Tag Archives: families

Superhero Cuffs

April 5, 2013 By in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 20 Comments

By day, I am a mum, wife and career girl.  I leave at 7.30 each morning, waving goodbye to my family as I speed off in my ordinary car to my ordinary office building.  Beyond a certain bounce to my step, there is little to giveaway the fact that my alter-ego is – wait for it – ELASTIGIRL (da-da-daaaaa!).  This alter-ego was news to me too, but Harry has lately become obsessed with The Incredibles (or ‘In The Credibles!’ as he is inclined to call it), and my new identity has been resolutely confirmed.  In fact, there are times when he won’t call me anything else, which can be head-turning when we’re out in public.  Harry is Dash, and I am Elastigirl, and together we will save the world.  For those who are not familiar with The Incredibles, Elastigirl is a suburban superhero/mom with hips you could rest a bar-tray on and a questionable haircut, and she is very, very bendy.  My husband finds this comparison hilarious.

elastigirl-incredibles

I’ve realised that as a family we are somewhat lacking in superhero accessories.  Sure, we have plenty of spandex, and after three years of parenthood we all have a good repertoire of rocket noises and the kind of finely-honed reflexes that would rise to anything Marvel comics could throw at us… but what we really, really need are some superhero cuffs we can slip on to change our identities in a heartbeat.  So I made some:

Superhero Cuffs DIY

Toilet-roll Superhero Cuffs


These are the quintessential ’5 minute makes’, involving nothing more complex than cardboard toilet rolls, glue and paper.  I’ve added a downloadable PDF of my graphics below if you want to simply print these and use as a wrapper… or design your own and have a paint & glitter-fest at the kitchen table.

Because we’re very taken with gadgets and buttons, our cuffs have rocket booster features and a special button on the Batman cuff which alerts Robin to arrive at lightening speed in the Batmobile.   When I am wearing the Batcuff, it has been reprogrammed to summons a cup of tea, but I’m afraid neither of the men in my life is reliably responding.  *Sigh* …you just can’t get the side-kicks these days.

Superhero Cuff with Tea Button

Even the usually sensible Mr B has been seduced by our new superhero wardrobe…

superman cuffs with suit

To make your own cuffs you’ll need:

  • Toilet rolls or kitchen-paper rolls (these are usually a bit bigger; great for older kids – or grown-ups…
  • glue
  • paper printables (PDF at end of post) or paints, glitter and embellishments to decorate yourself
  • odd buttons to glue on for additional gadgets / accessories

Making the Superhero Cuffs:

  • Cut once along the length of the toilet roll to create a cuff shape and a flexible opening.  If you’re making a pair of cuffs like the Superman ones above, cut the toilet roll into two equal halves.
  • Print out the PDF wrappers and glue around the cardboard rolls, folding the ends over and glueing in place.  You might need to resize slightly depending on the size of your rolls.  The cuffs should look like this:

superhero cardboard cuffs DIY

  • You can activate your super-powers immediately, or you can glue on buttons and embellishments for additional gadgetry like we did below:

buttons for superhero cuffs

Behold; our work here is done.  One last word of caution; use your new super-powers wisely.  With great power comes great responsibility…

Have a great weekend!

Incredibles DIY cuff

Red and Grey Superhero Cuff Printables

Superman Cuff Printables

How do you spell….

August 30, 2012 By in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

One rainy day in early Summer, I spent an evening decorating plain wooden clothes pegs, intending to use them for a multitude of crafts, and wrote about it here.  With a box of brightly coloured, perky pegs leftover, I was looking for ideas for how to use them and stumbled across this brilliant idea for creating a spelling game.  As Harry is starting to recognise numbers, letters and enticing words (usually those relating to food or toys…), it seemed the perfect time to make him his own set of letters and words ready to practice his budding skills.

I decorated wooden pegs with scraps of gift wrap and washi tape, using double-sided tape to secure the gift wrap in place.  I had a box of these wooden letters tucked away in my craft cupboard, but you could write the letters directly onto the pegs, or use rub on transfers instead.  All you need to end up with is a set of pegs with different letters on.  You can make an alphabet, but I found it was easier to start with the words themselves and work back to see what letters I’d need and how many of them – ‘m’s and ‘d’s come up a lot, whereas some other letters are hardly used at all.

I designed and printed out a couple of sheets with words I knew would be instantly recognisable to Harry and fun to spell.  Because my wooden letters are all in capitals and I want Harry to recognise lower case too, I wrote the words out underneath so he can see how letters change in different settings.

I cut these up and laminated them by slipping several in a laminating sheet with space around them to cut between the words

Put them together with the pegs and hey-presto, you have a spelling game!  I found a storage box to keep these in, and my intention is to keep adding longer and more interesting words as Harry’s skills improve.  This is a great game to make because it can be as simple as using a pen to write letters on pegs, through to this more elaborate and decorative set – a lovely thing to make for a grandchild, perhaps, or for an older sibling to help you make for a younger one – not least because everyone can use a spelling refresher once in a while!

First Harvest

June 29, 2012 By in Green Fingers Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 15 Comments

I wrote here about the moment in April when Harry and I caught Spring Fever and had an exuberant flurry of planting fruit and vegetables, before collapsing exhausted on the lawn with a stiff drink (of milk, naturally).  We are complete amateurs, seduced by the adverts in the garden centre which promise abundant produce from phoenix-like plants which thrive on neglect and rise from the dead every time.  Harry’s selection process involved choosing the brightest coloured packets which were reachable at knee-height, and that seemed as good a plan as any to me. It’s fair to say we put our feisty seedlings and their hardiness to the test, as did the British weather – the amount of floods and hailstorms we’ve had in recent weeks would suggest to the Biblically-minded that eternal damnation is quite possibly just around the corner.

Still, today we harvested our first crops and have held a small judging ceremony to score our efforts.  We have been generally tough on ourselves but start with the stand-out winners, our beautiful, abundant sugar snap peas.  Or perhaps I should just say peas; they grew way beyond sugar-snapping size and are now cheery fat pods bursting with perky peas. We’re very proud.

Our second crop was courgettes.  Everyone warned me that courgettes grow in the blink of an eye and that gardeners the world over will roll their eyes and tell you of the glut they always experience, and their weariness of having to cook courgette 50 different ways to try to run down their stocks.  It is thus with some embarassment that I confess we have managed to grow just one courgette.  One, Uno, Solo.  And that one is approximately the length of Harry’s finger, and only slightly wider.  It is perfectly formed, but insufficient for a meal, unless perhaps Gwyneth Paltrow was coming for dinner. We give ourselves 6 out of 10.

Chantenay carrots were my secret favourite crop; I pictured rustling up a bowl of them for Sunday lunch en famille, where they would glint under a knob of melting butter and look radiant and perfectly formed, yet just earthy and organic enough for it to be clear they were not from a supermarket.  Well, of all these goals we seem to have achieved only the latter; there aint no doubt that our carrots are not shop-bought….

Still, who needs to eat carrots when you can give them false eyes and name them individually? (this one above is The Lobster, by the way…).  We may not be close to winning any beauty prizes for our efforts, but we’re having a lot of fun growing them…

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