Posts Tagged ‘Crafty’

Back to School Necklace

Monday, October 18th, 2010

One month ago Rebecca started her second year of preschool (parent co-op which she loves and never wants to leave, today she said she wished the school day was longer… Next year baby…). Penelope went down for her nap, and I suddenly had an hour and a half of completely child free time. How novel! (Rebecca hasn’t napped in two years…) So I used it to assuage my guilt at not having made Rebecca a back to school anything, and made her a pink necklace. She’s just started to get into pink. And princesses… If you asked her what her favorite color was before the school year started, she would say, all the colors that my art friends and I use to paint with. Now she says pink. And black, sometimes. Anyway, I gave her the necklace as a ‘congratulations on your first day of a new school’ present, which she was thrilled with. The school and the necklace. :-)

To make it I used the clear stretchy beading string you can get at the craft store. We use a lot of it around here, Rebecca loves to make bracelets, and so do some of her friends. We use the 1mm stuff, which is pretty sturdy. For the kids I used to try to knot it, or knot it around a bead for a stop, which sometimes came off, it’s slippery stuff. (When you make the final knot you have to use a dot of super glue to lock it.) I’ve finally figured out that the best way to start a string of this stuff for a small child is to bend the end into a large U and fold some masking tape around it.

I also dug into my vintage cats eye and crackle beads, glass pony beads and seed beads, and the few remaining pink beads in our glass bead grab bag. Need to get some more of those!

Insa Skirt

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

[Don't forget I'm having a Candy Corn Barrette giveaway!]

A month or so ago I got ‘Sewing Clothes Kids Love‘, and I heart heart heart it! It is full of the clothes that I wish I had had as a girl. I may yet scale some of the patterns up and wear them myself. I’m not sure I’m allowed to wear them as a mom though! I just made the Insa Skirt for Rebecca. I convinced her that it was a princess skirt, and she wants to dress up as a princess for Halloween… is that cheating? :-D We went to Jo-Ann’s Fabrics when they were having a $1 fat quarter sale, and I let Rebecca pick out 8 different prints. I think the result is awesome. And a little big. It will probably look better on her scale wise in a year, I should really draft the proper size for her, and then make 10, because I think they are so cute.

Notice the upside down Hello Kitty framed ribbon bit? She demanded that Hello Kitty be upside down everywhere on the skirt, so that she would be right side up to Rebecca when she was looking down. I sewed most of the kitties on right side up… but I relented and sewed one special one upside down. I don’t know if that makes it look like more or less of a mistake than if I had just done them all upside down…

Here is the skirt from ‘above’ so you can appreciate all of Rebecca’s fabric choices. At first they were going to be all pink, but she really branched out! Her favorite after bringing them home was the purple stars, so that is the ‘front’, as much as this skirt can be said to have a front. When she wears it it tends to spin around through the day anyway. Then she gets a bit peeved that someone has turned her skirt around!

I feel like I’ve learned a lot from this book, and between it and my serger I’m finally making clothes that I actually really like. I learned how to use elastic to make the vertical gathers in the skirt, and for the first time managed to hem a non cylindrical skirt without any swearing. Excellent book! Now I just need to quadruple my ribbon stash. I’m going to need to make another ribbon spool holder!

Haunted Princess Castle

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

October! I love October! Halloween is my favoritest holiday. So far we’re reading a halloween book each night, and I’ve made candy corn (felt) barrettes, and we’ve been working on this awesome haunted princess castle. What it is changes of course, it was a princess castle, then we painted it black-ish, and it turned into a ghost castle. In this process Rebecca painted over all the princesses she’d drawn, and then got really mad. You know, some days I’m glad I’m not still 4. Her life seems fun to me, but clearly sometimes so many things turn out to be incredibly frustrating experiences.

Back to the castle! You may not be able to tell from this somewhat inadequate picture, but the tallest tower (toilet paper tubes) is a jail shoot, you drop the bad guys in at the top, and then they are in jail. There is a tiny window, that Rebecca specified must be super tiny so there was NO WAY they could possibly escape. Of course there is a door on the back to let them out. But they can’t use that.

There is a fabulous balcony on the front, with curtains that have little pull cords to pull them open. The embroidery floss cord runs through a slit in the side of the (oatmeal container) castle that is quite tight, so that holds it in place when you are not pulling the string.

We are not done yet. It needs more windows and more fabulous sparkly pipe cleaners glued all over, and maybe some peg people ghosts and, oh, I have glow in the dark paint. No, we are not done with this yet…

PS, you are dying to go visit my Etsy shop and buy my pattern for felt monster balls you can tuck candy in…

Acorn Tea Set

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

For the Autumnal Equinox we had a double tea party, tea for us, and a mini tea party with fairies. We served them this nice glitter-in-acorns meal, because we’re pretty sure that fairies like to eat glitter.

This is a simple thing to make, I hesitate to call it a tutorial, so we’ll call it a mini tutorial, but what’s in a name anyway.

