What are the most-wanted toys on kids’ holiday gift lists for 2011? Best to ask the experts — the kids themselves!

And that’s just what The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis does to produce its annual Top 10 list of kid-tested, kid-approved toys.

Each fall, the museum store invites children to test the newest toys, then vote on their favourites for the upcoming holiday season.

Can you begin to imagine how much fun that would be for the staff? I’m so jealous. :)

Here is the list of this year’s winners — I’ve sorted them by recommended age group — all available from The Children’s Museum Store or online:

• Barbie “Jam with Me” Rock Star Guitar (Ages 3+)
  Jam with Barbie with this toy electric guitar. Connect your MP3 player to jam along with your own tunes, take the guitar challenge and play along with Barbie, or just freeplay to create your own awesome songs!
  $39.95

• Water Wizard (Ages 3+)
  The water wizard lets you draw and create over and over again using only water! As the screen dries the images disappear leaving it ready for another amazing creation.
  $19.95

• Barbie Giant Activity Floor Pad (Ages 3+)
  This complete activity set includes crayons, marker, paints, paintbrush, scissors and gluestick along with 40 fun fashion activities!
  $14.95

• Flying Turtle (Ages 3-12)
  The best toy for active play, kids have a blast zipping around on the flying turtle! But since it is entirely kid powered, they get a ton of great exercise at the same time!
  $79.95

• Playmobil Pirates Prison with Ship (Ages 4+)
  This fun Pirate themed set from Playmobil includes large pirate ship, small row boat, island, prison, and all the people and accessories you need to create an amazing imaginary world.
  $59.95

• Darda Fireball Climb (Ages 4+)
  The World’s Fastest Motorized Cars! This race car and track set is completely kid powered! No batteries or electricity required. Just wind the car and watch it zip through the loops and twists!
  $39.95

• OgoBild Pod (Ages 6+)
  A brilliant combination of active and constructive play. Ogo Bild Pods lets your child build giant structures like bouncing balls and forts.
  $39.95

• Perplexus Original (Ages 6+)
  Perplexus Original is a bendy, trendy, can’t put it down challenge! With plenty of twists, turns, and barriers between start and finish, this puzzle ball will leave you perplexed!
  $24.95

• Laser Pegs 3D Lite Board (Ages 7+)
  This is the Ultimate Laser Pegs Kit – the world’s only lighted construction set! The 3D Lite Board gives you 40 power connectors on one board so you can build anything you can imagine.
  $85.95

• FyrFlyz (Ages 8+)
  Create amazing light shows by spinning, swinging and twirling your FyrFlyz.
  $11.95

Adults in need of holiday gift ideas for the children in their lives can make purchases from the Kid-Tested, Kid-Approved list and The Museum Store holiday toy catalogue both in the store or online at www.childrensmuseum.org/kid-tested.

What I like about most of the toys on this list — and most of the toys you’ll find carried by most museum gift shops, come to that — is that they’re both fun and educational, and especially good for stimulating the creativity of young minds. And most of the toys on this list would be fun for siblings to play with together, even where there are a couple of years between the kids in age.

Also very cool for parents’ on-going expenses, a number of these items are totally kid-powered and run on imagination — no batteries required — like that awesome Darda Fireball Climb race track!

Of course I’d love to see a most-wanted toy list where and fewer of the toys that are pointed at a particular gender (I’m looking at you, Barbie!). A losing battle, there, do you think? Okay, okay, the politically-correct Grinch is moving on…

Stay tuned for more great out of the ordinary gift ideas for kids — and for us big kids, too!

Crafter whateverjames loves Star Wars. Loooooves it. He’s got the Star Wars requisite tattooes, sure — but we’re talking, like, name-your-kid-after-a-movie-character level of fandom.

Yet, so great and earth-shaking is his love for his fiancee — James actually sold off most of his Star Wars action figures to buy her an engagement ring.

That be T.R.U.E. L.O.V.E., right there, people!

Now, as you might suppose, True Love (geek style) calls for a truly awesome, hands-on personal, knock-her-socks-off Valentine, not just some mass-produced store-bought card or last-minute long-stem bouquet.

“I decided to make her a valentine that would be simple, with the most powerful and honest statement I could give her,” James told the admiring crowd over at Craftster, showing his heart-felt orginal cross-stitch pattern: I love you more than Star Wars says it all.

“Plus,” he says, “once I came up with the idea for little lightsabers bent into hearts there was no going back!”

Jude Hill is the guiding hand behind the What If… Quilting Collaborative, an online group of about 40 keen quilters (and counting!) that has just one mission:

… to revisit the Crazy Quilting style and share our results. We are asking questions about technique and rules and style using the traditional Crazy Quilt framework as a jumping off point.

