That would have made it the second best Christmas ever.

So it is officially established cards are off the list for men, but what’s an alternative? The following is an easy craft perfect for children to give to their parents, broke teenagers to give to each other, and women to give that special someone that screams, “I like you, but you’re not particularly useful and your FICO score is too low for this to go to the next level.”

Decorative Mugs
Supplies:
Ceramic mugs from IKEA
Sharpies---assorted colors
Rubbing alcohol
Paper towels
A watchful eye
Chocolate (optional)

1. Number the Sharpies. Honestly, the hardest part of this craft is keeping track of the pens.

2. Give each person 1 mug and 1 pen. Explain that when they are done they have to return the pen.

3. If they complain about the pen's color and, “I want purple!” tell them whining is not attractive and they need to switch with another person because you’re not giving them 2 pens and that’s life.

4. Let them decorate the mugs.

5. After they are finished decorating (which takes a lot longer than it seems possible with all the talking) get back 1 pen from each of them, not letting them leave until every pen is accounted for.

6. If a teen tells you they don’t have a pen, explain they’d better make one materialize out of thin air or prove there’s a ghost in the room.

7. Realize that despite all your hard work, you will always be 1-2 pens short of what you started with. If this makes you feel bad, eat some chocolate.

8. Use rubbing alcohol and paper towels to clean up the tables should any ink get on them. If you can’t find rubbing alcohol use hand sanitizer.

This craft is so easy, I wish there was an IKEA right in Elk Grove, and I’m not just saying that because I like to mindlessly wander through the store while eating cinnamon rolls.

Honestly!

And now, time for the perfect Valentine's Day song...

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!

The Teen Lantern

It’s been a while since I last blogged---I was preparing for the Iowa Caucuses with my “Election Season Should Only Last 6 Weeks Because We’re All Sick of You” platform.

(For those of you non-news watchers, I came in second behind Romney.)

Anyways, I recently opened an e-mail discussing summer reading program ideas, reached back through my pecan pie-induced brain fog and remembered that yes, this was discussed at the last Youth Services meeting. And all I could think is, “Nooooooo! It’s too early! I just barely remembered to block off the meeting room for April programs!” Because prepping for summer reading is like going to the mall right after Christmas and discovering that management is already merchandising the bikinis---it’s a reminder to drop the mouth-watering, succulent turkey drumstick out of your hand and dust off your gym membership.

Or at least buy some workout clothes.

Whatever the case may be, I decided to do lanterns. It’s something that all age groups can make. Besides, libraries may be low on money to buy, say, books, but we’re not running out of paper any year soon. Just the accidental one-line prints patrons leave behind are enough to keep our areas decorated with paper snowflakes for decades. And paper crafts seemed safer than doing anything on dream interpretation. Adults have issues, teens have issues, and think about all the issues kids must have, especially babies. Every night all babies likely dream about is people’s giant heads being right up in their faces and saying things they don’t understand like, “Goo goo, gaa gaa,” and “You’re going to have to figure out your own way to pay for college.” Still, lanterns seemed a little boring, and I needed to jazz it up a bit, hence, the Starry Night lantern. It combines the best of my creativity with a pre-made program listed in the summer reading binder, and it's fairly easy.

Supplies:
Paper
Colored pencils
Washable markers
Safety scissors
Rulers
Stapler

Tape

1. Color the Starry Night coloring sheet linked on the Enchanted Learning site.
To format, go into Print Preview. Turn off the headers, change the orientation to Landscape, change the custom enlargement to 215%, and set all margins to 0.3.

2. Fold the paper in half along the long side, picture-side out. Reverse the fold, turn it picture-side in.

3. Follow the lantern making instructions.

But why limit it to just Starry Night? You can color Sponge Bob or Dora the Explorer, or use Twilight coloring pages---yes, they do exist. (Scary, isn't it?)

Some call it love. I call it pedophilia. Everybody calls it a cash cow.

Stay tuned for more craft posts to come!

Learning From Elmo, Blue, and That Annoying Dora Girl

I love TV.

I watch a lot of TV. In fact, this entry was delayed because I was waiting to see if Nancy Grace would implode on live television with not-so-pent up rage. Then yesterday I spent the evening watching True Blood. Twice… …for the plot, of course. It’s soooo hard to keep track of the humans, vampires, were-people, witches and fairies, with people screaming, “You ate my fairy godmother!”

As a child I learned tons from TV. Like when General Hospital’s Frisco and Felicia got married, but they were too broke for a honeymoon so they went to his brownstone apartment and pretended to go places. (“Today we’re in the Middle East! Just don’t open the curtains…”) Deluding---sorry---pretending you’re elsewhere because you’re too broke to go there is a valid lesson for today.

