Every so often, the blogosphere kicks out a number of awesome things all at once and I find myself bookmarking pages and saving PDF files and printing out all sorts of wonderful goodness. Over the past few weeks, we’ve done quite a few projects that started off as blogged bits by someone else. And, as if copying someone else’s brilliant idea isn’t enough, they were kind enough to provide printable templates and step-by-step tutorials that made it even more awesome.
We’ve been on a gardening kick lately — you might have noticed I’ve got a rather fierce love affair going on with the garden right now — and we found several fabulous projects centered around gardens and gardening and the wild world outside the door… so we did them, of course, and had tons of fun in the process.
Aren’t these little butterflies lovely?
The wonderfully creative Lindsay from FilthWizardry posted a tutorial on how to make these out of recycled milk jugs over at alphamom. We made ours using patterned velum paper from my scrapbooking supplies and they turned out just beautifully, thanks in large part to the template Linday provided.
Since K and B are old enough to (a) be trusted with Sharpie markers and (b) not get frustrated by detailed drawings, I pretty much laid out the supplies, showed them how to get started, and then let them go to it. The finished butterflies were hung from the gazebo with thread where they could flutter and twirl in the breeze. By the time the kids got tired of making butterflies, there were quite a few floating around the garden and making us smile.
Butterflies are good at making us smile.
Kids by hand 