Old Fashioned Summer Carnival-Great for 4th of July (or 24th of July)

Here are some great activities to make/do at your Fourth of July celebrations this weekend. 

We always grew up having an amazing Old Fashioned 24th of July celebration with our family (this is a Utah/Mormon holiday).  It was truly amazing.  So, last year we put together our own carnival, for our children.
I think you can figure out how to make each of these activities, but incase you can’t you can find tutorials for all of them, here!  This is a post about our carnival last year.
The above picture is a Water Bottle Bowling Game.  It has a super cute placemat that you have to go check out!


Fun action shot of my Nephew throwing the dart at the balloons!  This is a simple game to put together that I love the look of! 

Bean Bag Toss Game.  With homemade beanbags that each have a patriotic word embroidered onto them!  The game itself is made from a box!  Are you getting that we wanted the games to be part of the decoration?
Homemade Rubber Band Shooters!  Remember those from your childhood?  They are super easy to make!   Katrina made enough of these for each cousin to have one!  They are so much fun!  We just shot empty cans and bottles with them.
How about some Cork Guns!  These are made out of wood, pvc pipe, string, and a cork!

Tin Can Stompers are another super easy yet effective activity!
         
Tin Can Knock Down!  We used a ball that you get wet, just to keep water flying around the whole yard!

Hope this gives you some inspiration for old fashioned carnival games you can make yourself, from mostly things that you already have around the house!

Rebecca

Fourth of July Wind Chime

Happy Fourth of July to everyone!!

I have had this idea percolating in my brain for a bit. Thankfully it worked out...and I finished it just in time to gift it to my dear Sweet Mother!

My Mother is in love with all things Patriotic! So, when I came up with this idea, I knew I had to give it to her. I am thankful to my parents for instilling such a passion for our country! They will be attending a swearing in ceremony in the morning, on the 4th. We all don't go with them, but we live vicariously through them when they do this. We love to hear our Dad talk about the heart warming stories of the people who are getting sworn in to become Citizens of The United States of America. On the 4th of July they do a really big session of it, so it's a really neat thing to attend!

So, this project being patriotic, and out of materials from Home Depot...well, it couldn't get better than that for me. I LOVE HOME DEPOT!! Seriously.

I bought a thin long plumbers pipe from Home Depot. I had an employee cut it in half for me. Trust me, you'll need to do this because it was 10 feet long to begin with. You will hit things if you try putting that in a cart and moving around the store with it. I then, just perused the store until I found metal sheets. I actually bought 2 different ones because I couldn't decide which one I would like better. I went with the bigger one because it was thinner and I thought the size was more appropriate to go with the size of pipe I got. The metal sheet was 12in X 8in. I already had the red, white, and blue spray paint from my carnival projects! You need to wash/wipe down all the metal. I even used a green scrubber pad to make sure to get all the grease/dirt off.

Let them dry completely and then spray paint one of the pipes white, one red, and the metal sheet blue (both sides). After they all dried, I cut the pipes up. Based on your supplies, you will have to do the math. For mine, I cut two lengths 10 in and two lengths 17 in. I did this out of the red and then out of the white pipes. I also cut my blue metal sheet in half so that it was 6 in X 8in. You also will need something to go along the top. For this I used a plastic tube that we already had.
Next I ground the ends down to make the ends flat.
Making sure to smooth around the edges because they can get sharp otherwise.
Next I drilled holes into each of the pipes. I drilled the holes 1/2 in from the ends. You want a top hole and a bottom one (so drill all the way down). I first drilled a pilot hole with a smaller bit. Then, I used a thicker bit.

After you use the thick bit, your pipe will look like this and be very dangerous.
So, use an even bigger drill just to counter sink the holes and leave them smooth.

