making a robot (that is wearable)

I had a food delivery sent to me by courier and it came in a huge box. I joked to my son that I could turn it into a giant turtle for him, he said no it could be a robot. Hence this post, we made a robot. I am adding how and what we did below. I don't have photos of every step we did, but it was very easy to do.

EQUIPMENT

1 large cardboard box, 1 smaller cardboard box, pieces of cardboard, duct tape in grey/silver, scissors, tin foil (or silver paper, or paint if you dont mind waiting), a tumble dryer pipe for arms, odds and ends as decoration/buttons, imagination

Tape the big box together securely but leave one end open. Work out where the head will go and cut out a circle. Cover the edge with duct tape so no sharp edges.

the kitten helps cut out the head!

Next you need to cut out some of the base (so child can get into the robot once it's all sealed). Don't go all the way to all sides as it will loose it's strength. As with the head go
round the base with duct tape so no sharp edges. Go over all parts of the box "that should open" with duct tape so it is fully sealed and more secure.

Once you have a head and base hole you can work out where the arm holes need to go, cut them out (make big enough to allow for clothing and more tape) and add duct tape over the edges. Tape the open side of the box together so you have a solid sealed box. You should have a box "outfit" your child can get into like the image right.

We then measured the distance between the top of the smaller box and sons head so we could work out where the eyes needed to go, instead of cutting circles we cut a rectangle right across the front (so he could see even if he turned his head slightly), as with base hole don't cut all the way across leave some on each side for strength. Cut a smaller rectangle for the mouth. Go over the edges of both with duct tape.

Next we fixed the smaller box to the top (over the head hole), we fixed it on with the top flaps open, so it had the whole open part as space. We cut lengths of the tumble dryer pipe to use as arms (this was an old one heading for the bin).

Our next move was to make the robot silver. We spray painted the tumble dryer pipes silver (as well as some of the patio and ourselves!) and left them to dry. We only did the outside. My son found some silver shiny wrapping paper with white stars all over it that he liked and wanted to use for the body. He wanted the head plain silver so we used tin foil. We covered the head first and secured it with more duct tape. Then we covered the body with the wrapping paper, i had to do it in bits due to the holes (and the bar code on box my son wanted to keep), I held the joins in place with normal selotape whilst i cut and sorted then secured with duct tape.

Once it was all covered i put duct tape around both ends of the tumble dryer pipe to cover the metal that had been snapped to break the tube, i then fixed them to the arm holes with more duct tape. Hopefully you have something that looks like our robot to the right.

We still need to add buttons and bits to our robot but this is the main construction complete.

HOWEVER, my robot making and craft skills didn't end here as my son decided that he wanted the robot to have a pet kitten, cue more boxes, tape and stuff. The pieces were collected (see below) and made into shapes, spray painted and duct taped together. this didnt take as long as the main robot did.

My son is very happy with his robot and robot cat and has decided to use them in his school homework and has written a story about them.

I hope that you have as much fun as we did.

*NOTE* i am not linked to the duct tape brand, nor am i being asked to promote them. the tape i use is from £1 shop or other cheap shops as it's just for crafts. We use loads in the things we make so i cant justify using expensive brands for it. I have also bought different colours from shops (like aldi) when they have had on offer.

Shut in with the children - things to do

SO, in light of the current situation around the UK linked to Coronavirus Covid-19, you have found your self on isolation with the children and you don't know what to do. I  have added some ideas below, not all are mine but some have been copied from posts on Facebook and other sites (I will credit where this is due.) They also don't include them being on technology (bonus). Many can be done with things you have around the house so wont cost anything.

The following items are things i have on a chart from school holiday activities for my children to do.

I hope that the above is readable.

The following lego ideas were taken off a page on Facebook (no idea of the original creator). They do seem a bit hard for some children, but you could alter them to the age of your children.

