Apartment Therapy has a tutorial on How To Make A Toy Grill for $20 by using a large plastic mixing bowl and wooden dowels. It doesn’t look hard since, as the site says, “you only need to know how to cut a dowel with a handsaw and drill a hole.”
For $20 (less if you get the material on sale/second hand), that’s a pretty nifty toy–especially since a quick look at the price of toy grills showed they run about $50-$100 new.
This Geometry Garland is so cool. The post contains templates to make each one of the shapes. Print them out, and it’s a matter of cutting and gluing.
This Floating Geometry Garland would look great in a kid’s room. Better yet, why not attach the shapes to the end of a mobile?
When your kid inevitably breaks crayons, don’t throw them out. Instead, you can melt them down and make one big crayon for your kids to play with.
There are lots of ways to do this, but it gets down to melting the crayons down, pouring the wax into a mold, and letting them harden again for use. How fancy you get with this last step makes all the difference.
For example, Momtastic layered the colors in pill bottles and made rainbow crayons:
Better in Bulk melted the wax in pans and poured them into different molds, making crayons shaped like puzzle pieces and stars:
And Craft Sanity went the easiest route and melted different colored crayons into muffin tins lined with cupcake liners, making these multi-colored crayons:
This Blooming Bath For Babies is adorable. It’s a flower-shaped bathtub you can use instead of a bath tub or a baby bath seat. It’s designed to dry fast in the dryer and is supposed to be comfortable and soft. It comes in blue, pink, and yellow. $50.
This is pretty cute. The Karpiuks made a Millennium Falcon out of cardboard boxes for their 9-month-old son. The Millennium Falcon is, of course, the spaceship Han Solo and Chewbacca drove in Star Wars.
The cardboard version was made out of cardboard boxes, then paper mached, then spray painted. There are also pictures of the process, like this one:
Of all the baby mobiles I’ve seen, this Artecnica Themis Mobile is by far my favorite. It’s brightly colored, geometrically interesting, and can work for a boy or a girl. And a reasonable price at $29.50.
Here it is from the baby’s point of view:
According to Grenwala, one handy grandfather turned his old Vespa into a rocking horse for his grandson. The results are pretty nifty:
I hope this Vespa was beyond repair, because otherwise it would have been great to get it running. Still, this kid looks like he is having a great time:
When Alisa Burke’s daughter outgrew her baby clothes, she turned them into plush baby toys. From the site:
And while we haven’t invested very much money in her wardrobe (thank goodness!), we still have some cute things that already hold lots of memories and I can’t bear to get rid of. So I have been saving my favorite outfits to cut up and create a whole bunch of abstract and whimsical little creatures to keep in Lucy’s room for future play time and to display as little mementos of her early years.
The results are pretty cute:
This is a great way to reuse baby clothes and preserve memories at the same time. [Apartment Therapy]
Twice Lovely turned this hideous entertainment center:
into this awesome play kitchen:
The kitchen has a “Tres Chic French theme,” complete with a chandelier, stove, sink, and view out the window.
Best of all, since the entertainment center was free from Craigslist, the whole thing cost about $15 to make.
Like this post on turning a nightstand into a play kitchen, both projects show how imagination can turn old furniture into a great toy for your child’s enjoyment. [Apartment Therapy]
