DIY: Pasta Beads

I have been planning this beading project for weeks now, I have already accumulated all the materials needed but can't find time to do it because we're pretty busy at work now plus all the stuffs and preparations we need to do for our Christmas party. Finally I was able to do it last week since I was on my 1 week Christmas leave.

These pasta beads are actually easy to make, but will need several hours to let them fully dry.

Materials:
-macaroni pasta
-food coloring
-plastics/ziplocks

Steps:
Put about a half cup of macaroni pasta (uncooked) inside a plastic, one for each color you want to make. Add 10-15 drops of food coloring, or you may mix alcohol with the food coloring first before pouring into the macaroni, I guess it will be easier to dye the pasta this way.

Seal your plastic and shake until all pasta is fully dyed. Yo may ass more dye if you want a brighter color.

Open the plastic and allow them to sit for  awhile.

Then lay them out on a tray lined with plastic to let them dry fully.

Beading activity is a great fine motor skill activity. I have been engaging Jashley with this kind of activities lately to help her refine her movement. I love that even her concentration skill is developing with this activity.

We use colorful fuzzy pipe cleaners with these DIY beads for our beading activity, you may use strings or ribbons tied on one end for older kids.

We have used this also on one of our sorting and counting activity, that will help her building her math skills.

That's it for now. We're looking forward for more activities using these colorful pasta beads.

DIY: Movable Flat Marble Alphabets

Most of the Montessori Teaching tools I am checking online were a little expensive. And If you know me so well, this frugal Mamma won't spend much on those expensive items, I will always find a much cheaper alternative or rather make my own.

I am wanting to buy the Melissa and Doug movable letters since I saw them on the bookstore last month but the price of it was way way out of my budget. We have a set of these magnetic ones that I bought from the toy store for around 100php but the set only consist of 1 piece per letter, meaning I have to buy a few more set because some activities that I have in mind would require around 2-3 pieces of some of the letters. For example; a spelling activity of Lady Bug's name, her 2 names will be needing 3 letter L, If I'm going to buy 2 or 3 more set of these letters that would cost me 300php.

So I have been searching for a cheap alternative and that would only mean DIY. I am so happy when I found a site that has a step by step instruction for a DIY Movable Flat Marble Alphabets. I'm sure that those flat marbles were so cheap and can be bought on the local flower shops.

You wouldn't believe how much I spent on this project. The print-out for the disk letters which I layout on Photoshop and the flat marbles are the only items I paid for that is intended for this project, and it only cost me 60php for the 2 packs of flat marbles that contains around 60pcs each pack and 5php for the print out. Glue and paint brush were items from previous projects. I was able to make 4 pcs (1 capital and 3 small letters) of each of the letters of the alphabet for less than 100php.

So following the instruction from this site, we now have our own DIY Movable Flat Marble Alphabets that we can use on our next activities.

Here's my Little Lady Bug having her name spelling activity using our movable letters.

That's it for now, if you want to have a copy of my movable disk letters you may download from this link, and fit it on an A4 size paper. Thanks for stopping by!

DIY: Halloween Clown Costume

Sharing you my DIY Halloween Costume that Jashley wore on our company Halloween Party last Month.

Materials:
tulle (I used around 2.5 yards of tulle or 0.5 yard per color)
elastic/garter
ribbons
pompoms/buttons
bow-tie
plain sando/shirt
scissor
glue gun & glue sticks
sewing stuffs
colorful stripped tights

Procedure:
For the tutu skirt.
1. Measure waist. Make your elastic into loop and sew the overlap ends (subtract 2-3 inches smaller as the elastic will stretch)
2. Cut your tulle into strip. The length should be twice of your desired skirt length. The number of pieces of these strips will depend how full you want your skirt.

3. Put the elastic onto something that can hold it nicely for you.

4. Fold the tulle strips in half, put the folded end of the strip under the elastic, open the folded end, then slip up the other end through it to make a slipknot. Repeat the process until the entire elastic band is covered with tulle. Make sure that the knots were tight by pulling them, so it won't look lumpy on waist.

For the top.
1. Get a plain shirt/sando. In my case since I don't want to spend much money on this project, I just used whatever plain top available on my daughter's closet.

2. Sew a row of brightly colored buttons or pompoms. Better if you have large ones but since I only have small pompoms, what I did was make a tulle flower first then used the pompoms as a center ornament for the flower to make it look bigger.
3. Sew a length of ribbon on each front side of the top. These ribbons represents the suspenders of  the clown pants.
4. Sew a bow-tie under the chin area of the top. In my case since I don't have a bow-tie, I made it using the scrap tulle from the tutu skirt, you can use other fabric if you have one.

For the bottom I just bought a colorful stripped tights that she wore under her tutu skirt. For the shoes, clown shoes are usually big and over-sized but since I don't want to spend much for this costume we just settled on whatever shoes she have that will look fine on her outfit.

So there you go that was my DIY clown costume for my little cutie clown here. This is so easy that I managed to make this a night before the event.

By the way I DIY'ed also her colorful hair clips. You just need to cut a few strip of ribbon of the same length, fold them in half and glue their ends, take 1 folded strip of ribbon put a small blob of glue on the ends, layer your next folded strip slightly over the initial strip. Continue the entire way around your flower. For the embelishment I used an old ribbon from one of her broken hair clips and glued it at the center of the flower. Then attached a clip under the flower. Easy peasy.

Till next DIY. =)