Also with lego you could make a model and then explain to your children how to make it without them actually seeing your model. EG you need a red piece with 8 raised dots, fix that to the bottom of a green 8piece so you have an "L" shape. this can be a fun activity as you get a wide range of models made.

• Pinterest is a godsend for ideas of things to do and you can find many for different ages.

• Teachers pay teachers website has worksheets if you want to do school type work (there are many free sheets as well as paid ones)

• twinkle has a good selection of worksheets and activities, as does activity village, some are free some are not.

There are many other ideas on my blog, please take a look for some ideas.

Take this time stuck at home to enjoy your children, make it a fun time to take their mind off the worries linked to the virus.

December 21st 2015 - junk modelling

my lil man loves nothing more than being able to make junk models from empty tubes, boxes and tape. 

We have been trying to stop him making anymore before christmas as 1. we have tidied things away and 2. so that he has extra boxes n tubes to go with the big box of odds n sods my sister has collected and bought him for christmas.

Well I had to nip out today and when I come home he was running around with a 2ft junk model space ship that he had made!  He was so proud bless him, and it does look good.

December 9th 2015 - Christmas cookies

Tonight at St John Ambulance we are going to be decorating some Christmas Cookies.  This pin of tea cakes into Christmas puddings is just 1 of the things we are doing.

To make a Tea cake Christmas pudding like this:

You will need the following:
chocolate teacakes
white icing (or melted white chocolate)
red icing balls (or red icing pens/red sweets)
green icing leaves (green icing pens)

They are very simple to make: 

Take a tea cake and unwrap it carefully.  Place the foil wrap pattern side up on the plate and place your tea cake back on it.  Place a spoonful of thick white icing on the top of the tea cake and let it drip down the sides.  Add 2 of the red icing berries and a couple of the green icing trees as holly leaves in the middle.

Another  thing we are going to be doing is decorating gingerbread men:

 You will need the following:

Gingerbread men (pre-made)

white icing

chocolate buttons

decorations for face - sweets/icing pens etc

Take a gingerbread man and some icing and place on top.  You can use the icing balls (assorted colours) as eyes, mouth and nose or choc drops (baking).  you can use the icing balls or chocolate buttons as buttons.

The third thing on our decorating list is gingerbread reindeers:

You will need the following:

gingrebread men (pre made)

icing pens

red icing balls

green icing leaves

chocolate button for nose

Take a gingerbread man and turn it upside down so that the head is facing downwards.  Using small amounts of icing draw antlers in the "leg area", turn the "arms" into ears and then add a face using icing balls or choc drops (baking) and a chocolate button for a nose.

The last thing on our decorating list is melted snowman biscuits:

 You will need the following:

 digestive biscuits

thick white icing

icing pens

white marshmallows

 

Take 1 digestive biscuit, place a blob of white icing on top of it, stick a white marshmallow at one side.  Add 3 buttons (icing balls (assorted colours) infront of the head.  You can either use the icing balls or icing pens to make the eyes and nose and mouth.  Scarf is optional as are the arms.

Hopefully it should be a good fun night for them all and they make some lovely snacks to take home.  The ideas may also give parents ideas as what to do over the holidays.

November 30th 2015 - Christmas gift box

I have spent today playing about with bits of paper and cardboard trying to make christmas gift boxes for my SJA cadets to make on wednesday night.

I did have a tree shaped box that I planned to use but when I printed them and tried to make 1 it didn't stand up so the template shape is wrong.  So I had to look for a replacement.  The replacement works ok and I have printed them off ready.

Each box will have a couple of sweets placed inside them.

November 25th 2015 - Christmas Crafts

 I was at the school for family learning today and we were doing Christmas Crafts and making things that could be given as gifts.

There was loads of options for them to do.  They had the option of making tree decorations from sewing kits, making christmas pictures, and many more.

Lil man made a reindeer from brown paper and added magic reindeer food to it and needs to sprinkle it on christmas eve.

The middle one made a christmas bauble but as this was still very wet it got left at school to dry and 1 of the teachers will give them out later.

