It was just the Spring Equinox! So we made fairies. We always make flower fairies, or something for them, like houses. This year we shared it with our art group. The moms had a great time making these flower fairies. The kids (5-6yrs) unfortunately just wanted to pick out the bits and have their moms put them together. Maybe I could have staged things better, I’m sure we will try again next spring, and I will try to lay things out so that the method is easier for little fingers.

What you need:

• Silk scraps cut into flower shapes
• Glass and/or wooden beads for bodies and heads.
• Hemp beading coord
• Fine gauge wire for homemade beading needle, or other needle
• Pliers

You especially need the pliers if your doubled over cord is a tight fit for the glass beads. This is project is better for small hands if you use plastic pony beads, but I don’t like to buy plastic.

The flower cut outs were made by my new sizzix die-cutter-thingy. I used Tim Holtz’s Tattered Florals die. You can cut perfectly beautiful flowers by hand, but not enough for 9 kids and 5 moms without going crazy. So I finally broke down and got a die cutter, I have been wanting one for forever. Actually, I was NOT buying one yet again, and my husband took the computer and bought it for me. Awesome. Now I just have to figure out where to put it!

I am going to start out by sharing how to make your own beading needles for super cheap. Never be without the pesky useful things again! That is, as long as you have a spool of fine gauge wire. This is something higher than 30, I tried to measure it with our wire strippers, but that is as high as they go. Not much higher than 30, but a bit. 32-34 possibly. I don’t even know if you can buy wire like this anymore, I’m pretty sure it is older than I am and belonged to my grandmother. It’s been kicking around with my beading supplies for, probably about 25 years now, and has finally found its calling. Isn’t that a beautiful label though? I’m guessing it’s from post WWII Japan, 50′s or 60′s, and probably full of lead, but I’ll just keep it out of everyone’s mouth and pretend I didn’t think about that! Back on topic.

So, cut some fine gage wire twice the length you want your needle. Not plastic coated, not 49 strand super beading wire, just plain old bare drawn wire. Soft, not springy.

Grab the two ends together in the pliers, stick your finger through the loop and start twiddling your finger around like you’re absentmindedly twisting up your hair into dreads and driving your mother batty.

As it gets twisted up it should break right off. If it gets too tight before it breaks, try putting a pencil in (don’t garrote your finger!), or bending it back and forth without twisting. You want it to work harden and break off right where the pliers are holding it.

These are super useful (although softer than real beading needles which have been spring tempered), and what is semi critical for this project, expendable!

On to the fairies, nothing deep and mysterious here, I’m sure you can figure it out yourself, but here’s how we did it!

Start by laying out your bits. Flower cut outs for the skirt, a bead for the body, a bead for the head, and a small flower for the hat.

Cut a doubled layer of hemp cord and thread it onto your needle.

String up everything you laid out from bottom to top, without pushing it right off the end of your cord. If your fabric is too tightly woven for your homemade needle you may have to snip a tiny hole in the center. I found if I just carefully poked a couple times I could generally make it through. When everything is strung, tie a knot into the loop at the top. At this point you have two choices, you can cut the loop into antennas, freeing your needle, or you can untwist or cut your expendable needle. You may be able to twist it back up into another needle, but its life is certainly limited.

Push all the fairy bits up against the knot at the top, and tie a square knot under the bottom flower skirt to make hips and hold the whole thing together.

Tie overhand knots for feet, leaving enough string so the legs are just longer than the longest skirt. Cut the cord off below the feet.

Take a short length of cord and tie an overhand knot in-between the head bead and body bead. Then tie two more overhand knots for the hands and trim off the extra cord.

Then it is tea party time!

Holi is a Hindu festival of spring. Spring. It isn’t remotely spring anymore, but I was just looking through my photos for something else, and aren’t these beautiful? I love Holi. This year I was brave/foolish enough to take my good camera, and although my camera survived it needed a good cleaning, and my camera case was an entirely different matter. Well, it did survive, but I think I spent over an hour trying to get the red powder out of its many cracks and seams. I seem to remember eventually resorting to the hose… So I don’t know what it was I was doing in April that was so important, but obviously what I *should* have been doing was sharing these!

Now go make a mess!

Back on track.

For the Board:
Materials – $4 enormous bin of sidewalk chalk (you really need at least 4 sticks of every color for a good sized board, and I was doing skimpy scribble coloring for many squares.)

Time – This probably took us a couple hours of mixed lazy/focused drawing with some kids helping in interesting ways.

Board Construction – I drew a wiggly line, then went down it drawing outline boxes of the appropriate color, wedge shaped around the tighter curves and generally wonky approximate squares. I was aiming for about 18″ which is a nice size to stand in the middle of. After I drew the whole board in outline we worked on coloring it in. It took a while. Towards the end my husband started drawing in monochrome spirals and checker boards and stripes. Rebecca started making short-cuts. It was her birthday so I just let her handle that part of the game design. There was one that went from square 5 to just about the end, woo!

To play you also need colored dice or spinners or something – We bought a bag of little wood cubes, put them all on the table and put a blotch of red on each side. Then mom turned them all over to another side and somebody put a blotch of a different color on that side. Repeat.

Game Play:::: I wanted this to be something the kids could play in parallel without having shove-y competitive races. So everyone had their own die, and they rolled and moved along to the next matching colored square at their own speed, there was no turn taking, and whenever you got to the end you got a prize. Everyone was starting at different times, whenever they showed up to the party, so that was another factor that cut down on the competitive factor. Which was a factor for me since I wanted to make something that under-5′s would all enjoy with minimum tears since it was a birthday party. Practicing loosing is great at home (fast turn over and repeat games like tic-tac-toe really help) but our preschool teacher says that kids aren’t really developmentally ready to handle loosing until 8.

