Backyard Design: DIY Outdoor Sound Wall/Music Station

 This post is part of a series on Playspace Design.   Other posts in the series include:
Our Playroom

Our Reading Room

Our Art Room
Dinosaur Garden

Natural Rock Play Space and Outdoor Kitchen

I'll talk more about the whole layout behind our backyard design in the final post that gives the overview, but one of the things on my list of must-haves was an outdoor sound wall.  There's a beautiful hydrangea behind it and when it's in bloom with giant blue-purple blooms this view is rather breathtaking.  (The two other tan beams you see in the background of the photo are the supports for our deck above.)

To make our sound wall, I first went shopping at our Seattle Goodwill.  I searched for anything that I felt would make interesting sounds (for the wall itself) and for any interesting and unusual items we could use as "drum sticks".  I ended up purchasing two types of colander, a cream (tea) dispenser, a fish and a clover gelatin mold, part of a broiler, a drying rack, a bell, and a pot lid.  The awesome rusted crow was actually left behind by our home's previous owners and he is the perfect addition there in the upper right hand corner.

I also picked up a few strange shaped whisks, some interesting large spoons, and a potato masher for, well, banging.  :)  I keep those loose parts in a clear plastic shower caddy (the caddy keeps them organized, but the holes in the shower caddy don't allow for the collection of water).

Once I'd purchased all the items, I laid them out to determine the size of the wall I wanted to make.  We decided on a 2 x 12 single piece of wood and had it cut at Home Depot to the length we wanted/our space was able to accomodate.  We bolted that piece of wood to two 4 x 4 pillars that we also had cut to size on site.  The pillars are buried 1/3 in the ground (you can just dig a big hole, and once you get the wall where you want using a level, and then add pea gravel to "set" the pillars before adding dirt) and we chose the height based on S's height at the time (we built this over a year ago, and chose a height that she could reach at the time, but that would also grow with her).

I mounted most of the items with the same hooks I used to mount X's texture circles for his Sensory Board, though a few items necessitated screws.  I tried to hang them in ways that would create the widest variety of sounds - for instance, you can see that the broiler plate S is "playing" is partially on and partially off the board so she can investigate how that affects the sound it makes.  I love that we were able to make a wall long enough that several children can make "music" at once (as they do when S has lots of friends over).

And if you're not yet standing on your own, you can always watch and make music with the spoons and whisks in the shower caddy.   :)

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Life-Sized Magnetic Robot

Meet Bot.

S and I enjoy our mini Recycled Robots so much, I was inspired to make a bigger version.  I love life-sized things (like our Felt Board), but I also thought I could use his body as a magnet board.  It works brilliantly!  So for any of you who want a magnet board, but don't have wall space - this works a dream!!!

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For materials we used some cardboard boxes, white duct tape,six tall aluminum cans (our beans come in these tall cans - we use them to make chili!), three regular sized aluminum cans, HVAC venting, a thick mailing tube, aluminum foil, a box cutter, and a hot glue gun.

Since making Bot is at least a little involved, we decided to make a family project out of it this past weekend.  S was in charge of making Bot's fingers.  She decided he should have ten fingers, and based off the size finger she wanted, I pre-cut ten pieces of aluminum foil for her and she went to work shaping fingers.

My husband had a vision for Bot's feet (they need to be nice and big to prevent the robot from tipping), so he was in charge of that.

X...well, X was in charge of looking cute.  And exploring boxes.

Here's a back view of Bot so I can talk more about how he's constructed.  I took the three "head" cans and laid a piece of duct tape along the back of them to hold them together (loosely, granted).  I then used the measurements of the cans (height and width) to cut four pieces of cardboard to make a rectangle around them.  I used the white duct tape along all the edges of everything, as well as to hold cardboard pieces together.  Once I had the cans "boxed" in, I used a glue gun on the back of Bot's head along the edges of the cans and between them to lock them in place.  I repeated this same procedure to make Bot's body.

I cut the HVAC venting roughly in half, and then squeezed the far opening in half to close it.  Along that seam, I used the hot glue gun again to attach each of Bot's foil fingers.  I used hot glue along the circumference of the HVAC venting to attach Bot's finished arms.

I used hot glue again to attach Bot's ear pieces and his legs.  My husband used a box cutter to cut out an opening for the cardboard mailing tube to sit inside Bot's box feet.  We used hot glue at the base to make Bot's tube legs more stable.

S decorated Bot's face completely by herself (it's SO CUTE!) and then set to work decorating his body.  We used several of the magnets we created for our Recycled Robots (you can read more about how we made them in that post if you're curious) plus some of our beloved Tegu blocksand some of our geometric Melissa and Doug magnets.

It really is a good amount of magnetic space (and you could, of course, build an even bigger robot) for those of you looking for an alternate to a wall mounted magnet board.