Lil man decorated a mini treasure chest and said that him and Daddy are going shopping for a diamond ring me to go in it.

They both  made snowman countdowns to christmas.  This confused lil man as he thought it was from today and didnt realise it was from dec 1st, but we explained he was fine.

The boys also decorated cakes as melted snowmen but these got eaten.

We also made candy cane star decorations which involved a hot glue gun to fix them together and to fix the decorations onto them.

november 24th 2015 - jazzing up xmas jumpers

A couple of weeks ago I bought the kids xmas jumpers and although they have designs on them they are very plain and boring!  So I asked the kids if they wanted them made better and they did.  So today has been spent jazzing up the jumpers

Here are the 2 original jumpers:

 

To modify the 1st 1 lil man asked for a santa hat to be added, so I took 1 small santa hat, stitched it together and then to his jumper.

Lil man thinks his jumper looks good and is now ready for xmas jumper day.

The middle ones jumper wasn't such an easy task, well it was but it just took longer to do as I had to wait for bits to dry.  He wanted the baubles on the reindeer to look more 3d, I did think pompoms but it didn't look right so I decided on bells!  

I only had gold effect bells and they didn't look right so I set about painting them with blue nail varnish:

They had to have 2 coats and I was only able to paint the tops and then the bottoms each time because of placing them down to dry.  Once both coats and all of the bells were done I set about attaching them to his jumper with black thread in the same place as the sewn on ones are on his jumper.

so now when he moves he jingles.  He did ask about them going on the back as well as it's the back of the reindeer but we decided not to as they may dig into his back when he's sat on a chair at school.  Again he is happy with his jumper.

November 22nd 2015 - toilet roll yule log

 I'm sure by now you are aware that my lil man loves making things, and especially likes using toilet rolls.  Today he came downstairs with 2 toilet rolls and asked what he could make.  He was told to wait 5mins as I was helping his older brother with something but I had an idea for a Christmas craft with them.

5mins later, we are working on making pages to print out and collecting our supplies to make the toilet roll yule log.  To make it you will need the following things:

toilet roll tube
double sided tape
pictures of holly (or plastic holly)
birchwood effect printed paper (if you do the whole of an A4 sheet it will cover 2 tubes)
fake snow (optional)
glue (optional but needed for snow)
robin
paper plate
stapler
scissors

supplies and printed birchwood paper and holly.











Cut the paper in half so you have 2 pieces.  place a line of tape from 1 end to the other on the tube.  put 1 piece of the paper over the tape and wrap all the way round (you may need to cut it slightly smaller).  Make sure both ends are fixed with tape on the tube, you shouldn't be able to see anyvof the brown tube now.  If your paper is longer than the tube you can tuck the excess into the open ends of the tubes.

Take the stapler, the wrapped tube and the paper plate, fix the tube to the plate with the stapler on the middle of the tube so they are no visible from the top.

You next to cut to out the holly.  we flipped our picture b4 printing so that we could double side it but you dont have to.  As ours is double sided I taped them together before we cut them out so only cut once.   Lil man folded our leaves slightly so they had shape rather than looking flat.  We then putt a small piece of tape on the underside of the berries and stuck to the middle of the tube.  This was then stapled as they kept falling off with tape.

Sadly this was as far as we got as we realised we didn't have any robins to fix  into the middle and we cant add fake snow until we have the robbins in place.  I have ordered some robins and they should be here in the next few days.

November 18th 2015 - Snowman card

As there is only a few weeks until Christmas we are doing Christmas crafts at St John Ambulance for all the youth members as part of their craft badges.

Tonight the Badgers made Snowman Christmas Cards like the link shows.  I had made them all scarves from plaited wool, cut out triangle noses from orange paper, added  googly eyes to the bag along with plain white card.  I showed them the card I had made and left them to do them how they wanted.

Some added christmas tape others added buttons etc.  They all looked really good and i'm sure whoever they were written to will love them.

