As a child, I remember being thrilled to escape school in mid June—but by August, I was bored to tears. Now as a mom I realize how tough it is to find quality entertainment for kids without spending money or driving all over town. This week we’ll revisit a few of our best posts on entertaining your brood for less.

For toddlers:

• Homemade Finger Paint: These days we just head outside with Roscoe and avoid worrying about the ensuing mess. We use the back sides of household papers and just hose Roscoe down when he’s done! You can find a link to Rebecca’s post on fingerpainting here.

• Homemade playdough—including an edible variety! For a very small price, my toddler stays happily entertained with his little blob of playdough. Again, check this vintage post for some great links.

• Homemade popsicles. This entertainment-food will help you clean out your produce drawer, soothe teething gums, and sneak spinach into your child’s diet. With recipes for tofu popsicles and fruity-veggie popsicles in my repertoire, my skills in creative desserts have hit a whole new high!

• Homemade bubbles. Once you make up the bubble solution, you can experiment with pip cleaners, coat hangers, and other household objects to create enormous bubbles. Visit another post of ours here for tips on how to get started.

For older children:

• Cat’s cradle. I still sometimes catch my middle school students enjoying this simple but mesmerizing game. If you’re not sure where to start, this site provide pictures to illustrate each step.

• Paper games. Origami is a great way to provide kids with some quiet, focused crafts—and a great way to recycle junk mail. It may be easier to use a book, but this site has some simple origami shapes that kids can do with limited adult help.

• Hula hoops. I spent years of my life trying to perfect this art—and I still find the hoop down around my ankles most of the time. You can find hula hoops at garage sales and thrifty shops used for cheap.

• Playtime outside. There’s no better way to connect with nature—and one’s desire to protect it, than be spending some time outdoors.

What else do you do to inspire entertainment that doesn’t have to be plugged in? We’d love to hear your Thrifty Green ideas.

Remember that you’ll find a whole slew of frugal, eco-friendly tips below with links back to some fabulous blogs. This week we’ve finally added Mr. Linky.  Please jump into Thrifty Green Thursday whenever you’d like. For directions on how to start, just click here. Thanks for visiting!

This week’s Works for Me Wednesday has a theme: “Mom, I’m Bored!”  This summer will be the perfect time to bust out some homemade finger paint to keep my restless toddler amused.  Even very young babies can express themselves with finger paint–with a little assistance, of course.

A few months ago, I included this picture of Joy’s son Roscoe in our Eco-Valentine’s post.  I knew exactly what Andy would say when he saw Roscoe on Joy’s kitchen floor, wearing nothing but a cloth diaper, finger painting.  “What a mess!” he said, shaking his head.  I have to admit I felt the same way, and I marveled that Joy was definitely turning into the “fun mom” while I’d be forever known as the “uptight mom.”

You know what might work for me this summer?  Outdoor finger painting!

Here are some recipes to get you started.  Some are more eco-friendly and natural than others.

Basic recipe with food coloring

Finger paints with homemade natural dyes

Finger paints using juice for dyes

Easy corn syrup finger paint

With the warm weather ahead, I’m looking forward to making a batch of finger paints and letting my daughter go wild out on the driveway.  Clean-up will be a snap: I’ll simply hose her off when she’s done.

Store-bought Play-doh, which consists of a mystery list of ingredients and comes in individual little plastic containers, is more expensive than homemade. It’s easy to make a non-toxic version with a few common pantry items. I like to leave it white instead of coloring it, but below you’ll find how to use natural ingredients to color your play dough. If you roll it out, cut it into shapes, and bake them like cookies, you can even paint your creations. Try a batch today and see what your youngster thinks.

Edible Play-dough

Two Play-dough recipes

I found these recipes here.

Rubbery Play-dough

2 cups baking soda
1 1/2 cups water
1 cup cornstarch

Mix with a fork until smooth. Boil over medium heat until thick. Spoon onto a plate or wax paper.

Nature’s Play-dough

1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 cup water
2 tablespoon oil
2 tablespoon cream of tartar
beet, spinach, and carrot juice

Mix flour, salt and oil, and slowly add the water. Cook over medium heat, stirring until dough becomes stiff. Turn out onto wax paper and let cool. Knead the dough with your hands until of proper consistency. You can use the un-dyed version or divide it into balls and add a few drops of the vegetable juices to make green, pink, and orange.

Or maybe you’d like to try a scrumptious edible play-dough recipe. I’ve included a picture for inspiration. (Remember that eating it yourself is not required.)