There’s a pledge to keep an open mind and to challenge each other to new heights of creativity, and a Flickr group to share the results of “what-if” in every colour of the rainbow and every technique you might imagine. It’s textile art, and cooperative creativity that goes to the heart of the quilting tradition — in a very nontraditional way!

At the very heart of grey downtown Toronto, there’s a special bright sparkling place where Spanish colours riot and fairies cavort with doorstop-solid cats.

Feeling a bit down and grey, yourself?

There’s nothing I can think of to bring on the sunshine like spending some time with Tascha…

I’m not going to waste your time in gushing on about the artwork, for once, but send you over to tascha.etsy.com to check it out. These paintings sing out for themselves, and you’ll either love them as much as I do or … just wander about Etsy until you find your own favourite art and crafts!

But I’d heartily recommend sliding by YouTube to catch Tascha’s art videos if you’ve got time to spare and a creative spark you’d like to inspire: she’ll show you in fabulous fast motion, step by step, how she creates her paintings with acrylic paint, bits of paper, canvas or wood, and a whole lot of joy!

Inspired by seeing Jen365‘s blog featured on CNN, Lisa Murray decided to shake up her life in a light-hearted way, break out of her rut and out of her shell … by doing one brand new never-tried-it-before thing every day for a year.

I love this idea.

I know a lot of my “new things” aren’t spectacular, but you know what? Even if I’m the only 23 year old who’s never made Jello shooters before … people who may be laughing and ridiculing me should realize that they too had to make them for the first time sometime.

Yeah, exactly!

It’s all about getting your mind to work in a new way, little bit by little bit, just opening the door to creativity and seeing the world with new eyes. (That, and stocking up on life experiences on the way to becoming a fabulously cool little old story-telling Granny, some day in the far distant future…)

Mind you, sometimes the “new things” are not particularly planned, or pleasant, or welcome. One day, Lisa’s “new thing” was side-swiping another car on a misjudged pass. Fortunately, it was just a scuff, no ill effects, but still… not quite the kind of new experience she’d had in mind!

Lisa tells me that it’s sometimes challenging to come up with something new to do every day — whether that’s as simple as wearing black nail polish or just pure silly fun, like ordering a smile at a McDonald’s drive-thru — but it’s been worth it, so far:

I’m learning to love who I am by not focusing on what others think of me. I’m “finding myself”, getting out of my comfort zone, and providing entertaining reading material!

She’s always looking for new ideas for new things to try… What do you say, are we up for it? Can we can come up with some suggestions for Lisa?

Oh sure, a creative bunch of people like this!

Tell you what, I’ll start it off — just scoot on down to the comments section, and we’ll see what wacky and wonderful ideas come floating to the surface…

Game Design: Exploring Creativity with Children

Monopoly Rules

I remember playing Monopoly with my dad.

He taught me many things about wheeling and dealing.

Whenever he purchased Boardwalk, he would ceremoniously place the card into his shirt pocket, symbolically telling me that I would NEVER get it. Mostly, I remember that he would nearly always win.

Yet, my fondest memories are of his creation of a game called Card Monopoly.

He made it with a deck of cards and two record album covers slit open and taped together. The rules were simple, requiring only a second deck of cards, two dice and a couple of tokens. We played quite a few games of Card Monopoly.

I remember thinking that my dad was a genius to be able to invent a game.

Zillions of Games

Dad went on to create many more games, including a computer word game! He instilled in me a love for making games. He also tempered my competitive nature.

Now, as a father, it’s my turn.

With five children, the fun is amplified. We have made up games as one group. We have made games for each other as Christmas presents. We have done solo efforts and used each other as play testers…

So, how did all this come about?

Come take a trip back in time, when the children were young and impressionable…

Inspiration

Where did our game ideas originate? It may be cliché to say that inspiration comes from everywhere but, for us, that was pretty close to the truth.

BEDTIME STORIES

The first games we ever made up were bedtime story adventures. I invented dungeons and forests through which the kids traveled as a team. Each child had opportunities to change the course of the story:

The bedtime stories were so much fun that we began playing them during the day. We would sit in the living room and spin wild, fanciful tales of treasure hunts, quests and spelunking (caves are great settings for game stories!)

EXISTING GAMES

My wife and I spent a lot of time choosing fun, family-oriented games that would appeal to most of us. While my older sons and I enjoyed competitive games, my wife, daughter and youngest son were more laid back. Sure, they would get into the spirit of the moment, but for them, it was not an all-consuming affair. It was rare to find the perfect game.

Our short-list included:

• Liar’s Dice
• Stacker
• Boom-o
• Boggle (no scoring)

When we created new games from existing games, we either changed the rules or we combined two or more games into one mega-game!

MASS MEDIA

PC games, fiction, sitcoms, cartoons and movies have all played a role in inspiring us. All five kids have collaborated on creating a town populated with television characters lovingly drawn on the backs of my old business cards. The town is on a poster board, complete with a mall. I have no clue about the game, but I hear constant laughter coming from their bedroom as they play-act their way through this adult-free world.

