Last summer our teen-driven Iron Chef program was so well perceived that they requested it again for this summer. And when you have such enthusiasm to plan an event like this from teens, then you HAVE to do it right! As someone who still hasn't seen the show, without our teens and fellow librarian blogs, I would have been at a complete loss on where to begin with this.

The main thing the teens wanted from this program was to create, eat and be judged but they were very concerned that I give them a secret ingredient to work with. Of course, this stumped me the most.  Last year it was green apples; this year it was blueberries and/or strawberries. Some other options were graham crackers or chocolate.

Two weeks before the program, our department had received a phone call letting us know someone would be bringing a group of 12 to the event. So when I went out the day of the program to buy supplies I bought quite a bit more that I normally would have.

Some ingredients not pictured above are milk, eggs, whip cream, spray butter, melted chocolate and of course our berries. The crowd favorites are always the pie crusts and tortillas.

To get us started we decide on groups (teams of two) and rules. Last time we played where each team claimed different ingredients but it ended up where the teams just shared what they all wanted. So this time, instead of ingredients being exclusive to separate teams,  we all just shared everything. They were given the option to have one item that could be exclusive to their team but decided against it. We really just let them make their own rules :p

On a separate table from the ingredients we had a work station which was assortment of baking and mixing supplies. This included a griddle, a chocolate melting pot, blender and an assortment of mixing bowls along with spoons, spatulas and alike. Cleaning the blender bowl sure did keep me busy though!
 

Pardon the ugly pink tablecloth *gag*

Each group made enough samples to share with the other teams before presenting their creation to the group.

To decide winners, each person was given two pom poms as voting chips with the instruction that only one team member could vote for themselves once. The two winning team mates were given colorful wire whisks with a badge that said Iron Chef Winner and the other groups were each allowed to choose something special out of our SRP prize box.

All in all, this is one of TAG's favorite, most talked about program of the summer and I'm sure we'll be bringing it all out again next year. Tip for next time though, you can never have too much whip cream!

You'll run up two different staircases to reach door to Skyrim. Go outside door and towards tower on left.

This month in Harry Potter Book Club, we made wands!

The basis of this craft came from Instructables and is made using paper and hot glue. It went over very well with our tween age group, although we did have some younger participants who needed a bit more help. Honestly, I was a little hesitant to pull out the hot glue gun like this for a program but it went fine.

QUIZ 
To personalize the experience, I designed a quiz to determine what wood your wand would be carved
from and what core would be inside. 

Click here for the Quiz PDF

The 12 question quiz is broken up into 2 parts. The top part will determine the wood and the bottom half will determine the core.

For the wood we used different color tissue paper.

For the core's, we gathered strips of ribbon that were at the bottom of our ribbon box and of course for the Phoenix tail feather, we HAD to use warm-colored feathers!

CONSTRUCTION
The steps from Instructables are very straightforward.

Our wands were rolled diagonally with a sheet of paper and tapered them so one end came to a point,
as per instructions.

We did deviate a bit in how we made our wands sturdy. This was by adding tissue paper (AKA our wood) into the center (and also the core).

Once wands were filled, we plugged the ends with dabs of hot glue and added surface details.

DECORATION

All that was left to do was decorate, which we used paint and glitter to do.

I wasn't able to snag too many pictures of the process, but here are a couple completed wands...

As a Librarian, I have a love/ hate relationship with glitter and if I were to do this program again, I might leave the demon litter in the craft cabinet. Cleaning it up was a nightmare.

But overall, this was so much fun! Good luck in your wand making. Hope you can use the quiz.

Story Crafternoon is a program our library offers to elementary aged kids, who have gotten too old for our preschool story time. This program typically involves a story and a craft or activity. With Easter coming up, I really wanted to do something involving peeps and found a cute program called "Protect Your Peeps".  There wasn't very much description of the program at all but overall, the impression I got was it had something to do with floating
peeps on a raft. So that's what we did!  