Step 1: Collect acorns. We live in a blessed part of the world, California, where there are several varieties of acorns available year round it seems like. Near our house we have the round fat acorns of my East Coast youth, and also long skinny acorns which belong to California Live Oaks. You need some good big flat acorn caps for the fairy plates, and some small deep ones with long stems for the cups. If you don’t live in California you might not be able to find the shape of acorn we used for our chalices, if not, collect some 3/16″ (~3-4mm) twigs for the chalice stems.

Using some heavy grit sand paper, something in the 60-100 range, sand the bottoms of the large acorn caps flat. Rebecca helped me with this, it’s good practice holding things steady while sliding them over the sandpaper. For the chalices just sand the end of the stem flat. If your chalice acorn doesn’t have much of a stem, cut a tiny bit of twig and sand the ends of that flat to use as a chalice stem, or consider yourself to be making tea cups. That was my original plan anyway…

Get out your glue gun and hot glue tiny buttons to the bottom of the chalice/tea cup stems. We put our buttons face down, which made them more stable as cups. If you decided to go with a bit of twig, glue that in between the button and acorn caps.

Have your 4 year old fill your dishes with glue and glitter, or other fairy food, such as small seeds, or beads.

After the glue dries, have a tea party! These are really easy, and I expect them to get a lot of play in the doll house!

I just updated my theme, hand integrating a bunch of changes, so let me know if you notice something horribly broken. I’m trying to get threaded comments working. I know my sidebar is grey, I haven’t figured out why yet… Oh, hey, now it’s not. Shoot. I hate it when things change for no explainable reason. Hrmph. Oh, it’s just grey on the front page… Moving along…


Birthday Crown

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

So this night weaning thing has been rougher than I was expecting, two and a half weeks since my last post, wow! I think that’s a record. And while normally I might post after the girls go to bed, I’m writing this at 6:30 in the morning. The first week I was useless and made myself sick from not getting enough sleep, but I’m mostly functional now, and getting about the same amount of sleep I was before, while spending an extra hour or two in bed… woo. We aren’t nursing at night, we also aren’t sleeping. Who is winning here??? So far, no one. Right. I’m starting to think about buying a new bed (for me) and coming up with a new plan… But meanwhile.

A month and a bit ago, with great rejoicing and an enormous built-by-mom-and-dad piƱata with pop bottles and, right next post, Penelope turned one. Yes! We have met the basic infant survival goal. And I made her this cute little birthday crown. There are tutorials around if you want one, basically I cut the orange layer, sewed it down to the blue layer, leaving holes at the edges to insert the back elastic, and then trimmed the blue layer to fit the orange one. I always trim the back layer last, it makes it neat. Then I handstitched a casing for the back elastic out of crinkly blue kimono silk from a scrap bag I bought in Tokyo Fabric Town, which I have been hoarding. I slipped the (loose) casing over the elastic, and tucked both the casing and the elastic into the holes I’d left at the edges of the crown, and stitched both openings closed with a running stitch matching the rest of the running stitch embroidery. You’re just going to have to imagine all of that.

Here’s my little diva working on her thank you notes. I feel like thank you notes are such a great fundamental thing to work on with your kids, involving gratitude, personal narrative, and writing/drawing skills. I am good about getting my kids to do them promptly, and then I fall down on the distribution! Since Penelope started scribbling like mad around when she turned one, she was quite happy to sit through all 10 or so thank you notes, scribbling on most of them with several colors. I was expecting her to get through about three before loosing interest, but I was neglecting the power of big sister worship. Because after all, Rebecca spends a lot of time drawing, so now Penelope does too. Also, she can get the tops off the little crayola markers herself, so if Rebecca leaves one lying around, watch out!

Monogram Barrette

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Rebecca is 4, which means that she gets to pick out the birthday presents for her friends, and while I may retain some veto power, and can provide suggestions, it’s really her show. But sometimes *I* want in on the fun too! So I made this barrette for one of her fashion conscious friends who was turning 3.

As usual I was planning an extravagant set of six barrettes, some leaves, flowers, an apple, an ‘A’, but reality set in, and I only ended up making one, which with all the hand stitching took me at least an hour, possibly two. I’m really not very fast with my hand sewing I guess. Too much of a perfectionist. When I was gathering the lace for the back I carefully took a stitch in the 2nd and 4th holes of the lace, pulled them together with the 0th and then tacked it down with a back stitch. Please, I’m gathering lace to the back of a barrette, not counting cross stitch, but I have a really hard time going fast. I find slow and precise relaxing, but frustrating at the same time.

To make this barrette cover I traced the barrette, cut two, clipped a hole for the back prong of the barrette, and with the barrette in the center sewed them together with a running stitch. Then I whip stitched the monogram/lace stack to the edges of the barrette.

I have been doing a ridiculous amount of cooking and fermenting and sprouting rather than blogging recently. I think I have 4-5 containers of various ginger ferments, 3 jars of somewhat suspicious pickles, I made crackers and quinoa milk today for heaven’s sake. I idly think about blogging as I’m cooking, and sometimes take pictures, but I don’t really think I should diversify this blog any further, it’s already gotten pretty unfocused from where I started! And sometimes that bothers me, but not enough to do anything about it yet. Would you like my blog better if it was my crafts only or children’s activities only?