My nephews sometimes come over in the summer for a few days during a week and while they are here we often make things.  Sometimes we build boats, robots or masks out of bits of wood and nails.  Sometimes we build cardboard armor and weapons.  Sometimes we paint and sew stuffies.

Last week we built elastic band propelled cars and extending grabbers.

We built the grabbers from broad flat Popsicle sticks and brads, finishing off the grabber heads with painted foam core. They were quite easy to build but the brads would sometime come apart and the expanding scissor action would come apart.

The elastic propelled cars we build from old CDs, juice lids, BBQ skewers, cardboard tubes and small foam shapes as well  as elastics.  Our first attempt failed and we discovered that it was too light.  Our next design had more weight to it and worked great.  Once we had them working, paint and foam stickers were added to make the cars look fabulous.

This years Hallowe'en challenge was to make a costume for a character from the game Undertale named Gaster.

My daughter loves this game and wanted to come up with a costume for this character. I am always up for a costume challenge.

The costume was pretty simple except for the face and hands.  We needed to make a mask out of paper clay that would still allow her to see through.

My mother gave me a totally amazing present for my birthday.  A digital piano. I grew up playing piano and gave it up when I was a teenager.  Recently with my own kids I have gotten back into music and taught myself ukulele and guitar.  Now with this amazing new digital piano I can refresh my piano skills.  I was so excited to start playing that it sat for 3 months on my long coffee table where I played it from sitting on the couch getting a sore backed from the awkward position.  

It was time to get to work in the shop and build a piano bench for it. Here is my result.  It is not the best built but it was made with what I had on hand and at the perfect size and height to fit the piano and myself.

I am so excited to start playing again!

I've often used glass floral beads to make eyes for various clay or sculpture projects but never for a photography project. 

I found some large glass beads at our local dollar store and then painted up a few sets of eyes in different colours and styles (mammalian or reptilian).  Then while out on a hike with my family we went looking for unique features in the forest where we could place a set of eyes and give nature a face.

It became a really fun outing, hiking and seeing some beautiful landscapes while also searching out the finer details that could be given nature a face. I think we'll keep a set of eyes in our camping supplies so that we can do this again on our next hike.