Bunchland

These custom toys from Child’s Own Studio rule

We’ve written before about artistic geniuses who take kids drawings and turn them into stuffed toys, but we’re no less amazed by it than we were initially.

Child’s Own Studio started when Vancouver mom Wendy Tsao wanted to make a recognizable soft toy for her 4-year-old. Why introduce  your kid to some new store-bought toy when you can create one inspired by your kid’s own imagination? She’s now made hundreds of toys from kids’ drawings. We think Tsao’s attention to detail is incredible. Just look at the long t-shirt yarn hair on this Rapunzel-type doll!

According to the Child’s Own website, Tsao is currently slogging her way her way through her wait list and isn’t taking any new requests just yet. We’re not surprised that her wait list is rather long. Because she knows how strongly some parents feel about getting custom toys from kids’ drawings, Tsao has helpfully provided links to other companies with similar sewing talents.

Keep all the drawings without all the clutter with a digital gallery

GeekDad Nathan Barry wouldn’t never dream of discouraging his daughter’s creativity, but their home does seem to acquire an awful lot of her drawings and sculptures. How do you keep all these precious creations without building an addition onto your house just so you have have more wall space? Barry says digitize!

“In an effort to try to curb the art overload and also make it much easier to actually admire them, I’ve embarked upon a grand digitization of everything I can. If it’s letter/A4 sized, then on the scanner it goes – with a resolution of at least 300dpi. If it’s bigger than the scanner, then a photo will do nicely. I always use the DSLR, at it highest quality settings as you can’t get those pixels back later. Sculptures of all kinds are filmed from all angles in HD.”  Read more...

The easiest fun you and your kids ever had in 5 minutes

I went to the new Tequila bar on Ossington with a friend last Tuesday night and when I came home my husband had invented this very simple and surprisingly cool way to turn cookies after dinner into a Jackson Pollock influenced art making activity. I was super impressed and have vowed to go out for cocktails on weeknights more often since it clearly inspires my family to be creative! Anyone want to meet-up for a Tequila next week?

Materials:

Oreos or a similarly flat, sandwich type of cookie. A dark brown almost black cookie is best (aesthetically).

Cake icing tubes in an assortment of colours. We used the kind that are called “Scribblers”.

Awesome visual artist Anne Karsten helped her child’s school raise money by running a stuffed toy making workshop. Anne led the children through the design process, from studying commercially made stuffed animals through to final design, encouraging them to think about textures, shapes and colour. She then sewed the creations and sold them to the children’s parents.

While Anne is willing to sew your child’s fantasy stuffie for them (for a price), she includes directions on her blog on how to do it with your own child or with your own child’s class. We think this sounds like a really cool way to spend a couple afternoons with our bunch!