some craftiness of late

Last week I had to come up with an after-school craft idea.  We'd just had a fairly substantial snow fall that some frigid temperatures kept around for much longer than we normally experience, so snow was on the brain.  A quick Google of snowflake paper crafts yielded a spectacularly lovely, deceptively simple project that was extremely well-received. 

Nice, huh?  I'm not going to show you the process, but if you want to make this stunning project, here's where I learned it.

The snowflakes became wildly popular around the library.  That happens here fairly often.  We get quite enamored of various crafty things from time to time.  A few weeks ago we got a new book in with loads of tubey crafts.  We've been making tubular crafts with empty toilet paper rolls for ages, but there were several fresh ideas in the book about which we were quite excited.  Then one day, Lisa realized that all of the columns throughout the library were giant tubeys waiting to happen, so we talked about how exciting it would be to do that.  Sometimes we hype ourselves up about things like that and then we don't have the time or inclination to make them happen, so I wasn't completely certain it would happen.  Pardon my skepticism.

Fast forward to today, imaginary readers, when we arrived at work just ahead of more forecasted snow.  Lisa declared it a snow day and decided that we were going to make that first giant tubey dream come true by building a snowman.  She put Susan to work making more of the 3D snowflakes, and we started planning our attack.  The column (which got painted this particularly violent shade of yellow this summer during our part of the remodel) started out like this:

After some measuring and wrapping we had our base up.

Next we added this:

And then this:

times seven or eight, which made this:

You're feeling it now, aren't ya?

Next came his scarf.  Yes, that is real fleece.  No flimsy, flappy paper scarf for our snowman.
The hat brim was my first true test.  After a fair amount of measuring and equations and fashioning a compass out of a pencil and yarn, I achieved moderate success.

The band and flower cover up some of the less attractive bits of construction and give him a jaunty flair.  Right?

Next came his arms . . .

 . . . and mittens . . .

. . . and buttons.  Because what self-respecting snowman doesn't have buttons?

And then he was complete--and precious I might add.

And then to make his winter wonderland complete, we added the snowflakes:

Couldn't you just die from the cuteness?

And this is what he looks like to the itty-bitties who'll come up and pat him and rip his arms and buttons off in the next few weeks.  It'll take a slightly taller kid to take care of the nose, but I feel fairly confident that it'll come off a few times too.  The good news is the dedicated craftsmanship that went into the project should insure that anything that is ripped off will not actually tear away the "snow" underneath.

For the record, it did snow for the middle part of the day, going from early mist/rain/sleet to great, fat, gorgeous flakes to dense flurries of tiny flakes.  But in the downtown area it just never stuck and my hopes of getting to close early (like the city offices and schools and everywhere else) melted along with all those snowflakes.  Such is life, I suppose. 

At least I have a long-lasting, all-weather snowman to show for it.