Rafts were built using large Popsicle sticks and duck tape.

The idea was to see how many peeps your raft could hold, without sinking or peeps falling off into the water. ... And surprisingly enough, we had no problems with drowning peeps or sinking rafts.

We used two clear plastic tubs and filled them halfway with water to float our rafts.

I did have trouble finding a good storybook to relate to the activity though, so instead I opted to tell the story of John Wesley Powell, the first man to sail down the Colorado River.

In the Children's department, we did have an easy-ish book Down Colorado by Deborah Kogan Ray, but since it was longer than the kids are used to, I wasn't sure about reading it. Telling the story worked out great though!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story... John Wesley Powell was a nature enthusiast and 

loved exploring outdoors. He lost his arm at the battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. Afterwards he began to teach and made many trips out west with his students, where he began to form a plan on how he would explore the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River (which no one had ever mapped before). With a few boats and men, he set out to map the river. The river consisted of many dangerous rapids and waterfalls and as their journey progressed, some of the men left the party.

 On the 96th day they came upon what looked to be most dangerous rapid they had seen! Three of the men were certain that if they were to attempt to proceed down the rapid they would all die. These men decided to turn around and leave as John Wesley Powell and the remaining crew continued on. It turned out that the rapid was not nearly as terrible as they had thought and within minutes had safely passed. 

Three days later, Powell and the crew reached the end of the river. So if those three men had stayed just a little longer, they could have made history but instead, they backed out when things got rough. 

January 6th is national bean day. Did you know that? Me neither, but one of our TAG members sure did! (You can always count on teenagers to know the most random things).

So needless to say, when this tidbit of information was shared, TAG unanimously decided our January program must have something to do with beans. Over the course of several more meetings, this program evolved (thankfully) from Bean Dip Buffet to Book Cover Bingo (originally beango...get it?).


For this program, the teens were really interested in the Bingo sheets and how we would play. We decided it would be easiest to have 24 book covers that repeated over all the boards. Choosing their top 24 books did take quite a while though!

I used a Bingo template from online and just added the book covers. On covers with small text (such as the original Perks of Being a Wallflower book) I instead used movie covers or whatever I could find with large text.

Rapunzel's glowing lanterns were inspired by this clever craft idea for a fall leaf lantern, I stumbled across a few weeks ago. This was such a cute idea, I had to try it and it was easily adapted to fit in with the movie Tangled.

My lanterns were based on the same instructions only with shredded purple and yellow tissue paper instead of leaves, to reflect Corona's flag color combination. Also, instead of round cheese containers, Pringles cans cut to size will do just fine.

 Supplies used were: Tissue paper, golden suns cut on construction paper, a glue/water mixture, tea lights, Pringles cans, wax paper and paintbrushes.

Using a medium sized piece of wax paper, we folded them in half and covered one half with glue, tissue paper and the golden sun emblem. Then we added more glue over top and folded along the crease. 

From here, we let our lanterns dry and set down to watch the movie. This worked out well for kids who came in late too! They just made their lanterns up to this point and left them on the table.

When they've stiffened up and dried a bit, it's easier to  fit them into their tops and bottoms. This part required the most amount of setup as the Pringles cans were cut to be about an inch tall.

The tops and bottoms were wrapped in colorful scrapbook paper and ready for wax paper!

To fit the wax paper into the top was simple enough - I just used a stapler. For the bottoms we pulled out the hot glue gun and glued the edges of the wax paper to the sides of the can bottom. Tape and Elmer's glue just wouldn't cut it for the bottom. (Ignore the crumbs in my test lantern!)

Once these two parts are secured to your lantern, the tea light sets in the bottom and voila - Rapunzel's glowing lantern. We used LED tea lights from Hobby Lobby, which came in a box of 16 for $10 regular price.

One thing I had not considered until a little girl came up and asked was string to hold them. She creatively fashioned her own handle out of her popcorn bag, which I thought was very resourceful.

