Here is the set of ‘nesting’ dolls that I made for my housemate’s baby shower. I like them a lot, although I should have made the pocket a little looser. Luckily mommy’s tummy is soft enough to accommodate baby.
A couple more weeks and things are going to get much noisier around here, then in another four months the noise will double when I have my baby. Almost like having twins in the house, but much easier since we also have four parents… (and by then a three year old…)
Every Friday I host a toddler Art Playgroup at my house, we’ve been doing it for about 3/4 of a year now, and it’s so much fun. This week we were going to have an egg hunt, but no one came! Some weeks are like that, somebody’s on vacation, somebody’s sick, somebody made other plans. But we had fun anyway.
We started by making the string nests that everyone’s been making, although we used a plastic-wrapped bowl rather than a balloon. Rebecca had fun cutting up the string, but she didn’t want to get her fingers sticky. She was convinced when we made it a game where she was the mama bird making a nest for the baby bird.
Then we made Jojo Ebi’s bunny ears, although we used sewing elastic rather than a rubber band for the back, because I was afraid it would get wrapped up in Rebecca’s fine long hair.
Finally we made some paper egg cutouts with magnetic tape thanks to No Time for Flash Cards‘ Foam Easter Egg Magnets. I was glad to have some magnetic tape that I got in Sea Bird Chronicles craft material swap from Lauren Pope. (Boy that was a lot of links.)
That was a pretty crafty Art Playgroup. Sometimes our activity is just ‘painting with red’. Heh.
More eggs! I made these with Rebecca last week. We used mini plastic easter eggs as the center, covered in duct tape so they were water tight, wrapped them generously in organic wool roving, (which smelled wonderfully of lanolin), and then added a little colored roving from a juggling ball kit I never made. The color pallet was a little limited, next time/year I’ll get out the Procion dyes and make colors my way. Or maybe we’ll use cabbage and beets and turmeric. Or maybe I’ll have more juggling kit left next year, and I’ll still be lazy. Yah.
We hand felted two of them in a bowl of soapy water, and the rest we made into a nylon sausage and put in with a couple of consecutive loads of laundry. The machine felted ones came out more round than egg shaped, it would be fixable with a little more felting if I wasn’t feeling lazy. I threw them in the dryer too.
Then this morning I cut the eggs out of the middle. I was procrastinating, and really worried that everything would fall apart, but the first one worked! Yay! The rest worked too. This is probably the easy way to make stuffable natural easter eggs, if you have wool roving around. They seem pretty sturdy, and you can make the opening however large you want, as long as it’s big enough to get the egg form out. Pulling those eggs out a minimal hole was a bit disturbingly like giving birth. I’m going to have that as a birth image in August now, aren’t I? Darn.
We used these basic instructions from an AP news article. It was in a bunch of different papers if this particular link breaks, search for “felted wool eggs associated press” and you should find something.
I turned one of them into a little head with some needle felting too. I can’t decide if it’s creepy or not. But hey, I bet they would make good hollow heads for halloween candy! Woo! Creepy hollow heads for candy stuffing, now I know what I’m going to be doing in october. Good thing I have some black dye. Then we can have a shrunken head hunt around the house… that’s going to be fun… heheheheh
Yogi Kaveri here to proselytize my new school of yoga, developed by me, a sleep deprived time-strapped mother of a toddler (she doesn’t toddle anymore, what do you call them then?).
I call it tooth brushing yoga, because that’s where it started. We all brush our teeth for two minutes in the morning and two minutes at night, and maybe even floss for a minute. If you add in a warrior 2 pose while you are brushing your teeth, left foot forward on the top teeth, then right foot forward on the bottom teeth or however you like to divide things up, and a chair pose or some kind of squat while you are flossing your teeth, every day, then that is 35 minutes of yoga a week, just while you’re taking care of your teeth! It’s a miracle! I may also be punchy.
Not that 2 minutes of yoga at a time could be called a work out, lets just call it an improvement over 0 minutes of yoga at a time.
But then there’s that balance we all need to work on as we get older. You’re standing in line somewhere? Tree pose. You can leave the hands out if you’re feeling shy, or just keep them in prayer form in the center of your chest. If the thought of tree pose makes you fall over, just lift your foot up to your ankle. Or put one finger on your shopping cart. This is ten times better for you than scanning the awful checkout magazines or staring at the candy bars and batteries.
Standing next to the car (or anywhere) waiting for your young child to PLEASE GET MOVING? Try some chest openers. Interlace your fingers in front of you, turn them palms out and stretch them up and over your head as far back as you can. Doesn’t that feel great? Release your arms out to the sides sweeping them back and down. Some people call this morning stretch I think. I’m a yogi, really. If you keep doing yoga when your kids are dawdling you may start to actually like it when they slow you down. Maybe going faster isn’t that important anyway.
Just flow. Namaste.
(Have more ideas for incorporating yoga into the tiny cracks in your life? Share them in the comments.)
Eggs eggs eggs! I’ve been experimenting with soft hollow eggs to stuff for Easter, I don’t like plastic eggs. If you don’t like plastic eggs either, then whip up a bunch of these to hide around your house, or just make a couple to put in a basket.
I can’t say I’ve gotten the pattern quite right yet, but it’s almost Easter, so *ding* time’s up. Maybe I’ll work on these some more next year. The two main caveats are they are pretty crushable, and the opening is small. They will hold their shape fine if you stuff them with paper grass and candy, but if you just want a couple jellybeans rattling around you can squash them flat if you don’t treat them gently. I’d also like the opening to be larger when I redesign them, but the larger the opening the less stable they are. My friends tell me the small opening is an advantage for entertaining little children anyway.
So there you go. There are lots of variations you can make with these, how many different prints do you have in your stash? You can practically fit this pattern on a charm square, actually, you probably can. The initial instructions call for embellished felt, but at the end is a variation for (heavy) interfaced fabric, and the button is also optional if you’re in a rush and you want to make a lot.
Scatter brained crafty mama. I craft with a little bit of everything, during those precious nap time minutes.
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