That means it’s springtime.  Soon to be summer.

There’s no better time than the present to spend some time making pinwheels with your grandchildren.

I decided that I would make a pinwheel pattern to share with all of my wonderful grandmother friends so they could make pinwheels with all of their wonderful grandchildren. I made a papa-sized pattern and a baby-sized pattern.

Pinwheels are easy to make. Using the pattern, cut a square from some paper. Cut on along the diagonal lines. With a hole punch, punch holes where the dots are on the pattern. Use scissors to make a small hole in the center of the pinwheel.

With a hole punch, make a hole at one end of a plastic drinking straw. (Preferable an unused drinking straw. But, hey, if you want a pinwheel on a straw sticky from soda pop, that’s your choice . . .)

Bend the corners of the paper with the holes toward the center. Align the holes and push the ends of a brad fastener through all of the holes. Push the end of the fastener through the hole in the straw. Bend back the ends of the fastener. And there you have it. Your fabulous pinwheel.

There. Simple, huh?

Well, that’s what I thought this activity would be. Simple. Quick. Piece o’ cake.

Ha!

After several hours of frustration, let me share with you what I learned.

• Scrap booking paper is colorful and bright and fun to use.  (It’s hard to tell but my red pinwheel has purple tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs on it.) But pinwheels made out of scrap book paper don’t spin easily in the wind or when you blow on them.
• Using a brad on a straw doesn’t work too swell, either. The pinwheel doesn’t freely spin.
• Plain white copy paper (what we grandmothers know as typing paper) spins the best. If you use this, your grandchildren can use their creativity and color their own designs on the paper.
• Using a straight pin to attach the pinwheel (made out of typing paper) to a pencil eraser works great.
• The straight pin might be longer than what you want. If that’s the case, hold the pin with a pair of pliers. Bend it back and forth until the pin breaks (where you are bending it). This will shorten the pin and be better for your pinwheel.
• If you use a colorful pencil, it’s not as drab and boring as a plain yellow No. 2 pencil.
• When taking a picture in my family room that has amber colored light fixtures, the pictures have a yellow cast to them. And, there are tons of shadows in the picture. It would be far better to take the picture using natural lighting (meaning in the daytime — but I’m at work then. Phooey!)

Here is a beautiful flower pinwheel that has curvy edges. There is a pattern and great directions to make this flower pinwheel. But, be forewarned. This is not a functional-blow-in-the-wind pinwheel. It’s just for decoration.

If you are feeling dapper and adventuresome, here are directions for making a pinwheel that uses a grommet in the center of a pinwheel and a thumbtack to hold it onto a chopstick. Interesting variation.

For older granddaughters, say twelve years old and older, here are directions for making a card with a gorgeous pink pinwheel card. It uses pink vellum and you make a small pinwheel and a large one. You put the smaller one on top of the bigger one so it makes a more “full” pinwheel. Way cute!

When you are finished making your paper pinwheels, make some pinwheel cookies.  Milk and cookies. What a great way to end an activity with your grandchildren!

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So what’s a person to do who wants simple photo editing tools but doesn’t want to pay an arm and a leg and give up their first born to purchase Photoshop?

Ah! I’ve just recently stumbled across a fabulous answer that I want to share here. Get Paint.

Paint is a free software (for Windows based machines) that started out as an undergraduate design project for college seniors who were mentored by Microsoft. It was originally meant to replace Microsoft Paint that comes with Windows. It has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editing tool. It is a much, much, much, much, much better program than the one that comes with a Windows machine!

It has some fun effects.  I’ve taken a photo of  my sweetest new grandson and applied ink, oil, pencil, emboss, and soften effects. Take a look. (The original  photo is the top left one.)

I have found a plugin that allows you to do fun things with text. Like this. (Be sure to click on the image below so you can see it in a bigger size.)

If you have a granchild that wants Photoshop but can’t afford it, this is a fabulous alternative. Tell your grandchild to go here to download Paint.

Go here to download the dpyplugin6.1 zip file that does cool things with text. (It does more but the text was the main reason I installed the plugin. When you unzip the file, put the plugin contents in the Effects folder. The Effect folder will be on your C drive, then Program files, then the Paint.NET folder.)

Grandma,  you might  have to stretch your technology muscles and get out of your techno-comfort zone when you install this software. But that’s okay. Leaning new technology is always good. (If all else fails, one of your grandkids could get it up and running for you.)

You’ll have loads of fun playing around with this program. And that’s a guarantee.

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One of my son’s college professors did a fun bubble activity for his daughter’s birthday. He cut a dryer vent hose in half, duct taped the ends together so it made a circle, and filled it with bubble solution. He wrapped yarn around a hula hoop. His daughter stood inside the circle that the dryer vent made. He dipped the hula hoop in the solution and pulled it up so his daughter was standing in a bubble.

I wanted to do that. Really bad.

I talked to the professor to find out exactly how he did it. One thing he said was that the wire from the dryer vent kept popping the bubble. So, he put a big sheet of plastic over everything and then it worked just fine. He recommended that I use a plastic downspout instead of a dryer vent hose.