SCHOOL SUBJECTS

As Homeschoolers, whenever my wife an I introduced topics to our kids, we either supplemented them with computer games (Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Zoombini’s Logical Adventure, etc.) or we created our own. One such creation was Chemistrivia. As you can imagine, it was designed to test knowledge of basic chemistry.

Guiding Theme

I think it is critical to recognize the elements that make a game fun for children.

Kids don’t always tell you how they feel, but it’s pretty easy to detect boredom and frustration. Getting trounced by big people is no fun for junior — although apparently, it’s okay for him to dance all over our vanquished ruins.

Having one daughter and four sons sitting around the table, I’m keenly aware of gender stereotypes.

Finally, I realize that sometimes, sibling rivalry intrudes on the game, making Sheldon, the oldest, disproportionately targeted for all the evil cards and whammies.

On a positive note, I have learned that Dominique displays the best lateral-thinking skills; Evan is the most analytical and enjoys numbers; Kayla — like her grandpop — drives a hard bargain and can be quite sneaky; Sheldon exploits all the loopholes in the rules; Ryan loves to play, as long as he can sit on mom’s lap and help her.

By minimizing or eliminating the potentially unattractive parts of games, we have a handle on the “fun bits.”

Going back to our sources of inspiration, I looked for ideas that either minimized competition to the most trivial level, or fostered team play. Here are just two examples of each theme ideal.

Trivial Pursuit of Happyness

Scrap Paper Game exemplifies trivial competition. By making the acquisition less important than the surrounding activity, we created a game that was fun for a six year-old as well as a fourteen year-old.

With nothing more than pencils and six pieces of scrap paper per player, we each drew one animal per scrap, assigned it a value from one to six, and wrote that value down. We also wrote down their natural habitat. We arbitrarily ranked the habitats (Ocean-dwellers were stronger than Desert animals).

Then, we simply played out each animal, one round at a time, with the “strongest” animal collecting the rest of the critters.

At the end of the game, whoever had the most points got to draw a new animal with even more points. The rest of us got to draw weaker animals to add to our collection.

Then, we’d start all over again!

The Civil Board Game

Gem City was all about cooperative play.

We had to mine precious gems for a despotic king and his high-maintenance queen, while keeping the city running as efficiently as possible.

Each player was elected to a government position and made proposals that only got enacted if the majority voted in favor of them. With civil positions having conflicting agendas, a lesson in petty politics awaited my unsuspecting children!

I went all out on the construction of the game board, using spray paint for the river, forest and desert, sandpaper strips for dirt roads, and duct tape wrapped around cardboard strips to represent paved roads.

We bought some beads from the dollar store and these became gold, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. We borrowed the figures from RISK®. These became various citizens in the King’s realm. Other, one-of-kind remnants were used as props. Railroad tracks, mines and warehouses all came from whatever was lying around the house.

Although I built the city, the kids helped define the rules of play.

A regular deck of cards controlled the actions during the game. If one of the four Queens was drawn, we got a holiday, but she got all of the sapphires! If one of the four Kings was drawn, we had to pay taxes. Other cards controlled the growth of the population, work production, and the number of guards at the mines. The game was over when all four Kings were drawn.

The heart of the game was managing the city.

Each child had his or her own idea of the best way to accomplish various objectives.

Teaching the kids the art of wheeling and dealing brought me full circle.

Now it’s their turn.

Mitchell Allen and his family own Morpho Designs, a website design company. Sheldon Allen owns GameDev Guru, an active recruiting site for game software developers.

Technorati Tags: games, children, creativity

So a snowboarding accident wipes out your plan to climb Mount Kilimanjaro? What then? You look for a whole new hobby, of course! But maybe one that’s a tiny bit less challenging to the body… but boggles the mind and tests the patience.

For Lee Greenwood, that means he’s taught himself to trap a Rubik’s Cube inside a skinny-necked water carafe.

Impossible is Nothing!

Seriously, I tip my hat to this fellow we call Scramblejam — deprived of one challenge, Lee just picked himself up and took on another one, equally “impossible” for the average person to do.

Oh sure, just like the magician’s tricks, of course there’s a secret to making an Impossible Bottle… but the real secret may lie in what my grandmother used to call “stick-to-it-iveness”!

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

~ David Beckham

Etsy.com is my number-one source for hand-crafted inspiration… and I thought you might like to see a few of my current craft crushes.

This display will change almost every day as I discover and add new favourites by Etsy artists from all over the world — so you might want to bookmark this page, to check back in from time to time… Also, if for any reason you can’t see the pretty pictures here, you can jump right over to my etsy page to see it all.

