Wannabe Soule Mama

For Christmas I gave myself The Creative Family by SouleMama. I love it! I want our family to be allowed to exercise our creativity, and I want us to show gratitude. I have a jumble of ideas going around in my head, things we can do in our family.

The first project was to reorganise the crafty, colouring things so they stay organised and are easy for small people to tidy up, with guidance and nagging of course. I reclaimed a quarter of a cupboard in our dining area and using some cheap plastic food containers sorted the pencils from the textas. I went to work with my trusty labeller so we know where to put things back. We've given the system a couple of workouts and it is easy! Things go back where they should! I wish I had batteries in the camera to document it.

In the process of organising I culled our crayon collection, leaving only some chubbies. I am working on Soule Mama's principle that children only need a few good quality art supplies, the same supplies that the grown-ups use. The assortment of broken mismatched crayons were put aside for our next project.

Yesterday we recycled the old crayons into these. I enlisted my big girls and we set about removing the paper wrappers from the broken crayons, then we sorted them into colours. I put them in a tupperware silicon mould that is mini "booby cakes". I'm not sure of the proper name of the shape but they do indeed look like boobies.

Our first batch was a mixture of colours: yellow and black, like bumblebees and purple and brown, like um... purple and brown? They weren't so great looking so in the next batch we kept to like colours, shades of red, shades of green. They are spectacular.

Anyway, normal service will no doubt be resumed shortly when I'm back at paid work and the craziness of schedules returns.