That sounded like a good suggestion to me.  So, off to the hardware store grandpa and I went. We got the downspout.

With his nifty saw, grandpa cut it in half.

I wrapped and wrapped and wrapped yarn around the hula hoop. This took about half an hour!

I mixed up some solution using Dawn dish detergent. (That is the best brand to use because it make better bubbles.)

Then, even though it was 9:30 at night, grandpa and I went out on the patio and tested it. We got it to work. Huzzah! I was excited for when our grandchildren would come over for the Bubble Bash.

Saturday came and my grandchildren arrived for the Bubble Bash. My daughter and I set up the downspout filled with solution. We tried and tried to make it work. We added more soap. We waited for the wind to die down. We added even more soap. Finally, we pulled up a fairly large bubble. When my granddaughter stood in the middle, it wouldn’t work.

Thinking that the grass was popping the bubbles, we moved the set up to the driveway and got a bigger piece of plastic.We tried, and tried, and tried. Still no enchilada.

The picture below was the highest that we were able to pull up the bubble before it burst. (If my granddaughter looks rather unhappy, it is because she had gotten soap in her eyes.)

I had other bubble making thingies. We had purchased this bubble wand at a 4th of July celebration a few years ago. It is made out of a dowel stick, some cording (found at a fabric store), a wooden bead, and a metal ring. The cording is 1.75 yards long. It is held on to the the end of a dowel with a wooden bead. The ring is tied to the cording 16 inches from one end of the cord. When both ends of the cording is held in place on the end of the dowel, the ring will be about 15 inches from the end of the dowel when the dowel is held upright. (See picture.)

Dip all of the cording in the bubble solution. (We had it in a mason canning jar. But it would work if you had the solution in a bucket or a large plastic ice cream container.) Here are some pictures using the bubble wand.

This bubble was almost 10 feet long!

I also threaded string through two straws. I dipped the straws and string in the solution, held the straws apart, and moved the straws through the air. When I brought the straws together, it created a bubble.

I also cut out the center of a Styrofoam paper plate. That worked really good as a bubble wand. I also cut out the center of the lid of a Cool Whip container. That worked well, too, for creating big bubbles. (Well, bigger than the wand you get when you buy a jar of bubble solution.)

So this is what I learned from my experience with the hula hoop and downspout:

• The downspout didn’t make a very deep ‘container’ for the solution. I would use dryer vent hose next time.
• I would make sure I put the vent hose on a flat surface. It wasn’t very level on the grass.
• The soap solution was one part soap to 15 parts water. That wasn’t a thick enough solution. Next time I will do a 1:10 ratio. (You can always add more soap if you need to.)
• I wouldn’t do this activity on a windy day.
• Practice before having the grandchildren stand in the middle to make sure you have the right bubble solution. Then, younger grandchildren wouldn’t lose interest so quickly in the activity if the bubbles didn’t work.
• Before starting, I would putting a piece of plastic over the entire surface. That would help it so the bubbles didn’t pop.

If you try this activity, let me know how it went for you!

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It was also an activity that my spectacular non-crafty skills could handle.

So, I stopped at a  local craft store and bought a fancy plastic bottle for each of my grandchildren.

I bought several smallish gizmos that would fit inside the bottle that I thought would be fun for the grandkids to find.

It was rather challenging because the mouth of the bottle wasn’t very big. I had to make sure that the things that I purchased would fit through the opening.

Here’s a list of things that I bought:

• teeny boats
• teeny trucks
• teeny trains
• teeny bees
• teeny lady bugs
• teeny dragon flies
• teeny shoes.

I hunted around the house and my not so vast craft box.  I gathered:

• beads
• yellow pom poms
• googly eyes
• clear ‘rocks’
• marbles
• thumb tacks
• beans
• popcorn kernels

Before the grandkids assembled their I Spy bottle, I laid out these items and took a picture of them. I printed the picture on card stock and covered it with clear contact paper.

My grandchildren put all of the items in their bottle. I filled the bottle about 3/4 full of white rice. I put super glue around the top of the bottle and then put the lid on tight.  (Didn’t want those little rascal grandkids to dump out the rice, you know!)

The grandkids could look at their card and then try and find things in their I Spy bottle.

Here’s what I learned from my experience. My 2 year old grandchildren didn’t have a very long attention span while we made them.  But then, I didn’t expect them to. And, they really don’t have an attention span to look for things very long.  I was surprised. I thought that they would spend more time looking for things.

However, my 4 year-old grandson absolutely loved making it and looking for things. So, I guess that this activity works better for older grandchildren.

I also learned that it’s best to have better lighting when you take pictures of the items. When I took the picture, the lighting was coming from the side so that there were shadows. I didn’t have time to do anything different with the lighting.  Oh well. The picture turned out okay but it could be better.

If you have grandchildren that are say 8 – 10 years old and maybe think they are too grown up to play with an I Spy bottle, they could be in charge of finding things around your house to put in the bottle and of assembling a bottle for a younger grandchild.  Creating one might be of more interest to them than playing with one.

Have any of you made I Spy bottles for your grandkids?

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