With the holidays fast approaching, everyone we know is starting their annual scramble to find great gifts. We’ve always felt that books make the best children’s presents. Over the years we’ve posted some of our favorites, all of which encourage creative thinking. From surprising cookbooks to clever craft projects, we highly recommend these six books to inspire your child’s inner artist. Click through the links below to read our posts about each one and order from Amazon, starting with The Donut Chef by Bob Staake ( buy it here)… read more…
We forgot how great old-fashioned crepe paper streamers are for jazzing up a space until we stumbled pictures we clipped from Aesthetic Outburst ages ago: it’s an easy way to give a room charmingly festive atmosphere with a bit of “kid” in it. The magic is all in the colors you choose like this mix of hot pink and orange that has a strangely stylish quality. We’ve also found streamers in apple green, aqua blue, black, buttercup yellow, red, tons of colors…at Amazon: huge possibilities….like these swell crepe papered lanterns (with how to)… read more…
We’ve written before about how much we love Made By Joel’s, Joel Henrique’s website that features his charming handmade children’s toys. This October 11th will mark the release of Joel’s first book, Made to Play!: Handmade Toys and Crafts for Growing Imaginations.The book compiles a number of great toy-making and craft projects for children and their parents. Categorized by fun themes (The Zoo! Cars and trucks! Music and art! Dress-up!), most of the projects use ordinary crafting materials, like paper, fabric, tape and glue to make versatile and simple toys that kids can be proud they had a hand in making. Many of Joel’s creations are appealing to grownups as well. read more…
For a fat, liberating dose of inspiration, check out the long riff on Mondoblogo of chairs Italian Designer Gaetano Pesce painted in the nineties for his kids.
His “Open Sky” chairs are out-there, fun, wild, loose, and awesomely beautiful… read more…
From Eloise by Kay Thompson (Drawing: Hilary Knight)
The other night a friend who was recuperating from an injury asked us to tell him a story as he fell asleep. A story, we wondered, h-mm-mm. Why not read a kid’s book for this exhausted, wounded grown-up. Looking through our library, an ancient copy of Kay Thompson’s Eloise jumped into our hands. As we read it aloud, we marveled at the precocious little girl on the loose in the great hotel. We’d totally forgotten the story: a self-possessed kid surviving in the face of a wealthy mom who wasn’t there, and a nanny who was. Eloise used her unfettered imagination to act out, fabulously.
…wooden table as percussion instrument and choreographer’s palette
+ arms/hands
= table dancing (no fancy footwork needed)
We never thought of that!…
…Just watching gets your energy moving (We love the ‘BE AMAZING’ sign in the background).
(The video’s surprising origins are traditional Irish dance under the influence of hip-hop, contemporary dance and electro-pop, created by Suzanne Cleary & Peter Harding of Up & Over It.)
We recently came across our SWINGS file that lay forgotten on our computer. There we found all manner of swings hung INSIDE the house, mostly in the living room, where they become a thing of delight for both children and grown-ups: a kinetic sculpture-of-a-seat that gives the pleasure of being rocked, of air, and somehow, of outside. Traditional swings work best in big spaces with high ceilings and room to fly… read more…
We spotted this very odd picnic table on Planetargonautes, a French blog whose most recent post was in January, 2010. We poked around its eclectic archive, around the several years of stuff, using our basic French reading skills to navigate the author’s charming, rather ‘out there’ writing. (Using a language translator turns it into a sort of poetry.) We had the feeling that an abandoned blog is a little like something found floating in space. You climb on board and look around for signs of life…take energy readings, wonder where everyone went, and follow the evidence…
Suddenly we fell through a hyperlink to the site of Daniel Gantes, who designed the picnic table. We really liked his statement “Who am I?”
“I think I’m one of the few colour-blind designer in the world. When I was child in the school I painted a tree with wrong colours, and all my schoolmates laughed in my face, that was cruel. Since that moment I started to fight against my problem, and I learned all about colour. At the end I developed a peculiar system to work with colours. I think I turned the problem into a virtue, and I learned there’s a solution for every problem.”
And we realized then that the dormant Planetaronautes is still sending its message out…
Working Big is a remarkable book about large-scale art projects for kids. Written in 1975, it is long out-of-print, but available these days as a free, downloadable pdf from Public Collectors. It gives an expansive view (with how-to’s) of discovery projects to do with your own kids, or fantasize about for your (grown-up) self.
Working Big’s essential premise is that kids and artists often take similar approaches in exploring and working with their environment. Its chapter titles – ”Kids’ Space Equals Artists’ Space” and “The Artist Shapes as the Child Shapes” – should be printed on tee shirts, or scrawled on walls. Pictures of kids working away with obvious pleasure are interspersed with images of works by notable artists, like Robert Smithson‘s earthworks, The Broken Circle and Amarillo Ramp. This inspiring book holds a lot of wisdom about kids AND the creative process in general:
“When nature itself provides the medium, children are eager and intuitive artists. They need no one to tell them that the moist grittiness of sand is just right for sculpturing or read more…
MacGyver is a 1980′s TV series about a cute, soft-spoken secret agent who doesn’t carry a gun or hi-tech tools; he uses ingenuity and science and whatever is at hand to invent solutions. Over the course of seven seasons, MacGyver fixed a truck with a pen spring, fashioned a harpoon out of a rod and electrical cord, used milk chocolate bars to stop a sulfuric acid leak, and faked musical notes with wine-filled goblets to open a lock…to name of few of hundreds of off-the-cuff macgyverisms. As MacGyver said:
“A paper clip can be a wondrous thing. More times than I can remember, one of these has gotten me out of a tight spot.”
I watched this 7-minutes clip showing the ingenious ways MacGyver used a map to get him out of scrapes, and was smitten. read more…
In the wonderful daddy blog Stork Bites Man, Andy (who also writes Reference Library) wrote a brief post about making this blue tape painting in the hallway outside his daughter Elsa’s room. The two had been working on it for a few months,”a few minutes at a time. She requests a ‘little one, great big one, skinny one, or triangle one’ and I cut each shape to order.”
It’s a perfect, simple, visually charming project to do with a kid (or another adult), and is another example of the brilliant versatility of blue painter’s tape (it’s masking tape so it comes off with no marks, if you could ever imagine taking such a painting down).
and 
that has a strangely stylish quality. We’ve also found streamers in apple green, aqua blue, black, buttercup yellow, red, tons of colors…at 
.The book compiles a number of great toy-making and craft projects for children and their parents. Categorized by fun themes (The Zoo! Cars and trucks! Music and art! Dress-up!), most of the projects use ordinary crafting materials, like paper, fabric, tape and glue to make versatile and simple toys that kids can be proud they had a hand in making. Many of Joel’s creations are appealing to grownups as well. 
jumped into our hands. As we read it aloud, we marveled at the precocious little girl on the loose in the great hotel. We’d totally forgotten the story: a self-possessed kid surviving in the face of a wealthy mom who wasn’t there, and a nanny who was. Eloise used her unfettered imagination to act out, fabulously.
.
(it’s masking tape so it comes off with no marks, if you could ever imagine taking such a painting down).
