Who was your child’s first best friend? Before playdates and string bracelets, kids find love and companionship in their stuffed animals—a playmate, a shoulder to cry on, and a superhero all wrapped into one.

If you are in the NYC area, please join me on Saturday, January 19th at the Museum of the City of New York to celebrate the exhibition, A City for Corduroy: Don Freeman’s New York. The classic story celebrates the bond between a girl and her bear, who through her eyes, is perfect just as he is. We will be making superhero capes for your kids’ favorite lovies (stuffed animals are welcome too!).

Click here to RSVP!

MAKE A SUPERHERO CAPE:

What you’ll need:

• felt
• 24″ ribbon
• Aleene’s Turbo Tacky Glue
• Gems, pompoms, buttons, foam shapes

Make it:

1. For a medium-sized stuffed animal, cut an 8-inch-by-10-inch piece of felt. Cut 6 slits about 1/2-inch down from top edge.
2. Weave ribbon through the slits.
3. Decorate the cape the cape using Aleene’s Turbo Tacky Glue to keep those embellishments right where you want them!
4. Tie cape onto stuffed animal and watch them leap tall couches in a single bound!

1. For a medium-sized stuffed animal, cut an 8-inch-by-10-inch piece of felt. Cut 6 slits about 1/2-inch down from top edge.
2. Weave ribbon through the slits.
3. Decorate the cape the cape using Aleene’s Turbo Tacky Glue to keep those embellishments right where you want them!
4. Tie cape onto stuffed animal and watch them leap tall couches in a single bound!

What’s your feeling on the whole New Year’s resolution thing? Do you make ’em? Do you keep ’em? Do you write them down? Do you share them or keep them secret? This is the first year that I didn’t even mentally write a list of promises of change and I’m okay with that. And then I saw Julia Rothman‘s More/Less list on Instagram and thought it was the perfect soft launch into resolutions for 2019. I’ll be penning mine this weekend.

We got a great response from our first Show & Tell last week, so here we go with installment numero dos!

• This Printbrush do-hicky on Kickstarter literally blew my mind. When he printed straight onto a balloon, I was done.

• So the Ostrich Pillow is not a new thing, but it just landed in my inbox via their PR company and it just made me want to curl up in a warm ball. Plus, Moira uses one on the best show on the planet, Schitt’s Creek. Is anyone watching on Netflix?

• Would you add an IV drip to your wellness routine? Too drastic or just what the doctor ordered?

• My husband and I love the TV shows Landscape Artist of the Year and Portrait Artist of the Year (yes, we both still love to watch Bob Ross too!), and we learned about this guy Dan Genders who created the most detailed self portraits using electrical tape. Watch this insane video to see his process!

• I’m loving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to the people that find fault with a video of her dancing on a rooftop in college! Explain to me what’s wrong with that original video!

Project Kid had the extreme pleasure of working with J. Crew and their mini-me brand, crew cuts on a super fun craft event to celebrate their September 2018 relaunch. If you know Project Kid and our aesthetic, you’d hopefully recognize that crew cuts is like the clothing sister to our lil craft brand. Bright colors, sweet shapes, and a little bit of humor.

J. Crew’s relaunch campaign was called Meet My Crew, celebrating the people in all of our lives that make up our beloved trusted crews. And when it comes to families, there’s no better crew than the folks that live within the same four walls.

When tasked with creating kids’ craft activities for an iconic clothing and accessory brand, we had to consider a bunch of things. First, the projects have to make sense with the style and the message of the campaign. So making a bird feeder, for example, would have not have flown (pun intended). Also, you can create things to accent their products, but not compete with them. So I’m glad I researched their accessory line before I went to them with my fun pom-pom necklace idea. Here’s what we came up with…

COLORFUL PATCHES

Mom and daughter making patches

Crew cuts wasn’t currently selling anything like this, but there were so many ways to use them with their products…on jean jackets, backpacks, or hats. We started off creating the felt patches beginning with 4 basic shapes…a square, a half-circle, a rounded rectangle (think Pac-man ghost), and a triangle.

Circles and squares and colors OH MY!

We brainstormed different icons that could be made with these simple shapes. So that the kids didn’t have to cut up all of the little pieces, we pre-cut all of the pieces and displayed in sort of a toppings-bar style buffet.

“Toppings” buffet for felt patches!

