One Inch World

I’ve received both of my phonics swaps now, okay, it’s been a week or two, but anyway. And I thought I would take a couple of pictures of my phonics boxes and shelf.

Here is my shelf:

On the left is an alphabet book I made for Rebecca on Lulu.com, by taking pictures of things in our house that start with each of the letters. There is a lot of food for the letters I ran out of ideas. Like J: Jam and Juice and Jars. It is fun to have a book with her stuffed animals in it, but it was a lot of work because I insisted on being a perfectionist about masking out the (mostly white) backgrounds. I should have found a better back drop before I started, I always rush the pre-production and regret it.

I used card stock boxes for each of the letters, rather than Jo’s embroidered pouches, it was a cheap solution. Rebecca picked some sticky chip board letters out at the craft store and she had fun helping me fold up the boxes and sticking the letters down on the tops. Honestly, she’s most interested in these boxes when we get some new things. Then I pull out the right letters and we talk about the things in those letter boxes when we put away the new thing.

Here are the contents of a few of our boxes:

I especially love the four frogs over on the left. I have to confess, when I found these in the antique store I convinced myself that I could give two of them away for the first phonics swap last summer, but in the end I had to keep all four of them. Besides, four frogs. Obviously I should have picked out frogs I *didn’t* like. They had scads of them. But that would have been silly. We just got the fly, and now the fish and frogs can try and catch the fly. Some of the boxes are more fun than others.

The fly came from ittybittylove’s swap:

This one was really hard to photograph, because my daughter would not stop stealing the animals and bits. The glass crab and pig, and the penguin were lost for most of a week because she ran off with them and couldn’t remember where she left them. In a pocket as it turns out. Piggy broke an ear and is in the hospital right now. We’ve been having a lot of practice with breaking dolls and fixing them recently.

And then here is Brand New Ending’s (okay, obviously I can’t make up my mind whether to refer to people by their blog name or their real name. I feel clueless) swap:

Lots of Australian animals, the plastic ones are fun because some bits move when you move other bits. Er, for example, the bilbo’s head moves when you move his tail up and down. Rebecca also had lots of fun using the question mark as a stencil, and pulling the smily face in and out of the frame like a pop-up book.

Hmm. This post has no end. (And I haven’t forgotten the arm chair pattern. I will get there eventually.)

I saw this Valentines Day Busy Book over on Lavender and Limes a couple days ago, and it immediately went into my craft project ideas file. I tried to get it done yesterday, but although I finished the book in time for actual Valentines Day, (after my daughter fell asleep), I didn’t have time to cut the hearts out until this morning. But holidays last at least a week when you’re two, so she didn’t care.

Here’s the front, I had to tart mine up:

I really enjoyed embroidering the letters. I’ve sort of stayed away from that since high school, when I thought it would be a great idea to embroider poetry onto a cloak I was making, and it took about twenty billion times longer than I thought it would. Three words is just about right, nice and relaxing without getting really boring. I’m still stayin’ away from poetry.

Also I got to use some more vintage buttons, which is always fun. I liked the light blue one on the front, although it did cause me to use too-light matching embroidery floss on the front. I had to use this quilting cotton rather than felt for the book, the hearts were too perfect, even the right size, I just trimmed a tiny bit off, so now I have one more tiny patch of this fabric. And this fabric is from her ‘two year old’ quilt, which makes it fun and connected. It’s also filed with cotton batting to make it stiff. I changed nothing about this project. Really. I quite like how it came out overall, except that it’s a little bit crooked and I made the ribbon button loop a little bit too tight.

As an addendum to the last post, we also made little origami triangle boxes to hold the peppermint hearts that we made to give to some of Rebecca’s friends for Valentines Day. After doing all the pre-folding and ripping for the box we glued wax paper on the candy side, and tissue paper on the outside. I wanted to make them out of red paper, but the only paper I had that was large enough was white. I think they are pretty cute though. I wanted to make more, but after three I was quite done. The rest just got wrapped up in waxed paper and tissue paper squares and tied with ribbon. Much faster.

I didn’t make anything last week. Bleh. We’ve been going to pre-school open houses constantly it feels like. I wanted to be one of those cool homeschooling moms who lives in the middle of nowhere and has a farm, but my daughter has been asking me whenever we see a bus or a school playground when she can start school, so obviously that isn’t her plan, and I feel like I should respect that. So we’re looking at parent-participation pre-schools. And I don’t live in the middle of nowhere and I don’t have a farm, I have a teeny garden, but that’s beside the point. We did pick a whole pile of February carrots and eat them for lunch on wednesday though. And we watched bugs. Digression.

This week, about the best I can share is the Valentines Day candies we made. (We’re working on some paper-pulp play pizzas, (that’s what’s in the oven baking behind Rebecca) but those are going to be Rebecca’s mess in the end, not mine.) Someone linked to flossie teacakes peppermint hearts recipe which is great. Rebecca mixed the whole thing up. The ‘medium sized mound’ of powdered sugar turns out to be about half of one of those ubiquitous boxes. And we added way too much peppermint essence, about half a teaspoon. That made them awesome like Altoids. My addition, you need to dip these in dark chocolate. Oooooooooooh yah. Since they are solid sugar, the bitter-er the chocolate the better, I think. Do they make chocolate dipped Altoids?