advent countdown: december 4-5 (lamination!)

…??? this is what my daughter found in her advent calendar yesterday morning. do you have any idea what it means? you’ll have to keep on reading to find out. but first, i have something to tell you: my sister sometimes seems to think that i’m a trash can. (yes, i’m talking about you, dear sister!) but don’t get me wrong… i love it! besides the very cool clothes she’s passed my way (for example, this skirt), she also give me all sorts of other stuff. for example, a little laminator. with two special cartridges: one with adhesive to make sticker and one with a very thin, cutable magnet layer underneath. and so every so often we make very adorable magnets from my girl’s drawings, like these ones we made a bit over a year ago:

while she was making her christmas cards, sofia said that it would be cool if we made some magnets to send inside the cards. it was really a good idea because they’re very thin, the don’t break and the weight is virtually null. so the next day (december 4) i told her to do some christmas drawings, but also other non-christmas ones if she wanted.

i showed her how to make them go through the machine (this one is the xyron 510).

obviously it had to happen now that i was documenting the procedure that the magnetic roll ran out in the middle of a drawing (but it doesn’t matter because it still sticks anyway and they you just cut away the rest) and the plastic folded a bit in the new roll, making a crease. but that had never happened to me before!

then you cut out the shapes. (see, you can’t even tell that there were issues after cutting them out.)

the one thing that i don’t like about this laminator (besides the expense of the cartridges) is that a lot of the laminating material gets wasted at the beginning and at the end of each piece of paper. but i always save these pieces because you can still use them to make other magnets by gluing drawing on top or sticking stickers on them.

this day’s activity is thanks to a project by play at home mom which was amongst the first that i pinned upon joining pinterest. what it is is that you laminate photos of faces so you can draw on them many times with whiteboard markers.

but this time i used transparent contact paper.

you print out some large photos of the face of someone you’d like to make fun of and stick the contact paper onto the front and back. i’d intended to cut around the head, but sofia wanted the whole photo, so we just trimmed the excess plastic. in the end, she was right because that way they can be embellished even more.

at first she wasn’t totally sure what to do, so i helped her. together we did her (you can see the original photo here)… and teacher macchia.

then you erase the marker with those dry erase marker erasers or a rag. they don’t always come off perfectly, but you can also use a damp rag.

then mr. nicky wanted some “boobie…again”, so i left her on her own. but every so often she’d come to me to show me her interpretation of nicky (with his favorite colors on his forehead and a worm coming out of his nose)…

…and of me (as a frog catching flies with its tongue). (the original photo can be seen here.) i cried from laughing so hard when i saw this last one! she also did my husband, but i don’t publish his photos here, so his portrait shall remain a family secret!

contact paper is very useful for other things, too. a few months back i used it to put back together the paper pieces…

…of this game from the 1970s.

i contact paper-ed them and now they’re protected and the broken ones are one piece again.

however, before laminating them we played at making the biggest sandwich possible…

…and make the most ridiculous ice creams from the broken cone. we laughed our heads off, but you know that in lancusi, province of salerno, there’s a gelateria that makes the most improbable ice cream flavors imaginable, and i have tried some of them? i actually did like the onion, celery and fennel ones (especially celery, which was very refreshing), but the baccalà (salted cod) one was absolutely narsty!

other news? remember the refashioning tutorial book i spoke so well of? now there’s a giveaway to win a free copy! who will be the lucky winner…?