Next, I drilled 4 holes along one side of my blue sheet metal. Again, I went 1/2 in from the edge. These are what the shorter stripes will hang from. On the opposite side of the metal, I also drilled to holes (to hang from the top). Notice that I did this step with scrap wood underneath.
Use your scrap wood to do your math and figure your spacing! ;)
Next, I drilled all my holes into my top pipe piece. This is where my wood written math came in handy.
Take ALL your pipe pieces and repaint for touch ups. Don't you love homemade contraptions for all the weird projects? ;)
Another great invention for painting my top pipe piece. I attached a dowel into a drill. Slid my plastic pipe onto it. Then sprayed each of the colors onto the pipe. The point of this is to make a swirl down the pipe. You pull the trigger on the drill to swirl the pipe, while spraying down the length of the pipe with each color. Pretty cool.
Now that your blue metal has been repainted for touch ups, and had a chance to dry, you can add your stars. I made up a pattern, in the size I needed, and cut out the stars to make a template.
Then, I sprayed the stars white. This worked out pretty well.

Now, you attach everything together. We actually have a machine that etches dog tags, so we have lots of heavy duty necklace chain that I used for this. I just strung it all together. Here's my finished project.

Rebecca

By the way, this is finished it on both sides so that you can view it from either side since it is a wind chime!

Our 4th of July Carnival!

Our family holds very strong feelings about our country. I think part of it comes from our parents growing up in small towns. There is certainly a different feeling when your dad (our Grandpa) is the Sergent in the National Guard. There wasn't much more going on in town besides things to do with The Guard.
We got the benefit of the small town when we were little kids too. Our uncle would hold a huge breakfast on the 4th of July. They would borrow huge grills from The Guard or church (I'm not sure which) and would grill the most amazing breakfast for the whole family. We would all gather at our uncle's home, which long before that had belonged to our Great-Grandparents. The house was passed down as well as the stories and the the love.

This was some of our pancake buffet breakfast. It included aebleskiver, chocolate chip pancakes (with whip cream), german pancakes, hash browns, fresh fruit, red white and blue ice cubes, and more!

After breakfast we would all walk up the street and put up chairs on another Uncle's lawn where we would watch a little parade. They had huge machines rolling in the parade. They would have to stop every once in a while to move power lines out of the way for the huge machines. They had these long poles to move the power lines. People on floats would throw out candy and we would rush into the street to gather it up.

Then, we would head to the local park where they had a carnival going on. They had all the usual old-fashioned carnival stuff going on. There were the contests where people entered their baked goods or homemade creations like beautiful quilts. I think our Grandma entered these. Then, there would be live entertainment, our cousins would be in some of the dance and singing performances. They had all the great carnival games going on (I think I remember us coming home with a gold fish from this carnival). I even remember a zipline one year. It was a really fun carnival, but was more fun because of all the family that was there at the same time. I wasn't just running around with my siblings, I got to run around with my cousins!

A lot has changed since then. The family homes have turned over to different hands and we aren't able to gather with our Uncles, Aunts and cousins as we once did. But we still have a love for all things patriotic.

Years ago, our parents started a new tradition for the 4th of July. They have started going to Naturalization Ceremonies. We have several adopted cousins. One of the most amazing things we ever did, was to attend the ceremony where one cousin became a naturalized citizen. So my parents addending the swearing in of new citizens on the 4th of July is a perfect fit. I highly recommend looking into something like this in your area.

Since our parents already have plans for the morning of the 4th, we decided it would be fun to gather this last weekend. We also thought it would be fun to have a little carnival for the kids. We tried to make as many things as we could, with things already on hand. So it was very much handmade.

Here are our rubber band shootersin action!Katrina's bowling game was so cute! She took it back with her, and so I'm going to have to make my own for this week, as we are continuing to play these games this whole week.

Erika and Anjeanette's delicious red, white, and blue ice cream! Oh, yum! We also had red, white, and blue snow cones. Rebecca's Father-In-Law threw out the idea of combining the ice cream with the shaved ice (they live in Hawaii and that's how they do it there), and oh.my! That was even better!