Whenever I start to feel even remotely content with my own creative capabilities, I like to browse at The Artful Home, just to indulge in a semi-masochistic spate of envy and avarice.

Today’s objet of shameless desire is the mixed media table lamp known as “Alexandra,” created by Carin Kinzig and Susan Kinzig.

First off, there’s the shimmering opalescence of the blown glass base… but really, it’s the graceful confidence of the asymmetrical shade that really gets to me…

This lamp is just like that woman (that woman!) who can toss on a Victorian piano shawl and a scrap of cargo netting over her yoga gear, and knock ‘em dead at a posh gallery opening. Only, you know, with a 60-watt bulb…

Craft projects or decor, wardrobe planning, website design, or even landscape and garden planning — whatever you create, much of your success will depend on an attractive colour palette that has balance and harmony.

There are lots of fun colour scheme tools online, but only one that I count as an essential colour planning utility, coming back to it time and time again for design inspiration — Pic2Color.

Go on…. give it a try!
(opens in pop-up)


What makes Pic2Color different from most color-picking tools is one simple trick. You give it the URL of a picture, or browse your computer for a saved photo, or just let the tool pick one at random and see what happens…. Pic2Color will create a colour scheme for you, using the hues of that image.

Choosing the right wall calendar is a huge decision. No, really, think about it –

You’re going to live with that calendar most intimately for the next 12 months, staring at its images as you go through the days.

Those adorable kittens that were so cute in the early months, the amusing cubicle-clown cartoons, the bland landscapes — will those calendar pictures still hold their charm by the middle of the year?

One wall calendar sure to inspire you throughout 2008 is Nikki McClure‘s Things To Make and Do Calendar. Arguably the Queen of the X-acto Knife, McClure creates her strong paper-cut images from a single piece of paper.

In this calendar, her evocative images of every day life are matched with one powerful verb per month, a call to positive action.

(My favourite is August… ambush!)

Printed on acid-free paper using soy ink, the calendar measures 12 inches square. It’s listed with other Nikki McClure paper goods at BuyOlympia.com, and also new at Elsewares, $16 at either source.

Technorati Tags: calendar, papercut, 2008

You know grosgrain ribbon, right? That sturdy multi-purpose ribbon with strong ribs going across it?

Striped, solid, or even printed with polka dots though it may be — yeah, you know grosgrain when you see it.

Grosgrain ribbon makes a regular appearance in our old family photo albums — mostly in striped ribbon belts with D-ring buckles, worn low on wide-belled hip-huggers or tight at the waist to cinch in a polyester shirtwaist dress.

My mother had an apron trimmed with apple-green grosgrain at the hem and pocket, too, as I recall…

That’s no doubt why grosgrain ribbon says “1970s” to me, more than any other material — except perhaps Mylar wallpaper… and Formica surfaces with tiny metallic flakes… and guitar-driven rock, played very loud…

In short, it’s a shortcut to retro decor style, with a bright new twist.

All this comes to mind because I’ve been looking through John Loecke’s new book, Grosgrain Style: Quick and Creative Projects for Accessorizing and Decorating with Grosgrain Ribbon, dropped into my dainty white hands this week by Random House, the publisher.

Designer John Loecke shows how to use grosgrain ribbons to trim almost any item of domestic decor… from glassware to picture frames… from chandeliers to slipcovers…

He divides the projects up into chapters by room, esssentially, but makes the point that a lot of cross-over is likely to happen, once your imagination gets playing with ribbons.

I think my favourite project of those showcased in the book must be the small-scale ribbon belts… used as casual napkin rings!

This comes from a designer whose own closet boasts a rainbow of ribbon belts, grosgrain ribbon watch bands, key fobs, you name it… So of course there’s even a chapter here on using grosgrain to funky-up your own personal accessories — necklaces, bangles, canvas sneakers, totes, and of course those classic D-ring grosgrain ribbon belts.

At the very end of Grosgrain Style is a section of Ribbon Notes and Resources — easy to find when you need to look something up, because the edges of the pages are printed as if bound with a bright green grosgrain ribbon.

And in here, in the Glossary of Basic Tools part, I found a piece of pure gold:

Sold on rolls and in a variety of widths, this double-sided, pressure-sensitive adhesive holds like glue without the mess… And, unlike glue, Sealah tape is washable, and because it’s both acid- and lignin-free, it will not yellow over time, changing the color of your ribbon.

Am I the only person on the planet who didn’t know of this magical Sealah tape?

But I digress…

This is intended to be more of an inspiration book rather than a step-by-step instruction manual, but I think the designer-author achieves both of those purposes to some degree.

In Grosgrain Style, John Loecke inspires with a bright host of project ideas (beautifully photographed by Wendell Webber, by the way) and gives the basic techniques and materials information that you need to take those ideas as a starting point — to run away with the grosgrain concept, and make each project your own.

Technorati Tags: home decor, books, reviews