This was our process of planning colors and shapes for the patches

COLORED GLASSES

Riffing off of the “seeing the world through rose-colored glasses” idea, we gave the kids these cool blue, red, yellow, and green lensed glasses to decorate and wear. They had a real Elton John 70s vibe and the kids looked amazing in them. (These are the cardboard glasses we used, but we punched out the centers on all of them.)

Glasses in the making!

MEET MY CREW PHOTO BOOTH

Clare, me and Bridgid…my beloved craft crew!

What’s a party without a photo booth? Made with just grosgrain ribbon and gold paper, this backdrop had a cool, geometric vibe.

FLOOR TILE PROMPTS

We had vinyl floor tiles made to match the colors of the collection. We wanted it to feel like confetti was dropped from a giant down onto the floor.

And every so often, there was a circle that gave an instruction, like “floss like you mean it” “freeze like a flamingo” “believe you can fly” or “high-five your crew”. We wanted the kids to literally stop in their tracks and do something silly, sentimental, or just plain fun.

FUN DECOR!

Just to add some whimsical decor, we also made these colorful panels to match the color story of the collection. You can bet these will be tiling a wall of my studio!

Ya know those moments when you read something or see something and you think, “Oh how clever/cool/sad/beautiful, I need to remember to tell so-and-so about that.”? I have them all the time, and so for that reason I thought I’d start a little weekly habit here on Project Kid called Show & Tell…a column to share discoveries with my like-minded people (that’s you).

Not quite sure if it will be the same number of items every week, but I do hope you’ll enjoy discovering these little Internet tidbits as much as I enjoy sharing them!

Show & Tell, issue no. 001…let’s do this!

• After the the crazy gift-giving month of December, seeing these beautiful DIY toys made by South Sudanese refugee children both tugged at my heart strings and blew me away with their ingenuity.

• Hands down, 2018 would definitely be the year of this vegetable.

• USA Today gave us a handy little cheat-sheet of the best post-Christmas holiday sales.

• Holiday party season ain’t over yet! For a little shake-up in the hostess gift category, consider one these clever little guys. (My personal fave is the knife that solves the butter that’s too cold to spread!)

• If you haven’t gotten your fill of Santa beards, twinkle lights, and angels on high, check out this beautiful slideshow of Christmas pics from around the world.

• Any resolutions about taking charge of your life and making changes? Thought so. Check out this list of nonfiction books compiled by some pretty big thinkers to start 2019 off right. (Anyone read this one?)

The first time you fold up a more complex origami project, you pat yourself on the back a few times and you can’t quite believe that all of those simple folds and bends and creases ended up looking so beautiful. But you imagine that mass producing origami would be painful. But actually, the more you make the more your hands just go go go and it becomes this sort of meditative, rote activity. That’s how I felt making these origami Christmas ornaments for Bluprint.

What you need

• Origami paper
• Glue
• Scissors
• String or thin yarn
• Sewing needle

1. Initial folds

Start with a square piece of origami paper. Fold it in half and crease. 

Open it back up and fold it in half the other way. Then, open it up again. 

Fold the paper in half diagonally and open it back up. Then fold the remaining opposite corners together. This time, keep the paper folded into a triangle. 

2. Shrink the triangle

Take the top point and fold it down to the left as shown above.

Push the outer corner in on itself. You should now have a smaller triangle. 

3. Fold to the center

Take the right top corner of the triangle and fold it toward the center, as shown above. 

Repeat this step on the other side. 

Flip the paper over and trim off the two projecting tips. You’ll have yet another triangle shape.

4. Repeat

With your paper still flipped, repeat the previous step. 

Once again, trim off the excess.

5. Unfold

Unfold the flaps you just made so you have a wide diamond shape. 

Fold the right flap in toward the center and crease it flat, as shown above. 

Then, flip the left side of this flap over to the right and crease. 

Repeat this step on the opposite side. 

Then, flip the right flap over to the left at the center. 

Flip the whole thing over and repeat all these steps on this new side. 

Keep folding!

Once everything is folded, you’ll have a small triangle.

6. Fold the corners

Fold the top corners of the triangle down.

Then, flip over the right side twice, so you have the small triangle again. 

Fold down the corners here as well.

Turn the triangle to the opposite side and fold down these corners. 

Just as before, flip the right side over twice and fold down the corners. 

7. Open it up

Unfold the paper completely.

Fold each point down as shown.

It should now look like this.

8. String it up

Thread your string, make a knot and poke it through the very center of your origami. 

Repeat all of these steps on another piece of paper, add some dots of glue to your folds and stick ’em together!

Then hang them on your tree!