Overall, this craft was very well received I thought. The main age group of our attendees were early elementary with a few of our Storytime kids.

And the picture looks lame - it was taken with my dinky phone but this is an idea of what it looked like with the lights off.

Last year our TAG group came up with a great idea for a Dirty Santa Book Swap program for December. This year we did it again.

  This program is incredibly low maintenance and that may be why it's one of my favorites.We ask that teens bring in one of their own beloved books from home to exchange for something new to read. Some kids choose to bring mix CDs as well as books and that's totally fine! Alot of teens even bring several books to give away - not just one.

The game is usually very quick and we just go around the room until all the books are gone.

This year, the teen program followed one of our kids program where we showed a movie and made crafts from Popsicle sticks, so the leftover craft supplies were brought over from that program.

No idea why this is sideways....

The teens at our library LOVE glitter and sequins, so anytime those can be incorporated into a craft is usually a huge plus imo.

But I can't forget to mention the big hit of the program, which was the Hot Chocolate Bar!

Amazon offers a set of seven different flavors which was bought, which included Smores, Pumpkin Spice, Chocolate Supreme, Caramel, Raspberry, Arctic White and French Vanilla. In this package there were 6 packages of each flavor so we were set. Walmart also had various flavors available such as Mint and chocolate, Cinnamon and chocolate, Butterscotch and chocolate, etc. Who knew there were SO MANY different hot chocolate flavors out there??


I opted to try the Arctic White first which surprisingly was very bland and disappointing. French Vanilla was the crowd favorite and only one girl was brave enough to try raspberry.

Because our community room where we have our programs does not have access to a sink (those are in the bathrooms and staff area downstairs) we needed a way to have hot water. Cue coffee pot. It took a little more effort than if we had had access to a microwave, but this worked out fine. It just had to have water added to it regularly since it's not a full-sized coffee pot.

Buying the hot cocoa and marshmallows was literally the only expense for this program. Next year, if we choose to do this again, I may run to the local thrift store or the book sale room and try to purchase a couple good book titles and fluff up the table though. Not that we didn't have some great titles, I think people are just hesitant to bring books they really enjoy to give away.

Gah, ignore the typo in #4...

I remember when I was barely 13 and discovered Quizilla. Back then it was just a website for quizzes which gradually began to incorporate fanfiction and nowadays, I'm not sure what it looks like. But I do remember that was my first experience with creating quizzes of any kind.

For our Cinderella movie night, I was able to revisit those days of quiz-making as I crafted a version of What Cinderella Character Are You?
I'd forgotten how much fun it was just to make silly quizzes :)

Once you took the quiz you went around to the back of the easel where the answers were posted. 1= Fairy godmother, 2= Stepmother, 3= Prince, 4= Mouse, 5= Cinderella, 6= Stepsister.

A couple ladies from another department went all out and made a background and stand up carriage for photo-ops!  They had a huge assortment of dress up clothes to pose with as well. Hats, scarves, crowns, fabric- it was very impressive.

Aside from showing the movie, little crafts and snacks were set out. We decorated crowns, made wands out of pretzels and melted chocolate, had coloring and trivia sheets, etc. And because this was planned right after Halloween, we were able to find alot of those candy corn pumpkins on clearance for snacks.

Surprisingly though, the movie didn't seem to hold attention like other kids movies we've shown. Maybe because it's more grown-up version of Cinderella when compared to the animated, so the kids were a bit more restless than in times past.

It's an adorable adaption of Cinderella though and the costumes are fantastic!

One program that was passed onto me recently was Story crafternoon, which has recently been re-branded as Makerspace. It is typically for school aged kids but at libraries, sometimes you never know who will show up! We've had anywhere from 4 year old to 6th graders come to these programs (and it can be rough when these extremes show up on the same day). This has been an assortment of activities from balloon rockets to minecraft mosaics to paper art. Sometimes there will be a story to go along with it, but if there's not, we really don't sweat it.