A fun action shot of
the balloon dart game. Look at that form!

We live in Arizona. So this was a must! After all the games and food, we had a water balloon fight. I swear we had people filling those balloons up all morning! And yet they always go so fast. We ended up just using buckets, the hose, and some of us ended up in the jacuzzi. I don't think anyone minded...after all, it was over 100 degrees!

A new twist on the old fishing game!

We turned the jacuzzi into a fish farm. Octopuses with washers on them were floated in the jacuzzi. We had two poles with strong magnets on the end for the fishing poles.
Here were the prizes for just that game. They were set up in groups of 1, 2, or 3. Each of the octopuses had a number on them. So, your prize matched the number on the prize table to your octopus! This game was quite a hit!

We had so many great games! Here we threw frisbees into a hula hoop.

We had cork guns that worked with a plunger like action. The older "kids" loved these.

Gotta love walking on stilt stompers!

How about knocking tin cans over with a wet smooshy ball!?

This is a great action shot of a ping pong gun knocking over gaterade bottles.

Not to let our prizes be forgotten either. We had tons of prizes displayed in jars for the kids to have the fun of picking out all that they wanted!

Ah, this is exactly why I wanted to have this carnival! Family, chaos, fun decorations, great games, and delicious food! What more could a girl ask for?

The Roots And Wings Co Ladies!

Tags and Prizes for 4th Of July Carnival

Since we were having so many fun carnival games we knew we had to make up a cute prize station. We each brought some small prizes and filled up glass jars with them. We then tagged them all so that you would know what was in each jar. The kids had so much fun filling up their bags with all of the fun prizes.
To make the tags for the prizes I cut out fun designs from a 4th of July printed paper. Then, I cut out those same designs, only smaller and on white paper. I then ran the white designs through my xyron machine to turn them into stickers.
I just matched the smaller designs with the bigger designs.
Next, I cut a slit on the top and bottom of the tag (just outside of where the white design is). This will be for the ribbon to slide through.
I cut some ribbon long enough to go around the mouth of the jar, through the tag, and have some left to dangle a bit from the bottom. I wove the ribbon through the tag, with the ribbon going behind the tag so it wont cover the words on the front of the tag.
Then, you put your loop around the mouth of your jar, and your tag is ready to be labeled.
This section was our old-fashioned prizes. Candy lipstick, button candy, marbles, and candy sticks (we grew up with them being those candy cigarettes, they've brought them back but just as candy sticks with cute packaging, which is the only way would would want to pass those on!). Other prizes were dinosaurs, necklaces, bouncy balls, wet balls, 4th of July toys, party blowers, medals, army guys and lots more. We shot for each of us to bring one jar full, but we all went overboard (especially Nana!). I alternated the ribbons, red then blue.
I could not believe when I found this dot candy! I so used to LOVE this candy. My kids really enjoyed it as well.

Rebecca

Fourth of July Ice Cream

For last week's Tuesdays with Dorie we made peach ice cream. Neither Anjeanette nor I had ever made ice cream before and it was quite the adventure. We didn't have an ice cream maker (though I've been asking for one for ages!) and so we followed David Lebovitz's guide to making ice cream without the maker and it turned out FANTASTIC!

We then decided to make blueberry, strawberry and vanilla ice cream for our Fourth of July carnival (so we would have red, white, and blue). We were going to make mint ice cream as well but someone around here really likes to eat the peppermint candies and there wasn't any left over for the ice cream...but I'm sure the mint ice cream would be delicious as well if you can get your candies to last that long. We had made up a big batch of the ice cream custard, and then we simply added it to our fruit flavorings.

My husband was initially concerned about the texture that homemade ice cream would produce, but once he tried some his worries were dispelled. The secret to making great ice cream without the maker is to stir the custard mixture occasionally while freezing and we discovered that using an immersion blender to do this works the best.



~Erika

We linked to the following parties:  ABC and 123, Someday Crafts,