My small library makeover

With growing kids there is always a need for more room for toys, books, clothes etc. I love arranging, re-arranging things at my home, but arranging my sons books is always frustrating. I keep them in some fashion, after a while they are just thrown here and there. Besides there is constant fight library space, books among my sons.
This was how the kids library looked. It's usually worse than this.

I was looking for cheap and best deals online for bookshelves so that my younger one could easily reach them, take care of it himself.
One option was from Urban Ladder(BOEBERG BOOKSHELF) and another one from PepperFry( McAnna Storage Shelf, MollyCoddle).  I could not go for the Urban Ladder one, not yet since it did not get along with old computer table in the same room and for me to purchase it, first I had to dispose this computer table.
Since the necessity was urgent I bought these storage shelves from PF. They came disassembled in four packs. It was easy to assemble as it comes with instruction and people who have drill gun can easily do it themselves. However the PF carpenters will also do it for you in case you are not comfortable with it. These come in different vibrant colors perfect for Kids room, also you can have many options like closed, open, and different shapes and sizes. I bought four of them, 2 open ones and two with doors. Since they were of the same size I could arrange them in vertical fashion. These are made from MDF and easy on pockets.

By having two separate small libraries, I can entrust them the work of arranging the books for their personal libraries. This reduces my work and headache.

Kids crafts: Rainbow flowers

The summer vacation has begun for the kids in Bangalore and its two months of freedom from school activities. Well, my generation enjoyed the vacation in carefree ways, my kids are constantly complaining of boring holidays. It's my conscious decision to keep them away from tab, computer games, mobile in holidays.
It's Action time for mommy ME, to teach them art and craft at home. I spend at least some time with them with various art and craft activities, few simple and some complicated.
Here is a simple flower tutorial. My younger son(who takes after me in love for crafting)enjoyed doing this while my elder one as usual with an expression "what's all this nonsense?""Why I have to do this?"

What you need

Colored sheets, glue stick, glue[optional], floral wire or any thin stick or any craft stick to hold the flower, scissor, cardboard to stick the petals.

Make squares of colored paper, we made two sizes one of size 5 cm and another of 7 cm. From a square shape we can make two triangles and hence two petals from them.

Cut these squares to two triangles.

1.Fold the triangle in to half, opening it later to get a crease at the center.
2.Join the two edges into a rhombus shape along the crease.
3.Glue the edges in cross.
4.Take a circle shaped cardboard. Make a dot at the center.
5 Stick each petal around this dot.
6. Hold your flower with a wire/gluing to a stick

You can further make leaves to make it more beautiful.

Adding this craft to Craft Schooling Sunday April 09 link party by Creative Jewish Mom

Madhubani workshop experience

It has been few days since I joined the art classes and it is fun so far. When my art teacher announced that she would be conducting a 5 days Madhubani Workshop, I decided to jump the wagon. Madhubani is not new to me and I have been doing here and there and gifting them to my dear ones. The workshop has been a different experience for me since the painting had to done on the fabric. Doing on the fabric has advantage of long life.

Now few facts about Madhubani

Mithila/ Madhubani paintings are from Mithila region of India and Nepal. Most of these paintings have deities from Indian epics like Ramayana, Mahabharata, natural elements like fishes, trees, birds,Sun etc. Although originally people painted using the natural dyes, nowadays  people also use poster and acrylic colors. These paintings are popular internationally and popularity is on rise in India too, thanks to good marketing, craft fairs, online markets. If you observe these paintings they are typical with large eyes, pouting lips, colorfully dressed and mostly the figures are in side view. This is because these people used to paint these figures on their house walls more for religious purposes and they are not artists with a degree in art.

Detailed information about origin, types of Madhubani, here on Wikipedia

Coming back to the my workshop, we followed the below procedure to create Madhubani art. This is for the benefit of people who are new to this art or want to try one themselves. The basic idea of the workshop was to give information about Madhubani art, few works of famous artists and doing one ourself. Since this was for learning, we had to choose our favorite from the list of images from internet, trace it and color it.

Intially a A3 sized board is taken, this is to pin your fabric. We used off white poplin cloth.

Cut about the size of the board(slightly more than the dimensions of the board), folding them and tightly pinning them to the board using a heavy duty stapler. This is how it looks from back.

Now take the carbon sheet and stick it on the fabric board using the tapes. Put the tape only at the edges. For my design I used two carbon sheet side by side.

Now select the design that you want to paint. If you are creative then you can draw your own composition on the tracing paper/paper. I chose a design which was originally done by one of the artist from Madhubani, Bihar(unknown) and that design was available in A3 size.

Now stick the design on the carbon paper with tape, sticking it to the edges.

Slowly start tracing the design, from top to bottom. Take care not to stress on the other parts of the design since the carbon paper may leave unwanted color on the fabric.

After tracing remove the carbon paper and design.

Your painting is ready to be filled with colors and outline. Always do the outlining first, with 000 sized brush and black color.

This is how it looks after outlining. Now your painting is ready to be filled with colors.

I used the fabric acrylic colors and along with size 000 brush also used size 2 and 4 brushes.

After you are done with the painting remove the stapler pins, board.

Frame your painting on the fabric well and let it be a talk among your friends.