We took Bot outside for a photo shoot because it was too dark inside with our gloomy weather.  I just adore how S made his tiny hat and cute little cheeks with the Tegu blocks.

Best friends!

And then today we took a few more photos indoors.

I love that he's almost as tall as S!

We love our Bot and hope we've inspired you to create your own.  If you do, we'd love to see a picture on our Facebook or Google+ wall!!!

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Recycled Car City

Our little guy is currently addicted to two foods - sliced deli turkey and Happy Baby Green Puffs.  He goes through several canisters of the latter a week!  The bottles the puffs come in have such a cool shape, I've decided to give myself the challenge of reinventing them.  Especially given that Earth Day is in a few days, I figured this would be the perfect post!  Perhaps you also have some puff containers (or other bottles) that could be used to create a super fun car city.  :)

Just to illustrate - this is the stash of bottles after just two weeks.  Yikes.  Do you think they have a twelve step program for babies?  ;)

First we stripped the plastic off the outside.  It came off very easily with scissors.  Then we used some of S's copious foam sticker stash to decorate.  We have a whole set of mixed color geometric shapes, so those that weren't already squares or rectangles were easily cut into those shapes.  If you'd like your city to be monochromatic, Michaels and other craft stores sell large sheets of adhesive foam for less than a dollar!

S helped me decorate the buildings.  We decided to do a set of three rows of windows two wide on each side to make the bottles look like skyscrapers.

X inspected our work.  While he loved the city buildings and was actually quite gentle with them, we found that he liked to eat the roads, so he sat in his highchair and snacked (on more puffs, hahaha) while S set up her city.

I made several strips of varying length roads by cutting up some large black foam sheets I bought at Michaels for around 60 cents each.  Using a glue gun, I glued on little yellow stripes to divide the road into two lanes.

We absolutely loved how this project turned out.  S has already made several different configurations of cities, and there's always room to expand because it's super easy to make more roads!

She set up this city to have a square in the middle and told me that's where the city's park and playground were.  :)

We have these cute little wooden cars from a set she got for her first birthday, but you could absolutely use Hot Wheels cars as well.  The scale is just perfect for them, I think.

S had fun narrating the story of the various cars.  Here red car had to travel the whole length of the city to get to his friend's house.

Here he's knocking on the door to see if his friend is home.

And after a fun day of driving around, he parked in his garage.  Hahaha.

All in all this whole project cost less than $3!  We have been having so much fun with our recycled car city - we highly recommend it!

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Recycled Robots

Preschool+

This is running as a guest post over at Creative Family Fun; please click here to hop on over and read it there!

3D Painting

Toddler+

I just love spring flowers!  Every once in awhile we treat ourselves to a fresh centerpiece of daffodils or tulips, but it costs enough that we don't keep a fresh bouquet on our dining room table constantly.  So I thought - why not have S paint a centerpiece for us?  This also got me thinking about how most of S's painting is two dimensional.  I thought she might find painting in three dimensions unusual (and maybe a bit more interesting?).  

I knew I wanted to making something spring-themed, and I immediately thought of daffodils.  I'd seen several renditions of homemade craft daffodils on the internet (and by that, I really mean Pinterest) using egg cartons, so I thought I'd give it a try.  I wanted to use all recycled materials, so I raided our recycling container for anything that might be useful.  I ended up settling on some thin cardboard for the base and the white sturdy paper (not so much cardboard but somewhere between that and cardstock in thickness) that the Hanna Andersson unders came in (hahaha).  I wanted the stems to be sturdy, so I used the corners of the orange juice container for those.

S and I observed and counted the petals and leaves on the daffodils in our deck planters (the ones we planted together in this post).  We made sure that the replicas I was making were true to the original.  S also helped me determine the placement of the flowers, grass, and Easter eggs (she had to have Easter eggs, of course!).  After cutting all the requisite shapes, I used my hot glue gun to give structure to the whole thing (regular glue would not have been supportive enough, I fear).

Then she was ready to begin!  She has recently learned the difference between 2D and 3D and kept exclaiming "it's so weird to paint in 3D, Mama!" over and over.  So cute.

She had to bend and twist her hands and body to get into the little spaces; she needed to bend and move the parts of the flowers.  It was a lot more challenging than painting a 2D project for sure!

She had SO much fun painting the ground brown.  She spent a painstakingly long time getting it just right.

Here she's spun the piece around to get to some different parts of it.

After painting the ground so very carefully, she ended up wanting to take a break and finished the project the following day (this is often the case with projects she's taking her time on - she'll spent 30-45 very focused minutes before wanting a break.  To her credit, she does come back and finish (also doing a nice job) the following day).  Here's her final product!  The tiny gold glitter is a bit hard to get out of the shaker, so she had me dispense the glitter on the flowers; however all of the other painting was done totally by her.  We just love the bright colors of our new spring centerpiece, and S had a great time mixing things up by painting in 3D!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.