For this months story crafternoon we read Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance by Keith Graves. It's an incredibly short, cute story about Frank who wants to dance so he goes to the theater, where he dances on stage for an audience until his body parts start falling off. It has rhyming, fantastically vibrant pictures and it's just gross enough for this age to be intrigued.

After we talked about the book, we made monsters together on the wall. This a mixture between musical chairs and that game you used to play in highschool where you would pass a piece of paper between you and your bestfriend and you would each add something to the page.


Our craft inspiration came from this website. I had tried using a plastic paper plate for the example, which I wouldn't recommend with liquid glue. Paper plates worked best for the kids.

Overall, it seemed to go over well for very little planning.  I try planning programs that are a bit more generic than holiday oriented. Christmas and Halloween don't offend me, but I sure don't want to offend anyone else! So naturally Monsters seemed like a good balance between halloween and October as just another month. :)

Having never before made a costume sculpted from EVA foam before, I rely HEAVILY on tutorials from more talented crafters. For some reason, where to begin with this sword construction really stumped me. Here's how this project went down for me - hope it helps you!

Items used were: 1) interlinking foam mats, 2) thin color craft foam, 3) glue (both hot glue, contact cement and modge podge), 4) carpet knife, 5) small sander and dremel, 6) paper mache paste, 7) pipe, 8) spare fabric
______________________________________________________
To construct my sword, I started with printing out a picture of the sword in the desired size. Instead of free-hand drawing anything, all I did was cut apart my picture and use that as my pattern. This helped save time and hassle.

Once the base was cut out, I used the dremel to create a trail to fit my handle into.  To provide sturdiness to the sword, this copper pipe spanned nearly the entire length of the blade.
One of the things that stumped me while reading about how to make a foam sword was the discussions on priming and sealing.

Before painting, everyone seemed to endorse priming first, saying that because it is such an absorbent material, it will absorb any paint applied to it. So to prime it, I mixed equal parts Modge Podge and water and covered the sword with two layers of this mixture.  After those layers dried, I painted it.

I know it's not perfect, but not too shabby for my first attempt right?

With creative collaborative websites and online blogs, it's so easy for us DIY-ers to compare ourselves to every random Jane Doe we come across online. I LOVE scouring the interwebs, seeing what creative creations people can come up with. And should I even mention my Pinterest addiction?

For me personally, when it comes to my crafting, I am a complete perfectionist with the skill level of a grapefruit. So I spend more time critiquing my work than congratulating myself.

This coming Labor Day weekend, I will be wearing my (mostly-finished) World of Warcraft, Death Knight Tier 10 costume. This was the first mmorpg I ever played way back in bc, so when my husband and I watched the wow costume contest at Dragoncon last year, I couldn't help but think "why haven't I made one of these yet?" and decided to make a small goal for myself - I would forge my own armor set and participate in contest the next year. A goal and event (walking across the stage in  front of actual people) that is near inconceivable for me to carry out!

With remarkably inspirational Blizzard cosplayers and tutorials out there, I was encouraged to begin construction of my own.

Is it as well crafted as costumes like Kamui Cosplay? No! Of course not!

My glue seams show (you can even SEE the glue in some places), curves aren't consistent, the sanding is rough, pieces aren't attached evenly, my chestplate doesn't curve around my back and pokes out, I can find fault in ever piece of armor I spent the last 5 months constructing.

Why can't I just be proud of myself?

Instead of looking at the costume on my mannequin and seeing negatives, I want to instinctively be the person who sees the passion and time put into it. I compare myself to other people far too often, which makes me bitter, jealous and leaves me disappointed when I can't have or accomplish the things I see other people doing. It's not that I feel entitled or lazy, it's just that I set my standards too high. I look at something and see one persons skill level and I expect mine to be parallel with theirs, when they've been honing their craft for 10+ years.

So when I tried on my entire armor set last night and looked in the mirror, I wondered- does this display enough skill level to warrant entering a contest? There's nothing special about it at all. It's not based off a main character, it has no lighting or battery movement. It's just me wrapped in painted foam.

