Spring Coffee Cosy

My, this yarn from my stash is quite wintery. To spring it up, added a sprout. A multi-season cosy.

Spring Greens II

A lovely Luna moth on a pine tree in our yard, fluffing her wings to fly. Love those feathery antennae. And what luscious color.



A project to keep my hands busy - crocheted bowls for no real purpose, just to have fun with a single ball of cotton yarn.

Natural Dye Easter Eggs for Spring

Easter is so late this year, I've been feeling the urge to get something spring-y on the table already. I saw this cover of Country Living and liked the idea of using natural food dyes, especially to get the blue color. I remember using onion skins to dye eggs when I was a kid, will have to try that next for some contrast. For blue, I sliced up a small head of purple cabbage, boiled 30 min in about 10c water, strained the leaves out leaving just the colored water and added 1/4c white vinegar.



Since these are for a decoration I wanted to keep unrefrigerated, I blew the eggs out (we used them in quiche - yum!) using a long metal skewer to carefully poke holes in both ends of the eggs and I also used the skewer end to break up the yolk a bit so it would come out more easily. Pretty easy, and when I immersed them in the dye I just held them under until they filled up with enough water to sink. Instead of boiling them again as the recipe directed, I left them in the hot dye bath to cool overnight. These are farm eggs from a neighbor, and started out a light tan color - so you can see the color did take well - it was interesting that the dye bath stayed red but the eggs came out blue.



The color layer was quite fragile when these came out of the dye the next morning - you can see how if you rub them before they are completely dry the color shifts around and leaves white patches. I did not rub them with oil - but was thinking they could be coated with clear acrylic craft spray to preserve them and wouldn't they be cute in a felted or paper mache nest on a mantle, or under a terrarium.



I would love to try marbleing them with onion skin or wrapping them with plants as in the cover shot - or spelling out spring as at Stitch/Craft - but I think they look lovely on our table as is and it was certainly a fun and easy craft, 30 min or so plus leaving them overnight.

Dinosaur Party! Come on Over!

J turned four recently. FOUR. Oh, my. We had our first birthday party, all about dinosaurs!

Luckily it was just warm enough for outdoor play, although everything could have moved inside if necessary. The kids and I made dinosaur bones based on this Frugal Family Fun Blog post (and originally from Martha) Instead of paper mache and paint, we just wrapped them in cheap painting masking tape and buried them in the sandbox. J supervised the creation quite carefully, specifying what bones we would need for our skeleton. It gave us a good chance to look at all our dinosaur books and talk about fossils, science, and different kinds of dinosaurs. This guy was a definite meat-eater - look at all those teeth!



I bought a bunch of 99 cent brushes and the kids "uncovered" the skeleton, just like paleontologists! It helped that several of them had been to the Maryland Science Center where you can do this on "real" bones, on a larger scale.

After uncovering (so carefully! Amazingly for four year olds!) they got reburied and re-dug-up a couple more times - loads of fun.




We had a "dinosaur egg" hunt - a few of the eggs even had gummy worms hidden in them. Because everyone knows dinosaurs can't resist gummy worms.

After a meal of dinosaur mac and cheese (green) we decorated tar pit dinosaur cupcakes!



These were really so easy and they came out looking so awesome. I'm not really a huge fan of frosting, especially after the gummy worms and with all the chocolate. The cupcakes were from our favorite zuchini chocolate cake recipe (they are so good for you! Eat more!) The tar pits were vanilla yogurt with a bit of Ovaltine powder - chocolate-y without all the sugar of pudding and with the healthiness of yogurt. Sprinkled with Ovaltine on top it really looked like dirt - totally cool! We colored coconut green with food coloring for grass and placed chocolate granola on for boulders. Finally, an edible sprig of mint stood in for a prehistoric fern and each child got to pick a dinosaur to trap in the tar.

Then back outside to burn off all that chocolate power!



Happy Birthday, J. I love you buddy.

Meet Benjy

My first softie and totally designed by me!!! With lots of help from Posie Gets Cosy's book "Stitched in Time" which shows you how to turn a drawing of a quadruped into a softie by adding a stomach/inside of legs gusset. I'd been wanting to try it for a while and it was totally easy.

The things I learned: make sure all the seams are double stitched. I've already repaired the legs two times where a seam split. I'd also recommend using a small zig zag rather than straight stitch, for the same reason. Also, when making brontosaurus softies for assertive children, over stuff the neck and tail, or they will morph from bold upright appendages to limp handles for dragging.

And you can't see it but there is a tiny embroidery heart where a heart should be. Because who doesn't need to know how much their dinosaur loves them?

Welcome Spring!

Hello to everyone visiting from Pinterest, Momtastic or Modern Parents Messy Kids!

We had some toddler guests over to our house a couple of weekends ago and look what we did! A fancy flower garden in our front hall and in the office art area. Thank you Valerie of Frugal Family Fun Blog for the idea.

This was a super easy craft and very easy for young children (2, 3, and 4). And it didn't take a long time to set up. I get a bit miffed with kid craft projects that take me a precious hour to put together for 5 min of crafting time!

Valerie used flower-shaped postit notes, but I couldn't find any without going to more stores than I wanted to, so I bought a pack of 4 pastel colors and before the activity I cut them into petal and leaf shapes. By cutting about 5-6 sheets at a time each flower had a little "petal pack" that the toddler could use. We also had some left over heart shaped postits from Valentine's day crafting, so we used those for petals too. I dug out a roll of green package ribbon and we taped that up for stems - the taping was an in-demand toddler activity, even more so than sticking the postit note petals! Go, fine motor skills, go! Finally, we had the littlest ones help with sticking label "dots" for the center of the flowers the bigger ones had made.

The kids were really cooperative about this activity - I don't know if it was just because we timed it right or because I'm starting to get better at keeping activities short and focused. After a flower fury of five minutes or so, we all raced outside for play. The only clean up was to put the unused petals and scissors up out of reach! Definitely my kind of kid craft.

Thank you Valerie and Stephanie!

Dyeing to Wear Dark Brown

Mr. Sycamore's hat had faded from this color to tan, and he nicely asked me to magically turn back time. I haven't used RIT dye in ages, I thought I'd give it a whirl although I've been reading up on natural dyes and we do have lots of oak trees around - the leaves are supposed to give a dark chocolatey brown. But, that would be months away! While I had the dye bath around, I also dyed these thrifted napkins which I had to admit were more of an off-white greyish color and not all that appetizing to use. Then I went a step too far and dyed some towels - but without enough dye left they turned a wierd burgundy - kind of a deep pepto bismal. I'll wait to show them until I can dye them to something not quite so hideous.