Have you ever tried ignoring your kids? I do all the time. But when you add in the "no T.V." element the kids can get dangerously creative. I personally remember making an entire Barbie house out of paper Dixie cups and tissue boxes just because nobody paid a lick of attention to me for about 5 whole years.

On a less traumatic note, a couple weeks ago Piper and her future husband "H." were busy in our garage. We convert the garage into an art studio every summer (pictures to come soon.) We have peg boards with glue guns and paint brushes and shelves with every imaginable art supply we can get our hands on. We give the brats their own space to make a mess and we don't have to get all OCD and clean it up as they keep their projects on various burners around the studio.

We try to buy as little as we can at places like Michaels. Let's call a spade a spade: Michaels is creepy. Going there is like visiting your alcoholic aunt: it's confusing and boring at the same time, there's too much potpourri, the decor is hideous and you feel depressed when you leave. The only time I want to shop there is to buy a big ticket item like a silk screen printing kit with one of their weekly "50% off one item" coupons. That's it. There is really no customer service unless you walk a mile back to the cash register and talk real slowly. And let's face it, there is no guy name "Michael" with 2 kids and a mortgage who needs your money.

So we buy at local art supply stores and pick through the sale tables like peasants. But another advantage to living in Portland is that we have SCRAP! SCRAP (School & Community Reuse Action Project) collects donations from corporations and businesses; stuff like plastic caps, fabric, foam, springs, cards, magnets, buttons, test tubes, reams of paper and envelopes with out-dated logos, the possibilities are endless. I even bought globes there for $7! More recently I have noticed that they have more and more bins of miscellaneous crayons, markers, paints and art supplies. Last year we found a full set of Caran d'Ache colored pencils worth nearly $200 (we paid $20!). When you leave there, you feel like you just shoplifted everything and got away with it, it is so damn cheap it's unbelievable.

It's likely you don't have a SCRAP where you are in Anytown, U.S.A. but maybe I can encourage you to start one, it's a nonprofit and it's the most inspiring thing to happen at our humble "castle of crafts".

So back to Piper and H.'s creations. Piper pulled out a jar of colorful printed drill rings and H. had the bright idea to wrap them around spiral binder rings. I swear to god I had nothing to do with it! they came up with this themselves and I honesty LOVE the necklace and key rings they made! Ever the capitalists, they also had the idea to sell them on the sidewalk for $1 with a complimentary glass of lemonade and made a whopping 16 bucks! Hey, I did the math: eleven more years of steady sales, a good saving plan with compounded interest, and figuring in inflation, these two could save almost 9 grand for college (can you imagine how much beer that would buy?)

If you want to make these at home, you could use super cheap plastic beads or macaroni, and you could make spirals with rubber coated, colored wire (just wrap around your finger first).

Just remember to ignore your kids until they are literally so bored that they start making crap out of scrap!