How To Make A Jellyfish

Last year Brother-Bug was interested in jellyfish. We got books out of the library and delved. The eventual result was a large jelly that hung from our ceiling for months.We found it recently and hung it up for our month of studying Oceans and Marine life. It looked really good with our oceanic windows.

It is a very simple project. You will need:
A large piece of bubble wrap
A piece of colorful cellophane (usually sold or found as a gift wrap supply)
Lots of clear or white twist ties
A good plastic bonding glue
Scissors

Optional - a pack of silver rik-rak and small colorful cards.

Cut a large rectangle of bubble wrap - approximately 12"x36". Glue the 12" side together making a cylinder and let the glue dry thoroughly.

Using the scissors, snip holes around the top and bottom of the cylinder, abut an inch down and 3/4 of an inch apart. Thread one twist-tie through the homes, gathering up the cylinder. That's the top of your jellyfish.

Crumple the cellophane and put it in the gathered cylinder. Use a twist-tie to gather the bottom closed. Squish the cylinder flat-ish to make the jellyfish "head".

Cut tentacles out of bubble wrap - about 24" long and 1-2" wide. Use the scissors to poke a hole in one end of each tentacle and around the bottom of the "head". Use a twist-tie to secure each tentacle in place.

Optional Rik-Rak: tie long strings of silver rik-rak to the bottom center, using the gathering twist-tie as an anchor. Some jellies have two kinds of tentacles much like this.

Optional Cards: we wrote some of the facts we learned about jellyfish on small cards and stapled one card to each tentacle.

Hang in a window to catch the light! I imagine how cool it would be to make a lot of these and float them on a large room... Maybe lighting the cellophane with LEDs...

One bubble-wrap jelly fish.

A Birthday Banner

Adding a festive birthday note to our space!

For Brother-Bug's first birthday I dug deep into the scrap bin and made The Birthday Banner. This banner has been hung at all our family birthdays since then, and will continue to be hung as we all grow and change. When Sister-Bug was born, one of Brother-Bug's jobs was to hang the banner with help from one of his birth attendants.

A quick Google search reveals that similar banners are between $10-$90. However, if you have basic sewing skills, a banner is very easy to make.

The middle three flags - so scrappy!

Our banner has white felt for the flags. I cut triangles about 6 inches wide and 9 inches tall.

Each flag is bound in bias tape - I used the scraps from my bias tape box. You will need about 9 yards of bias tape.

I added another stripe of ribbon, tic-rack, or other trim to each flag, following the line of the bias tape. Again, I used scraps I had in my trim box - another 8-9 yards total.

There are 16 flags on our banner. Three have star appliqués, one to start, one between the two words, and one to finish. The other thirteen have the letters of happy birthday zig-zagged on. Here is where the scrap bin is particularly important. The scraps that form the letters are our scraps. Here is Brother-Bug's baby sun hat... There is Papa-Bug's favorite Hawaiian shirt that tore... This used to be a skirt of Mama's... And so on. I cut the letters freehand and used some fixative so they wouldn't wiggle as I zig-zagged them on.

Close up of the binding construction.

I found some gold star buttons in the button box and sewed them on various flags, putting the big one in the middle.

Finally, I took a wide ribbon (2-3 inches) that was about 5 yards long and carefully bound it over the tops of the flags and getting all the flags in a row. Now the banner is basically complete. I sewed long lengths of 1/8 inch ribbon on each end to tie it up.

Our banner is now into its 5th year, and 15th birthday (or somewhere around that). It's still lovely. The kids adore it. Papa-Bug and I like to sneak the night before a birthday and put it up so the birthday person sees it first thing at breakfast.

It's one of those little things that makes a birthday extra special in our house.

Simple Saturday - Holiday Edition: Make It Ourselves

One of the things I deeply enjoy about the holidays is Creation. Baking cookies, making gifts, crafting decorations... Always the gifts we give involve some homemade elements. We buy a few things new (or "newly used" at the thrift), but I love the feeling of ingenuity I get when I create something special out of something we already have.

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This year I knitted these darling cherries as a Tree Ornament. One tradition is that the Little Bugs always find a new ornament in their Christmas stocking. Often I find nice ones at the thrift store. This year I saw this pattern online and knitted up two little cherry bunches for their Ornaments. They were fun and easy to knit, very quick, and I made them out of yarn ends that were just gathering dust at my mom's house.

Tasty tree trims - made of old scraps.

I would post some of our other creations, but I don't know who reads this and don't want to spoil any surprises. After the Holidays, when the gifts are all given, I will post more extensive pictures and descriptions of some of our creating. I've been having fun, in a financially tight year, finding what I can make with what we have or can find. I often do this, but this year I am focusing on it more than usual and having great success!

The other thing I delight in creating each year is our holiday card. Some years I draw a picture, we color copy it, and make that design into a card. The year I was 6 months pregnant with Sister-Bug we sent a standard photo card. But since then I have been getting into minimizing our card footprint. What can I use to make a fun card?

We are blessed to have the Materials Exchange Center for Community Art (MECCA) here, which is an art supply thrift store. Bins of old fabric, stacks of paper, odd bottle caps, you name it. And more than fairly priced. MECCA is a blessing when it comes to making holiday cards. Last year I scored a stack of odd shaped white card stock, 55 envelopes, and a pile of used holiday cards for $4.00. A little work with paper cutter and glue stick and I had glued the old cards to the card stock, creating new cards!

Kid writing, fabric scraps, reused card stock. Voila!

This year I made these cards - again a stack of old card stock and assorted envelopes from MECCA. I added fabric scraps from my scrap bin, and had Brother-Bug write assorted festive words on a paper, which I color copied and cut out to finish the front. I used some other old card to print out our own greeting which I glued to the inside. I like writing this - what I want and not settling for an approximation of what I want in someone elses' words. Very home made. Very us.

Making my own cards is not simple. It is, in fact, far more complicated than buying cards at the dollar store, or getting a photo card printed. But there is a blessing here. The card says "I took time to make this for you. I thought about you." At least, that's what is says to me. It also champions recycling and reusing (the genesis of the card is printed on the inside, letting recipients know it is a reused item) which is so important to think about in this season of trash.

But though it is not a simple thing, it makes me plan ahead a bit. It makes me slow down and think about people outside my immediate family and those I make or buy gifts for. It makes me stretch my creativity each year as I find something new, something fun, something that will be special when opened.