This isn’t to say I spent most of my childhood watching a demon-possessed Marlena levitate. The great majority of what I watched was on PBS. I got the see my favorite person in the world, Miss Piggy, view Wild Kingdom, and witness Bob Ross paint happy little trees everywhere. Reading Rainbow, Schoolhouse Rock, many educational shows made up my viewing schedule. I thought I had a pretty good childhood…

Then I heard how horrible TV is for kids.

This I didn’t get. TV couldn't be all bad. After all, at least one child would have been strangled had I not been able to park him in front of Barney while I dismantled the VCR in order to repair the damage he’d done to it. True, if the only thing your child views is Maury Povich telling a man, “You are not the father!” while the mother runs off stage, this is not a good thing. But is TV necessarily bad? When I heard about the class “Learning from Elmo, Blue and Dora: Applying the Science of Children's Educational Television to Storytime,” I figured I needed to see what was up.

The presenters, Jennifer Bigheart and Maria Cahill, neither demonize or endorse television watching for children. One did not allow her children any screen time and the other said, “Go for it!” Fine, those were not her exact words. However, they discussed key elements of educational television that we can incorporate into our library programs:

Relevant themes
“How many story hours on teddy bears have you done?” one presenter asked. Answer: probably too many. We use colors, numbers and ABCs as themes. But when was the last time we did calendar, manners, weather or seasons themes? My season themes usually involve orange hand cutouts or snowflakes. They don’t exactly go into why we have season. That’s being corrected. Find more themes that are relevant to a child’s educational needs.

Non-fiction has a place
I love books in which frogs talk and eat bowls of flies. Pictures books are fine, yet we need to augment them with non-fiction material. Parents have a difficult time finding appropriate non-fiction materials for young children, so try reading the funny story during story hour and setting up a display of non-fiction books on the same topic.
Teachable moments
Our motion sensor lights were constantly turning off during programs. One time a toddler asked, “Why are the lights off?” I said the first thing that came to mind: “We are conserving energy.” Turns out, according to the presenters, this is the right thing to do. If something happens during your program, don’t ignore it; acknowledge it and talk about it for a while. Yes, it may lead to other questions and going off topic. This is a good thing.

Repetition
Did the kids really get into the story? Read it again! Okay, I won’t be doing that---it would drive me nuts. However, now that things float, you can order a few extra copies of a book and let the parents decide if they want to read the story over and over (and over) again without you unduly suffering.

Discussion
At the end of the story feel free to ask the children about the plot line. Establish that books have a beginning, middle and end. Ask, “What happened at the start of the story?” “Do you remember the main character’s name?” If there was a moral ask them what they thought it was. Was there bad behavior in the book? Ask them if it is appropriate to write on the bathroom wall with lipsticks and lotions like in 10 Little Lambs.

Variations
Pull an aspect out of a book and use variations of the word base. For example, when reading a book in which they drove a car, use the words drive, driving, drove, and driven. Reading a numbers book? Go over once, twice, thrice, first, second, third, etc.

Since I love Sesame Street, there is no way I am ending this without showing you my favorite clip ever!

ALA Wrap Up Q and A

Having attended several conferences (with the credit card bills to prove it), some of my fellow attendees have been texting and calling me with conference related questions. I thought I might share with everyone the answers to put your mind at ease if you, too, were wondering the same things but had no one to ask without fear of retribution. This is where I step in. Tabin to the rescue!

Q: How do I explain that I skipped a session?
A: If your supervisor asked you to attend a session, the only acceptable excuses for your absence had better involve copious amounts of blood, your water breaking, or alien abduction, and I'm not talking about the friendly aliens. I'm talking second head descends from major head, acid for blood, need-to-implant-something-in-your-belly aliens.

But if you've attended other sessions (bar sessions withstanding) and you are just plain worn out, you weren't doing anyone any favors by dragging yourself into a crowded room while looking like you had Ebola. With TSA rules we're unlikely to have had hand sanitizer handy, so you just placed visions-of-co-pays-dancing-in-our-heads. Not appreciated! If asked why you were absence, explain that you were in your hotel room recovering, or tell them you fell into the horse poop I almost stepped in on Bourbon Street, and that you had to decontaminate yourself.

Q: What if I didn't learn anything from my sessions?
A: Oh, you learned something all right. It just won't hit you for days, weeks or decades---take you're pick. Should you need to immediately present to your co-workers, select the session that stood out most to you, go over your notes, and fill your presentation with lots of words and pictures, etc. Everyone will be too distracted with your random use of bunnies and hot dogs to notice you babbled for 15 minutes.