But then I remember, it's painted foam that's been littering my living room floor since January. There are scraps of foam under the couch cushions, globs of paint and paper mache stuck to the table I've been working on, faux fur balled up and tossed in a corner... my craft space is a complete mess. This has been my most expensive costume to date. I've spent half the costume budget on glue! This has been a 100% learning experience and I shouldn't compare myself to the professionals I follow online.

So when I read that we should take pride in our work, even if it's not the prettiest, I understand completely. My mom always told me growing up that as long as I did my best, that was all that mattered. As long as we put our best effort into our jobs and crafts, our love and passion for our work, crafts and selves will show.

When the summer reading decorations are taken down, the children's department looks so boring. The room goes from vibrant colors and exciting displays in every spare corner back to bare beige.

What better way to help this transition than a bright, book-inspired bulletin board?!


The characters were traced onto poster board and colored using oil pastels. Leaves are 3 different colors of green butcher paper -the lime green was re-purposed from the previous bulletin (hurray for re-purposing supplies!)

I started with the monster on the right and worked my way to the big guy. If I had begun with the big guy I probably would have made him smaller. He barely fits in the frame, but it worked out just fine. And of course, I forgot to save room for my letters, so imagination covers 2 lines.

Do you guys start putting up bulletins with your letters or images first? This isn't the first time I've forgotten to allow room for my words....

Board Games

While planning for Summer Reading, one theme TAG kept mentioning was Percy Jackson. Based on their book descriptions I think I loosely remember reading The Lightning Thief but that was the extent of my knowledge and unfortunately for this program, I couldn't get anymore input as to what they wanted to do with Percy Jackson.

So of course, I scoured Pinterest for any inkling of a direction to take this. Maybe it was my word searches, but I was not finding anything age appropriate to confidently offer my teens! Thankfully, where all else fails, Teen Librarian Toolbox (Olympians Week) pulled through for me.

The Scavenger Hunt: Teens helped to pick out the objects that would be hidden around the library, but since this was a scavenger hunt for them, they wanted to be surprised and play along.

Originally they had expressed an interest in all three of the twists the Teen Librarian Toolbox had to suggest, but in the end, it was just your average scavenger hunt. Well, as average as I know how to make them- this one being my first ever!

I attempted to incorporate Percy Jackson trivia and library building structures and objects to base my clues on. For example, on top of the YA display bookcase we have a huge plant so that clue read "It's not Thalia's pine tree but look for this plant. On top of this shelf lies something very useful to Percy" and of course, 5 little Riptides were waiting to be grabbed.

These objects were nothing elaborate either. Riptide was thin foam covered in blue duct tape with a picture of the actual Riptide taped on and the trident was a blue plastic fork. The camp flags were felt and the report cards were printed off versions I found online.

At the start of the hunt, individuals were grouped into teams and given a scavenger hunt clue sheet and brown paper bag. In preparation, I had made various objects from the books that teams would have to collect to put into their bag. Each team would take 1 item and leave the rest for the other teams to find. As well as the hidden objects, there were the golden coins placed sporadically around the library that acted as extra points. Some of the things on the clue sheet were trivia questions though, just to add some variety and that was one thing the teens said they would have liked to have seen more of.

They were given 35-40 minutes to complete the hunt and had to be back in the Community Room at the designated time. Upon their return we had snacks and tallied up their points! Surprisingly, none of the teams found all the items... but whether that was because of my terrible clues or time.... well, let's face it- it was probably me. Read my clues and you'll see what I mean!

This was a program that went over very well though. Kudos for Teen Librarian Toolkit for having it available.

And here's what the clue sheet (my cheat sheet) looked like for all you people out there who may be stumped on this like I was!

Adapted for an 8 ft bulletin board... The castle was traced onto white poster board and covered with tissue paper for color. Other than that, I just used the cricut to cut out the snowflakes and letters.