October 28th 2015 - paper pumpkin

 today was the last of our halloween crafts before the party.  We made paper pumpkins similar to these.  ours were made with orange and yellow paper and we stapled them together as couldnt find any glue.

I havent been able to add a picture as i cant find where lil man put it.  All i know is that it didnt go with us to the party.

October 19th 2015 - purse

I have a small purse that is pocket size and great.  But I wanted another couple and was struggling to find them online at a sensible price.

So I took out the material box and some old clothes that were going to charity shops with zips in and set about making a new purse.

I have never stitched in zips to  things before, so the first of the purses I cheated and used the material that was already around the zip in the trousers and cut and stitched to the size I was after.  I over stitched the end of the zip and then coated it in superglue so that it should hold. (green in pic).

For the 2nd purse I half cheated as had a pocket that had been cut from an old pair of jeans, it still had the outer part of the jeans as well as the denim lining so all I had to do was attach the zip.  It took 2 attempts to get it in right but it worked.

Now you may be wondering why I would want multiple purses if I already have a good/nice one. Well as i'm off to London in a couple of weeks I don't want to keep all my money in 1 purse together incase it gets stolen.  At least if I have a couple of purses I can split my money and where they are on my person = less likely to loose all of it.

October 17th 2015 - paper book folding

I have spent today again trying to come up with easy crafts that are suitable for both boys and girls for my St John Cadets to do that are not the "normal" cut and stick kiddie crafts.

I have a pile of books upstairs that are going to the charity shop, so I decided to try and make a paper book folding christmas tree.  Looks easy enough so I had a go.

The insctructions I found were in German so I had to hunt for some in English asn translation didn't make sense.

Anyway, take a book and remove the cover and take out about 60pages leaving the glue on the spine, the more pages you use the thicker the finished tree will be but it will take longer to do:

From here you need to start folding pages like you would to make a paper airplane!  Make sure you have the spine to the left when you start as its easier.  Take the top right corner and fold down to the spine and crease so its a sharp fold (I use and old store card):

Then you need to take the section and fold onto itself so that you get a thin point at the top and airplane shape, again crease so its a sharp fold:

You will notice that the bottom of the folded page sticks out below the bottom of the book, this also need folding.  If you bend it down over the rest of the book you will get a fold mark, using this tuck the bottom bit upwards so that it is hidden under the 2nd fold:

Keep folding the rest of the pages in the above way (it is time consuming but worth it):

Then once you have folded all the pages you will need to staple the 1st and last pages together to make it as a cone shape and it will look like this:

It is now upto you if you decorate it or leave it plain.  I am going to add a glitter paint to the folded part of each page that makes the tree and add some sparkly stars and a pom pom to the top.

please make sure if doing with children that the books are suitable incase they decide to read any of the pages!  I had planned to use the books that I have upstairs for charity shop but as I made this 1 I realised they are NOT suitable and will still be going to charity shop, so I will be going to buy some more suitable ones (maybe from the kids/teens section).

October 16th 2015 - Christmas Candy Sleighs

I know it is only October and we haven't got as far as Halloween BUT I needed to sort out some craft activities for St John Ambulance including 1 week where they are in uniform which means no paint, glitter or glue or anything that would make a mess.   Yea not the easiest of tasks in the world!

Then I remembered the Christmas Candy Sleighs I made for the boys teachers 2 Christmas's ago - they were very easy to make and used double sided tape.

These were the ones I made for the teachers.  They look pretty good and the teachers liked them.

Que me going shopping for sweets and chocolate to make them.  £19.81 later I have everything I need to make a new demo version and enough sweets for 19 children to make sleighs - that work out at £1 per child - when you put it that way you cant really complain especially as 4 bar kit kats are 79p each in my local shop.  The sweets were from b&m, home bargains and poundland, all in multi-packs.

