Stick horse

Last week DQ brought home a parent/child assignment. A state holiday is remembered today and the 2nd grade teachers thought it would be wonderful to have the children and parents create a stick horse together.

DQ was all pumped about it. Apparently the teachers also thought it would be cool to bate the children into a contest. In other words these stick horses needed to be made not bought and then they, the teachers, were going to judge our creative abilities.

Hopefully by now most of you know that I am not an arts and crafty kinda gal. Oh, I've done an occassional counted cross-stitch. I did a needlepoint kit once. I even hooked my brother a rug once. But I am not crafty. I buy kits. Remember that I was doing a reupholstering job lately?

So over the weekend I designed a muzzle out of paper towel tubes. I taped them together. Yesterday we got together to finish the project. See the rest of the weekend was spent preparing for Passover. I finally found a recipe for potatoe kugel that I like. Why do good recipes always have to be so labor intensive? I digress. So yesterday we spent sometime looking for the muzzle.

Once I found it. I looked at it and realized that we needed something to be the head. Well I have all these pieces of foam left over from covering the seat cushions. So I balled them up and taped them on to the muzzle. Now the nose looked too flat so I bunched up a bit more foam and taped that on to the muzzle. Voila! I now had a horses head. My original idea was to cover this in construction paper but I looked at this head again and decided it was too lumpy. So wrapped it in some of the remaining batting from the seat backs. Which then led me to realize that the paper would not hold up very well. So I measure out the rest of the material that I would need to cover the cheap chairs I have. The rest I used to cover the head. We, DQ, PF and I, worked together to sew the material together. This was a very long endeavor.

I finally had to get dinner heated, and the rest of the kids back in the house, and feed the family. After dinner I get back to designing this horse head. I use black craft foam for the ears. The eyes are large, flat brownish buttons with smaller black buttons sewn on top. The nostrils are small black buttons. PF observed that the way I folded the material around the nose made adequate nostrils and the buttons were not necessary. But I had already sewn those buttons on the stupid head and I wasn't taking them off. Earlier in the evening I had made a proclamation that the horse simply wasn't going to have a mane because I didn't have any yarn that would be adequate. (I didn't think pink or purple would cut it) I felt bad about that. While I was reiterating this proclamation to PF in our bedroom my eyes fell on my scarf. It's made from that furry kind of yarn. I now had a mane!

By the time this horse came all together it was 11:00PM! I was tired. PF was tired, and DQ was asleep in bed. Actually I think it's pretty cute. It is a red clay colored horse with a dark grey mane. So we'll see how it survives the day.