For more Works for Me Wednesday ideas, check out Rocks in My Dryer.

This eco-friendly craft can go from a simple twenty-minute project to a full-fledged artistic adventure lasting several hours.  The result is quite beautiful in either case.  My mother first made a batch of blown natural silhouette eggs with my sister and me when we were little.  She saw the article in Sunset Magazine two decades ago explaining how to silhouette leaves and ferns onto blown eggs using natural, homemade dyes. 

I envisioned myself with pots full of red cabbage bubbling and beautiful eggs emerging from the multicolored washes.  In fact, I flubbed this craft up quite a bit before I had success.  Hopefully you will learn from my un-Martha-like mistakes and have better luck.

Step 1:

The Easy Way: Boil the eggs.  If you choose this option, skip blowing the eggs and go right to step two.

The Advanced Way:  Blow the liquid out to make hollow eggs.  The disadvantage of this method is the time it takes, but the benefit is that blown eggs can be used year after year as an Easter centerpiece. I tried blowing the eggs myself but had little success and nearly passed out after my first attempt.  Eventually I found that using a bicycle pump with a needle attachment (like the kind you use for inflating soccer balls) works far better.  Make a small hole at the top and bottom, insert the needle attachment and blow out the egg liquid.

Step 2:  Find some attractive leaves, ferns and small flowers.  Ferns work especially well, as will smooth leaves that easily adhere to the egg surface.  I tried a few leaves and pine needles that were too textured.  These eggs ended up with no silhouette whatsoever since the dye was able to seep along the bumps of the leaf and cling to the eggshell.

Step 3: Rummage around for nylons.  It is neither cost effective nor eco-friendly to buy these new, so if you can, hunt up a used pair.  They will work better if they have a great deal of elasticity left in them.

Step 4: Place the leaf on the egg and cover with the nylon.  Be sure to tightly tie the nylon around the egg so that the plant stays close to the egg during the dyeing process.  My first attempts at dyeing were failures because I didn’t stretch the nylon as tight as it would go around the egg.  Because the leaf wasn’t secured to the eggshell, the silhouette didn’t ever appear.   

Step 5:

The Easy Way: Plop the nylon covered egg into a mug of water with food coloring and vinegar.  If you want to make your own dyes, see the hard way below.  But if your life is too busy for the extra hour or two of work, just use food coloring.  The longer you let the egg sit in the dye, the more dramatic the contrast.  Also, try not to check it too frequently since it will disturb the dye and could affect the quality of the silhouette. If it’s been at least fifteen minutes, remove the nylon and admire your creation! You’re done!

The Advanced Way: Cut up natural ingredients, dump them into a pot of water and create your own dye washes.  See my last post about using natural foods to create your own dyes.  I love the earthy shades that emerge with home-made dyes.  It’s best to boil down the natural ingredients until you have a few different colors of wash.  Then strain out the veggie scraps and cool the dye water. 

Add the blown eggs to the dye washes and toss in a good splash of vinegar. The hollow eggs will be difficult to submerge.  You’ll have to weigh them down by putting small lid inside the pan and placing a heavy object on top.  It will take quite a while for the dye to set so be ready to let them sit for up to an hour.  And you’re done! 

Overall, this craft is a good way to get your family outdoors exploring spring’s newest arrivals.  Take the easy route and simplify your life or try your ultra crafty skills on the advanced version of this project.  Chances are, you’ll do better than I did!  

My daughter is attending her very first Valentine’s Day party today.  Ah–what is more romantic than a room full of toddlers exchanging cards and eating heart-shaped cookies?  The party hostess, Audrey’s daycare provider, gave us a list a couple weeks ago with the names of the children in attendance on Valentine’s Day.  Of course I immediately went to work making chocolate-covered cherries, composing personal poems for each child, and cutting out doilies and foil hearts.

All right, I didn’t really make candy or pen sonnets–how could I, when I left everything to the last possible moment?  I did manage to create my own last-minute Valentines rather than buying a box at the store.  A few days ago I saw a woman on television demonstrating how to make some easy eleventh-hour Valentines.  She threaded a tissue through a hole in a cut-out heart and wrote “Ah-cho-choose you” on the top.  I don’t know . . . unless I used 100% post-consumer recycled tissue, I just wouldn’t feel right about giving Audrey’s daycare friends this Valentine.  (Although, on second thought, who needs a tissue more than a little tyke in the dead of winter?)