Take 1 huge pile of sweets:

And  split them to what you need - 1 kit kat, 2 twix bars, 2 maoam blocks, 1 orange segment, 1 choc santa and 2 candy canes:

And you are almost ready to make the sleighs.  You also need 2 pieces of christmas ribbon and either double sided tape or sticky glue dots.

Step 1. Take out your kit kat and 2 twix bars.  Place the Kit kat right way up on the table.  Take 1 of the twix bars and a glue dot to each end on the back, then push down onto the back of your kit kat.  Do the same for 2nd twix and stick infront of the 1st one. You can add a sticky dot between the 2 twix bars to keep them together.

 

Step 2. Place kit kat on the table.  Take 1 of your 2 maoam bars, add a glue dot to each end of it on the back and stick on top of the twix bars.  Do this for the 2nd maoam as well.  You can add a glue dot between the 2 so they stay together. 

 

Step 3.  Place your kit kat on the table.  Take your orange segment and put a glue dot on each end on the base.  Stick this at the back on top of the maoam blocks. 

 

Step 4.  Take your Santa and place a glue dot on the base and 1 on the back about half way up.  Place Santa infront of the bars on the kit kat. 

Step 5.  Take 1 of the candy canes, put a glue dot on the top near the straight end, a glue dot in the middle and a glue dot near the curve.  Stick this to one side of the base of the kit kat.  Do the same for the other candy cane.  The curves need to be at the front near Santa. 

Step 6.  Take 1 piece of the Christmas ribbon.  Place a glue dot in the middle of the kit kat on the base and place the middle of the ribbon on it.  Take the ends up and over the sweet “parcels” and fix with a glue dot on the top.

 

Step 7. Take the other piece of the Christmas ribbon, tie both ends of the ribbon together in a knot.  Place a glue dot just infront of Santa and fix the knotted it to it (leave the knot to flap about like reins).  Take the rest of the ribbon under the front of the sleigh, stick to the glue dot from 1st ribbon if possible and bring up the back of the sweet “parcels” and fix on the glue dot on the top.

 

You now have a sleigh with reins. 

Some websites say to make these with hot glue or super glue - i dont reccommend this as the glue melts the plastic wrappers of the sweets and ends up touching the sweets making them un-eatable.  Therefore it is safer (especially if being done with children) to use double sided tape of sticky glue dots.

October 12th 2015 - Frankenstein repair kit

Following on from previous Halloween posts and apothecary bottles I have spent today making a Frankenstein repair kit.  

This has to be one of the easiest apothecary bottles you can make.  You need the following items:

An empty spice bottle.

An assortment of screws, nails, bolts, pieces of wire, springs etc.

Combine them together and seal the lid to itself and then to the jar with a strong glue like UHU.  Allow to dry.  Then you can add a label that says:

And you  have your finished frankenstein repair kit in a bottle ready to add to your apothecary shelf.

October 5th 2015 - tshirt 2 pillow

October 5th 2015 - tshirt 2 pillow

Last year myself and a friend in USA did a christmas gift swap based on Elves.  It was great.  We decided that we would do it again for this year.   Just after christmas last year I picked up a baby tshirt that said "I Elves they have magical powers".  My friend doesn't have a baby so this may seem like a strange thing to buy for her.  However, I had plans for the tshirt.  And that plan was to turn the tshirt into a pillow.

I started off  by cutting the long sleeves to just below the arm holes (as you don't need long sleeeves or extra pieces of material as they will just get in the way.)  I then stitched up the arm holes and along the base of the tshirt:

 I then started to stuff the tshirt via the head hole and pushed it down into the tshirt.  The stuffing is from a quilt I bought for this type of craft.  Its cheaper to buy new quilts and rip the stuffing out of than it is to buy bags of toy stuffing which is exactly the same thing!  Once it was fully stuffed I stitched up the head hole.

And have a finished pillow.

I forgot to take pics as I was working hence why its all a stuffed pillow.  I think it's nice and i'm sure my friend will as she is Elf mad!