crooked house

Luke's Lego Minifig Costume

He wanted it to look exactly like his minifig character in Lego Universe and he's very pleased with the result. I'd like to print out the Lego logo and glue it to the front of the body but Luke's not having any of that.

We took some inspiration from these extremely handy fellows but simplified, simplified, simplified. The fancy costumes they made -- they're practically perfect replicas -- took 40-50 hours each to make and required the use of a variety of power hand tools. Ours took probably 4 hours, tops.

For the mask, we used two sheets of yellow craft foam, taped together with yellow duct tape. Luckily, the tape and the foam were the same perfect colour. The  most finicky part was using said yellow duct tape to fasten a flat circle cut frome the same kind of foam to the top of the mask. We ended up using the glue gun as well and just fiddled a lot. The eyes were a bit fiddly, too -- they needed to look like minifig eyes but they also needed to be in the right places for Luke to see through them. We marked the positions of his eyes with a pencil and used an exacto knife to cut out circles. (Note: NOT while Luke was wearing the mask.) The smile was drawn on with a sharpie marker.

The little round connecter on the very top of the mask and the hands were both made from little round craft boxes we found at Walmart for two dollars each. For the top, we just covered it in the yellow duct tape and hot-glued it on. For the hands, we cut out the bottoms of the boxes, snipped a section out of the sides, covered them in yellow duct tape, and taped them to the backs of fingerless gloves that Luke keeps tucked inside his sleeves. (We had a pair of red mittens that would have worked better but Luke insisted that he will need his fingers free to select his Halloween treats.)

We purchased two cardboard display boards, one in red and one in blue, and simply cut out a front and back from the red in the correct shape for the body. We hotglued two strips of red fleece, cut from an old blanket, to them for shoulder straps. The body fits him like a sandwich board. (The cardboard display boards  each cost $11 at a craft store -- if you wanted to save money, you could just use any old cardboard and paint it.)

The legs are also glued to a strip of red fleece that wraps around Luke's middle and is fastened in the back with a couple of safety pins. If I had to do it again, I think I'd make the legs out of one piece of cardboard instead of two, as they tend to get kicked out to the sides as he walks.

When Luke isn't wearing his costume, Sylvie likes to put on the mask and walk around intoning "I BE ROBOT. I BE ROBOT." We have no idea where she picked this up.

It's been a busy couple of weeks for minifigs -- a mysterious 8-foot-tall one recently washed up on a beach in Florida.

That Was Dumb, Wasn't It?

Vintage telephone ad from here.

Luke: Mommy, could you call [my friend] and ask her to come over and play?

Steph: Why don't you call her?

Luke: I'm too shy to speak to her father.

Steph: Well, you have to get over that. I used to be very shy, too, and my mother made all my telephone calls for me. Then, when I was teenager and went away to live by myself and go to university, I remember that I was afraid to call the hair salon to make an appointment to get my hair cut! That was dumb, wasn't it?

Luke: Yeah, you never should have lived alone.

 

 

For My Brother

Wish you could come home.

Vivi's New Hat

Sylvie picked this hat up in the costume section at the drugstore this morning. (Only two bucks and  change!) It gets her so many compliments I'm thinking of getting one for myself.

Things That Caught My Eye This Week

I have a soft spot for the Enid Blyton book The Magic Faraway Tree as it is the first book I can remember my mother reading to me and many of the fantasy games I played in childhood were based on it. The house we grew up in was surrounded by trees and we named the largest one after it. This mom makes one out of cardboard for her kids to play with -- she is very faithful to the details.

You must watch the British family sitcom Outnumbered.  Apparently it is largely unscripted, and it is hilarious. The kids, especially. Via My Porch. You can watch oodles of clips on youtube, if that link doesn't work for you. I would love to be a fly on the wall while they film this -- wonder what the process is and just how much the kids come up with on their own.

In the United States, you can get excellent postage rates on unusually shaped items that weigh less than 13 ounces. The people in this flickr group share the fun things they've sent through the mail. I need to check if similar rates apply here in Canada as it'd be neat to send some of these things to the  kids' cousins on the other side of the country.

Here is a really great-looking recipe for Brains in a Jar. Probably doesn't taste half-bad either. Would love to make these for Luke's class. Via notmartha.

An interesting post on apothecary show globes.

Joanna Goddard is starting an articles club, instead of a book club. She's starting with this article, in which the author advocates calmly ignoring one's partner when he or she claims to want a divorce.

 

Barbie and the Plus-Sized Model

Beautiful (and apparently plus-sized) model Katie Halchishick is featured in the latest issue of O, holding a naked Barbie. Katie's naked, too, except for the dotted lines where a plastic surgeon or a photo re-toucher would have to get to work to make her look like the doll.  Read more about it over at the blog Katie helped found, Healthy is the New Skinny.

My Article For Brain, Child Magazine: Who We Think We Are

Some months ago I did a little genealogical research and discovered that my children are descended from royalty. I wrote an article about it for the current issue of Brain, Child magazine: 

Friedrich III, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and his wife Eleanor of Portugal were, Ancestry.com told me, the thirteenth great grandfather and grandmother of my husband! There were even pictures of them—well, paintings. There was Great Great Grandpa Friedrich getting introduced to Great Great Grandma Eleanor by the pope, as painted by Pinturicchio. There was a portrait of Friedrich looking steely-eyed and a bit jowly, the way my husband sometimes looks while watching his favorite hockey team lose. And here was a portrait of Eleanor peering wistfully at a flower, something about her expression, the lines of her face, reminding me of my son’s when I told him enough with the video games.

Because excellent records are kept by royalty—in a sense their family history is everyone’s history—once you find a connection to a king, it is possible to go back for generations and generations. I surfed for hours, looking at photographs of a golden crown that had once rested on the head of the fifteenth great grandfather of my children. I started planning summer vacations to the palaces their ancestors had once lived in. I began researching language tuition in German and Spanish for the children, never mind the fact that their ancestors lived so long ago they would’ve spoken entirely different versions of those languages. Basically, I stopped just short of writing to request invitations to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding.

With their bloodlines becoming clearer, some of my children's quirks began to make sense. The way my six-year-old son still wanted me to dress him in the morning, as if I were his valet. My two-year-old daughter's insistence on wearing a pair of golden slippers at all times and her particularly erect posture and imperious manner. ("Play cars, Mama!" she commands with a little wave of her hand and a slight, dignified inclination of her head. "Sit here!" she orders, pointing to a particular spot on the floor, her stern expression demonstrating that she will not tolerate dissent. "Dis one, Mama!" she says, handing me her preference when I pick up the wrong one. And then, "Vivi's turn first!")

This intriguing discovery was, for lack of a better word, brief. You'll have to get your hands on a copy of the magazine to find out the rest.

When Vivi Is Quiet

The other day we were given a four-hour window in which to expect some men to come and remove our old refrigerator. We waited a very long  three hours and forty-five minutes and then Sylvie got mysteriously quiet. I found her like this and then, of course, the doorbell rang.

House Made From Bookshelves

An award-winning house in Japan, made of bookshelves. Via Charles and Hudson.

Lego Minifig Halloween Costume

Image found here from the book The Cult of LEGO.

Luke wants to be a Lego Minifig (Majifig?) for Halloween. I can't seem to a costume to buy anywhere, which seems a major oversight on the part of Lego, and so far all the instructions I've found online for making the rounded yellow helmet seem unduly complicated. Does anyone have any ideas on how to make such a costume simply?

Or maybe I could just find him a Newt Gingrich mask. Bonus: it would be much scarier.