Tips:
Do not trace very minute detail like lines, since you can paint it later.
Try to use the earthy colors like blue, green, red, orange, yellow, use different shades of these colors.
If your composition is rich with colors and figures it is not a must to have designed border. A plain thick one looks always fabulous. The original painting in my case had no designed border, just a red one and I felt that looked more beautiful than mine.

Stitching Time: Cross Stitch project

Finishing off limited data pack means more concentration on the craft projects and less time on the Internet. Yes, I finished our subscribed data pack way before it's renewal date. I was Internet addicted and I had to find some ways to get de-addicted.
Taking inspiration from the fellow bloggers I returned to my half done cross stitch project. I had abandoned it because of lack of threads. First thing I did was to immediately get threads and set upon to finish it.

This one is tribal motif taken from the book by Dorothy Wood. It has beautiful projects few in Anchor and few in using the DMC threads. For this I used the home cleaning cloth(mop cloth) and 6 strands of the anchor skein and finished it in no time. Laugh at me for my choice of fabric but I found it cute to use as a microwave oven cover. The border in the book was a different one, in rhombus shape but I found it difficult to count on the type of fabric I had chosen. So I had my own border.
Meanwhile I am also working on recycling my aunts sari. The fabric is poly cotton and I am hoping that it would be good.

Have a nice month ahead everyone!!!

Sikku Kolam :A Looped Rangoli

Who haven't heard of the Rangoli or the Kolams of South India?
Its a ritual in the morning or in the evening to clean  the front part of your house with cow dung and draw rangolis in various shapes with rice powder. This is to welcome the Goddess Lakshmi to home and drive away evil spirits.  Nowadays cow dung is reserved only for the festive days that too mostly you would find this practice in the villages. Rangolis exists all over India with different names and avatars. I sincerely admire those people who if not themselves at least with help of maid make a point to draw rangolis daily in South India.

Today I am posting not the colorful rangolis but sikku kolams or neli kolams. Sikku means knots in Tamil. The difference between the ordinary rangoli and sikku kolams is that we draw patterns on or using the dots in the rangoli but in sikku kolam we draw around the dots(The dots are clearly visible). Hence they are mostly in curved lines. These kind of rangolis are usually uncolored, and it's difficult to find the start or the end of it. They range from simple ones to most complicated ones, easy to get lost while drawing these rangolis. If you don't believe me, try one for yourself. Like any rangolis these are drawn using the rice powder or white rangoli powder.

Is it possible to incorporate these into your décor? Yes, I think it's possible in many ways. We can paint these pattern on a wall,  or do a complex one, frame it well and display it. It's easy to get mesmerized in their beauty, and I drew one of designs on an empty cardboard box, initially drawing with pencil and later by tracing with acrylic white paint. I guess it looks decent enough, what do you think about it?

Here are few sourced from Pinterest. Aren't they lovely?

 

 

Source : Pinterest

Source : Pinterest

These are few simple ones which are easy and can be drawn on daily basis.

Source : Pinterest

 

Here a complicated one which looks like a chariot.

Source : Pinterest

 

These are the most common ones that I found near my house

 

 

Kids Art : A quick art [Heart]

These days kids are so addicted to the gadgets that worrying about it makes your hair turn grey even earlier than it's time. My sons are no exception and nor me. I am more worried since my younger one is still in the U.K.G and it's half day school for him. After noon is spent on the T.V and he doesn't move an inch while watching the repeat programs. I occasionally try to break this mad routine by engaging him in some activities. These activities have to be short as his patience wears out soon. Here is a quick art project which would hardly take less than an hour to complete but excitement is long lasting.

Things you need cardboard sheet( I used waste handmade paper which was good on one side), ear buds(three), poster colors(White and red), some heavy material(jam bottle).

Cut out card in the form of greeting card from your card stock.
Make and cut a heart shape out of the card board an place it on the center of the card and place something heavy on the so that this heart doesn't move while you progress through your art.
Mix the color. We used three shades. Red, mix of red and white to get light pink and dark pink color. Let your child do this so that he/she learns about color mixing.

Dip ear buds in each color and just randomly place it on the card. Continue this without leaving any gaps.
Remove your heart shape after the paint dries.
Write something nice inside you card and present it to your loved ones.

Chaos inside outside

My garden initially. Over the years these have grown into small trees.

My garden sometime last year, you see small trees in the background

My husband is a little workaholic and rarely works from home. There were few times when I desperately needed him at home, I request him to work from home , he doesn't citing the disturbances from the children. Often he wished for a separate work space for himself( Also to sleep peacefully on the weekends). So we(read him) decided to utilize the existing terrace space to build a new room, a very small one.  This could be used as home office, small hobby room or may be a study room to our children.
We stay in a residential lay out there very few countable houses. Due to the architectural plan we didn't have a high wall compound. People who built after us have high walled compound. Seeing them, our house is less secure and there were few instances where petty thefts have occurred in our community.

Above reasons made us to slightly renovate the house along with painting of the house both interior and exterior.

To gain something, we have to loose something,  isn't it? The thing we lost was our beautiful garden.
The garden that we cherished for long years is almost gone now. It would take few months to rebuild it back. 

So my dear husband I hope the newly constructed room is worth all the destruction. He says we would set it right in few months time and I am already set to work on the resurrection of the garden. Umm, I have a long way to go before I do this. There are chaos both inside(painting) and outside(construction/renovation).  Hope the dust settles down soon.

Cement and sand everywhere



Few broken pots and all hindrances to construction like trees are cut off