Q: What if I threw away something important by accident?
A: Class notes are available on the ALA website, and everything else can be recreated. Believe me when I say the vendors will be more than happy to send you more. Check your e-mail. There's probably 20 duplicate copies waiting for you at this very moment.

Q: My co-workers and I were supposed to present separate PowerPoints, but we both attended the same sessions. What should I do?
A: Type faster than your co-worker.

Q: What do I do if I forgot my business cards? Does this mean my whole conference experience was a waste?
A: In my 5 years of attending conferences I have passed out hundreds of cards, yet I could count on one hand the number of people who called me, and half of them were part of a bachelor party that was flying on my plane. I wouldn't be overly concerned.

Q: What do I do with the business cards and flyers I did receive?
A: Before you toss everything into the recycling bin, try to remember not only what the vendors told you, but what your co-workers said they needed. Example: I don't need book carts. Why would I? I spend my day singing songs about pink pigs, directing people back to the first floor where the bathrooms and holds are, and telling teens things such as, "These are stairs, not chairs," and "In or out!" However, one of my friends needs book carts, thus when I saw them on sale (my favorite word in the world behind "chocolate," "free," and "massage") I texted her and saved the flyer. Maybe you had a good conversation with someone about storytime. Perhaps you will only contact one another once or twice over your career, but their offered info could save you a ton of time and effort, so go ahead and put them in your address book.

Q: I'm tired but my family is still bugging me. What do I do?
A: Toss them some packets of ramen noodles, a few Disney DVDs, and lock yourself in the bathroom until July 5th.

Okay, it's time for me to go recover.

Recently someone came in to get this CD, and I suddenly remembered how much I loved this album and after I hear I I'm suddenly not so tired. Enjoy!

And We're Off!

ALA New Orleans is right around the corner and I have been packing my bags---sans more than 3 ounces of liquid per containers that can fit in a 1 quart plastic bag, of course. It's a joy and a pain to go on a trip. First I had to make storytime arrangements and clean at work. Thanks to Stephenee, the Pink Piggy Song is already on YouTube, so that was one less melody I had to repeatedly sing to the other staff members. Then I had to clean at home. Though I don't live alone, it's nice to return to a nice clean haven. And if it's not clean, I have someone to else to not only blame for this mess, I can make it seem like they are responsible for all other messes created in my vicinity since the Reagan administration. Packing was actually the easiest thing, except for the part in which I poured my hair care products into tiny unmarked tubes. Thankfully I’m flying Southwest, the only airline that seems to realize people don’t wear all their clothes on top of each other like Shirley temple did in that movie I saw on TCM.

This is my most favorite time of the year: dress up time! I try to wear nice things to conference because, hey, I’m a librarian. Chances are slim to none for librarians to meet famous people once in their lives, let alone twice. Must make a good impression the first (and only) time around. It’s a time of year in which I get little sleep because I jam pack my schedule. It’s soooo exhilarating to run from one overlapping class to another and another while sweating profusely in nice clothes. And it’s also a time of year in which I just might get to see my family, only this time I’m doing on purpose and I won't screech at my mother, “You weren’t suppose to tell them I was in Chicago!”

This here is my niece. Isn’t she gorgeous? She looks even better without the lamination reflections. I’m looking forward to seeing her…if my brother can get the logistics together. After all, this is the brother I was supposed to see last week but didn’t. (His fault!) He also sent us to the wrong airport for his wedding, then tried to convince me that it was my idea. (It wasn’t!) So while I look forward to seeing her (and the high school graduation pictures he took of me but never gave me), I also signed up for a free cocktail party that night to avoid anyone seeing me crying in a bar. Alone. By myself. With no one. (Yes, I've learned guilt-tripping from my mother.) And I’d be crying because I want to see my family, and not because alcohol at non-library functions comes out of my pocket instead of a vendor's.

I used my niece’s cute little picture for our Mother’s Day placemat sample. If you, too, would like to make a this craft, it’s fairly simple.

1. Put up your sample work 2 weeks before the program and encourage people to bring adorable pictures from home.
2. Print out words on card stock (Mommy’s Little Angel, Baby’s First Christmas, Toddler’s Third Tantrum, etc.)
3. If you do not have a die-cut machine, have teenage "volunteers" cut out cute little flowers/3 leaf clovers/make homemade confetti with the hole punch.
4. Set out glue sticks, stickers, etc. and let people create their own piece of art. (Word of advice---don’t make the mistake of leaving a stray foam sticker or two in the mix.)
5. Have a volunteer laminate the placemat.

Hopefully, if I'm not too busy roaming in search of free food, I will blog from the conference instead of saving it up. Have fun---I will!