The tissue Valentine got me thinking: what natural objects could inspire a Valentine-appropriate pun?  I ventured outside where I found more dead leaves than I could ever need.  Affix a dead leaf to a paper heart and write “Don’t leave me,” over the top and you have a nice, albeit somewhat desperate, Valentine.  Maybe “I won’t leaf you,” would be a little more jovial.  The dead leaf creation could also function as an anti-Valentine: “Please leave” or “Leave me alone” or even “You’re dead to me” could be written on the card to ward off unwanted suitors.

I didn’t stop with dead leaves.  I soon found rocks (”You’re my rock” can be written right on any nicely-shaped stone with soy-based ink), sticks (”Let’s stick together”), and creeping thyme (”Let’s spend thyme together” or “You’re a creep,” depending on the recipient).  Portland also boasts many evergreen rhododendrons, but I couldn’t think of a clever pun to accompany it.  I’ll leave it in case anyone knows a youngster by the name of “Rhoda.”

For my daughter’s Valentines, I decided to “leave” the nature outdoors and “stick with” the more traditional paper-heart variety.  I cut hearts out of a maroon shopping bag and old magazines, glued them together, and voila:

Ever wonder how to recycle your children’s artwork (without literally throwing the masterpieces in the recycling bin)?  Even very young children can take a part in the creation of Valentine’s day decorations.  Joy saved some of her son Roscoe’s finger paintings and used them to generate some brilliantly colored hearts.

In a pinch, other ordinary objects can also function as Valentine card materials.  Photos, comics, personal ads, old calendar art, ribbons, fabric, sheet music, and even old Christmas cards can be refashioned as a heartfelt Valentine with a little glue and ingenuity.  By using materials I had around the house (or out on the ground), my eco-friendly Valentines won hearts and saved the planet in one fell swoop–with not a moment to spare.

According to Denise and Alan Field’s Baby Bargains, the average American spends $1800 outfitting a nursery—that includes a crib, mattress, dresser, rocker, bedding, and décor.  I managed to spend just $245.  How did I do it?  Well, I did get a lot of stuff for free, thanks to the generosity of friends and family.  I also simply avoided buying all of the nursery “must-haves” on the market, such as a rocker.  My daughter’s room may not look like something you’d find in the pages of Architectural Digest, but it has a certain cozy appeal to it.

Much of the eclectic charm comes from homemade creations.  My daughter received beautiful quilts and blankets from her grandmothers and great-grandmother.  They make great nursery decorations—I hung the quilt my cousin Lindsay made on the wall for all to admire.  My daughter will treasure all of these hand-sewn blankets as she grows up.  After all these years, I still have the baby blanket my grandma made for me when I was born.  Homemade items become keepsakes, making them greener than store-bought goods.

My friend Anne sewed much of the bedding and some matching decorations for her baby.  I was a bit less ambitious (and talented) with the sewing machine, but I did manage to turn one curtain into two curtains for the windows in my daughter’s room.  I even reused a curtain rod I happened to have in my basement. I made some storage boxes for my daughter’s toys and books by wrapping shoeboxes in used wrapping paper.  Surprisingly, she has not ripped these apart after almost a year of use.  I have to give myself eco-points for crafting these boxes out of foraged materials, but I am not sure I’ll win any design awards for these creations—nor have I created an heirloom Audrey will treasure forever.  Oh well.

I had better luck creating a mobile out of twigs, paper, buttons, and raffia:

Sometimes making your own nursery decorations can save money.  The curtains I sewed, mobile I constructed, and decorative boxes I made were free, since I already owned the materials.  Be careful, though—often making things can end up costing more than buying pre-made items.  This is great if you are a talented craftster like my sister-in-law, who knit a beautiful sweater for Audrey, but not-so-great if you buy expensive materials and don’t quite realize your artistic vision.

This brings me to the focal point of our homemade nursery: the one-of-a-kind, gender-neutral, subtly striped, waterproof changing pad.  My husband brought a sewing machine into our marriage.  I never knew what he did with it and never once saw him use it.  But days after our daughter’s birth, he hunkered over that machine with mounds of carefully-chosen fabric and foam from a sporting-goods store.  He worked for hours.  Yes, it cost more than a store-bought pad.  Yes, it took a lot of time and energy.  No, I guess it’s not a particularly “green” creation.  But every time our daughter wets and/or soils her diaper, she thinks of her dear old dad.