Time for Craft

Just received a leaflet from the school to participate in a dragon puppet making for the upcoming Mid Autumn Festival celebration 中秋节. As the lantern making competition held at Chinatown Point has been put on halt, I decided to guide on this project. Basically, the instructions given by the school to make this puppet is very simple. If we were to follow it exactly, I'm sure 80% of the dragons will look almost alike. Really, it is not so much of whether this puppet we made will win in the competition a not, it is the passion in me to make a difference in every project I committed doing. We had a brainstorm session before we put everything in place. But, I got to really thank myself for the huge collections of recycled materials. If all these are not within reach, what magic can I perform? Golden & silver foil ice-cream wrappers, fresh milk carton box, bottle caps, polyfoam fruit net (the pink dragon body) etc.; all these are simply wastes that end up in the b...

It was a competition hold by the school to make a toy from recycle materials. After attending the Sony Creative Award Prize Presentation held in July, we certainly gained more insight on the awarded toys children have made. For this reason, I wanted more contribution from my son this time. So he suggested on a number of designs, drew it out and explained to me on how to play with them. With all his ideas, I brought in all the 'free' materials that I have, we fixed them up and tested on the toy several times. We used toilet paper rolls and some bottle caps on the trial run. It was until we used the little green balls recycled from chinese medicines as one of the materials, then the idea of a war site striked our mind. Initially, the bomb loader that we came up with was unable to 'work' probably. We opted out a number of possibilties and finally decided to use two containers, a chopstick and a rubber band to do the job. It was an enjoyable process making this toy. The wh...

This was a rather big project that I took on about three or four years back, when my son was around 4 or 5 years old. It was a request from him to make him a farm. I remembered I really have no idea on what to make. It was not something that came out of a sudden. I done it parts by parts, trial and error and it took me many months to complete the whole thing. It is my unique way of showing my love to him to make him such a memorable toy. And it was until recently, when he took it out and started playing with it again, that I realised he treasured it so much. He remembered how to assemble them and where each and every item should be placed. He even remembered his own set of farm rules... As you can see from the pictures, it was really fun here, you can actually harvest the carrots if you wanna. There's a water well near the farm house. A windmill that can turn... ... Besides all the toy animals and trucks used in there, the rest are all recycled materials. As what I've alway...

Didn't really have nice picture here again, but this was what I did to decorate my son's bedroom with a farmhouse motive on the wall without adding any stress to my pockets. The small little window was camouflaged with a picture cut-out from polyfoam. I collected them from the packaging that came with fridge carton box. My neighbor somewhere bought the fridge, I have the polyfoam sheets that potected it from dent, lol! I made a turnable windmill out of a recycled board dismantled from a wooden orange crates collected from NTUC supermarket here in Singapore. A perfume spray bottle cap was used as the center piece of the windmill. 5 pieces of the light weight wooden propeller were attached to it and was screwed on to the wooden board. Some stencilling was done to the wall and my boy was given the opportunity to 'scribble' the wall this time. He did some stamping on the wall with animals, farm house and tractor shaped sponge stamps. The ...