M. Butterfly

I haven’t blogged in a loooonnngg time.

No, it wasn’t just because I was busy watching the final season of the Oprah Winfrey Show. (My chances of winning a free trip to Australia have drastically plummeted…) Blogging is like exercising. When you’re into it, you’re into it. You have your cute gear on, your hair is up in a bouncy ponytail, your lipstick is on but your foundation is off--- it’s pretty hard to work out with L’Oreal running into your eye. When you’re not into exercise, you’re lying on the couch eating sugar cookies and channel flipping while wondering why that Nora Roberts' movie you swore you were going to watch last year is taking up valuable space on your DVR. What usually gets you up is either you realize you’re expected to fit into a swimsuit---a real one, not a string-one-size-fits-all-bikini. Or someone says, “Hey, did you know you’re morphing with the sofa?”

So when someone recently pointed out that I hadn’t blogged in a while, I thought, why not? There are plenty of books and crafts and TMI things I have to share, and not just with SPL librarians on SharePoint. All the adult participants of my craft programs want to know how to do some of the cooler crafts without having to comb through 15 books filled with impossible to make cards that require wire clippers, blow torches, and 2 weeks of planning.


I came up with this card after going online and realizing a lot of kids card crafts are ugly. Yes, I said it. Ugly. Hideous. Just plain wrong. You smile when they give them to you, but part of you wants to go all Tiger Mom and scream, “This is garbage! But I only say that because I love you…” I started thinking of how to jazz things up when my inner-Martha Stewart took over. The thing is, Sharpies and White Out are not items you want to turn over to a group of children, thus the butterflies were made beforehand. It’s not as difficult as, say, making the Four Season’s duck recipe (takes four days), but there is a learning curve. Sad to say, I can now turn out a butterfly in about 90 seconds, which means I surely have brain damage from the fumes.

Materials:
Card stock
Orange paper
Black sharpies
White out
Colored paper---yellow, plus colors of your choosing
Scratch paper
Glue sticks

Nice to have:
Volunteers
A room with ventilation (or a rock to throw through the window since ours don’t open)

For the card base:

1. The writing.
There are several ways to go with this. I printed “You are the sunshine of my life” directly onto my model card, but for the program I printed out cute sayings on colored paper to allow the kids to pick from. For the inside, I printed out poems to glue inside.

2. The flowers.
Find your desired flower template. Create two flowers using this template. Then take the second flower and trim the perimeter so that it can one flower can sit atop the other. Use these two different sizes to create masses of flowers. (Or e-mail me for some leftovers.) I traced a glue stick onto yellow paper for the center of the flower. (Please don’t tell the kids you are making the ovary of the flower---this will bring up questions you don’t want to answer.)

For the butterflies:

1. Make butterflies using orange paper.
We didn’t have a die cut machine, so we used Elk Grove High School students desperate for volunteer assignments that didn’t involve picking trash off the side of the road. If you need a template Central has this die cut shape, or I can send something over via inter-office mail.

2. Place the butterfly on scratch paper. Fill in the body and outline the shape with a black sharpie. Draw lines in the center bisecting lines.


3. Begin drawing in the other lines.
This is something you might not want to hand over to a sophomore who needs 10 hours of community service by tomorrow. If you don’t have time to closely supervise this work, only let trusted volunteers do this part.



4. Dot the lines created in step two with White Out.
Err on the side of stingy dots. You can draw over your mistakes on the black lines, but you can’t “white out” orange paper. Afterwards go outside and breath fresh(er) air.


5. After it is dry, flip over and repeat.
I only did the middle and right side of the other side, since the left part of it will not show.
6. Bend the butterfly in half.
You don’t want a crisp fold because the butterfly will look less perched-on-a-flower than it will look squashed-under-a-shoe.

7. Remember that perfection is the enemy of Getting Things Done.
Yes, it would have been nice if all the butterflies turned out perfectly. They won’t. Some staff members helped out and said, “I’m sorry, but mine doesn’t look like yours do.” My response: “So? They’re kids. I’m not worrying that an 8 year old might complain that the line’s not perfect.”

Putting it all together:

1. Do the inside of the card first, so as not to mess up the outside.
This is the time to glue in poems, love letters, baby pictures, ultrasounds, etc.

2. Glue the saying and flower(s) onto the front of the card.
Some kids will go all out and layer 3 dozen. Whatever floats their boats is fine.

3. Glue the butterfly atop the card.

And there you have it. I really don't know how long this craft takes because I broke it into many different parts, but the kids loved it and were really impressed. Of course children are also impressed by the magic of jello and finding pennies on the ground, but I take what I can get. Enjoy!