Category Archives: Projects

Cardboard Regatta

DIY, Ella Art, white elephant junior

We had so much fun working with our daughter to build her cardboard boat four our church’s annual Cardboard Regatta. The basic premise for the regatta is for parents and kids to build a navigable boat using mainly cardboard and duct tape. In addition to racing against other kids’ cardboard boats, boats are also judged on creativity and asked to come up with a theme for their boats. For our daughter’s boat, we came up with a winter/Frosty the Snowman theme with Frosty being towed from behind to look like he was water skiing.

This was the first time for our daughter to compete in the regatta. She was very apprehensive and nervous about her boat sinking in the chilly and “dirty” lake water. We assured her that she would be okay, and thanks to a whole lot of extra duct tape, we made sure that she wouldn’t sink. Thankfully the rules on duct tape were pretty loose.

When it came time to launch the boats, Frosty (being towed from behind) quickly fell over, but our daughter’s boat still stayed afloat. In the end, our daughter (and her co-pilot friend) came in second place, but the greatest victory was being one of the few boats to finish the race without sinking. It was a fun day, and best of all, our daughter is looking forward to competing in the cardboard regatta next year.

Map Party Invitation Envelopes

Cards, DIY, party decorations, Upcycle, white elephant junior, , , ,

Maps are great for using when you travel or just to look at and dream. Our son is a big fan of maps and the outdoors, so when it came time to create his birthday party invitations, it was only natural for us to incorporate maps in the design. We created our own invitations using Adobe Illustrator and some card stock paper. Then it was time to create the envelopes. We are always looking for ways to reuse materials, so it was only natural that we would use pages of maps from a beatup atlas to help create the look.Using an old envelope as our template, we cut and pasted and  folded, and created our unique envelopes that are sure to attract attention. We think they turned out great. 

Duct Tape Dress

DIY, Ella Art, white elephant junior,

Each year around this time, my daughter and I attend our church’s Daddy Daughter Dance. This year, she really wanted to wear a duct tape dress, so with her mom’s, she set out to make a classy dress using nothing but duct tape. After cleaning out all of the red duct tape at the store, my wife set out to make the dress. Duct tape is a challenge to work with sometimes, and this was definitely one of those times. After some setbacks and lots of thrown away duct tape, the dress was completed. Originally, my daughter had asked for me to join her with a duct tape suit, but I elected to stop at a duct tape tie. My daughter and I had a great evening together, and as you can imagine, we were quite the conversation piece. Check out some of the pictures of our duct tape dress creation, including some shots of the dress in action at the dance.