The prize!!! At the end was my husband the Candy King, complete with his ring pops and his chest of candy treasure, mostly ring-pops and candy necklaces, mixed in with Mardi Gras beads we got thrown at us in New Orleans. The kids got to take any one thing out of the chest. The candy was the more powerful motivator. Some kids went around and around, but the whole board probably took them 5-15 minutes depending on age and concentration (and whether they insisted on throwing the dice 15 feet away…), so the actual sugar consumption was not that high. It was fun though!

The real candy consumption came at the end with the candy catapult. Coming up soon?

Okay, not a great picture. But we did have fun with these peg dolls! I made sure to actually get out the hot glue this time! The kids had fun drawing faces on them, and I showed them how to use the ruffling foot with the sewing machine to make ‘skirts’, that we then glued on.

Recently we drove into San Francisco to go to the Cherry Blossom festival, why? Really because I LOVE TAIKO. Something about hitting something as hard as you can, while also making something beautiful. Jesse thinks it is super boring. I promised the kids I would do whatever they wanted next if they just sat through it, and they did. Then we spent the rest of the festival at the Sanrio booth playing little carnival games and making sand art. I’m an adult, I can compromise!

This year Rebecca chose to use the soft tree bowls I’ve been working on to turn into beds with some lace doilies we had out for ‘tea party week’.

Would you like to make one of these lovely hollow tree stumps? I’m sure you would! Would you like to test my pattern for me? I know you would!

To qualify you need to either have a blog, or have commented on my blog before when it wasn’t a massive cross-blog giveaway day. This is really just so I know you are a real person, if you have another way to show me you are a real person, by all means let me know.

Comment on this post, and I will choose one person to get a free pattern to test. You will need to have 2/3 yard of fabric and medium/heavy interfacing, and it will probably take about one hour (maybe more?), if you are good at this sort of thing and don’t have kids hanging on you. You are committing to have feed back to me by next Sunday (just let me know the parts you had a hard time understanding), or give me an estimate of when you think you could find time to do it in your comment.
[I'm giving the job to maryanne.]

Also, if anyone can come up with a nicer name than ‘Tree Bowl’ and I decide to use it, I will send them a copy of the pattern too.

Okay, so maybe everyone doesn’t have crystal head pins in their stash, if not you can improvise with a sparkly pipe cleaner, or a piece of wire and some sequins or beads, or heck, sew it together with some yarn. Forget the title, it’s not important!

We made these for a few of Rebecca’s friends for Valentine’s day. I was trying to come up with something that she could make for her friends, out of materials that we had on hand. I did cut the hearts out though, and she ended up needing some help twisting the wires together, so the ‘make it herself’ part was only a little bit successful. She pushed the head pins through the hearts and barrettes, and helped with the design though. Also, since I’d started with the design constraint ‘something that a 4yo might be able to do’, they were easy enough to make a bunch without pulling my hair out. WIN!

Am I starting at the end of the story? Well, let me give you the basic instructions in case you haven’t already figured it out from the picture.

Take a heart button, a regular sized barrette, and a couple of crystal head pins or other type of wire. Put the button on top of some felt and use it as a template to cut out a larger heart shape. Stack the felt heart on some more felt and cut out a yet slightly larger heart. Stack the button and the two heart shapes, and (help your 4yo) stick the head pins down through the button holes and through the felt. Slip the pin wires down through the prongs of the barrette at the wide end, and twist the wires around the end of the barrette, making sure that the pokey ends get tucked in between the barrette and the felt heart. Ta Da!

I know, you got all that from the picture right? Did you figure out why there is one set of hearts that is a radically different color of pink? No, we didn’t run out of lovely naturally dyed wool felt. One of Rebecca’s friends is allergic to wool. Do not pass Go, do not go to Waldorf school, do not collect $200. Do get a sparkly barrette anyway!! Very important.

Is it unseasonal to post this now? I should start pre-dating all my holiday activities a year in the future so people see them at ‘appropriate’ times. Whatever. When my kids are older I’ll magically become more organized…

Also, there is no gingerbread or actual marbles involved in this… it should be titled “Graham Cracker and Everlasting Gobbstopper Run”, but…

Every year (okay, maybe every other…) we build a gingerbread house, usually at a big party with our friends, which we used to host, but due to living in a tiny house this year Chris hosted it, which was AWESOME of her. This year we couldn’t get inspired over any particular architectural undertaking, although there are some awesome modern gingerbread houses, and super realistic ones, and, oh dear, prison yards and peep shows… But, gizmos are always good around here, so we went for the rolling candy castle. We ran out of time (carefully mitering gingerbread strips takes time!) to really decorate this, so it’s not very candylandish, but it does run! And that’s the important thing around here, or is it?

Proof (here’s the straight link if the embedding is being flakey…):

Hopefully that video link thing works for you.

Awesome? We think so. And I should clarify, we is me and my eternal partner in gizmology, my awesome husband Jesse.

Next year, unless we do something totally different which is probably what will happen, it would be cool to go for taller, add tunnels, and some ^ points where the ‘marbles’ can split directions. How about plinko? Perhaps a rolling car? So many possibilities once you get away from just ‘house’.

This is a mashup of a felt board dress up pumpkin and a decoupaged candle holder. With it you can have a different pumpkin friend every evening, or experiment to find your favorite pumpkin face for carving!

We made two, one is a round plastic cookie tub, the other is a glass peanut butter jar.

What you need to do this:
* Clear container
* LED candle
* One 1″ square of stick on velcro (just the sharp half)
* Black felt
* Orange acrylic paint (tempera might work)
OR
* glue and orange tissue paper

Cut up the black felt into lots and lots of pumpkin eyes, noses and mouths. Size them to fit comfortably on your container.

The peanut butter jar we painted inside with watered down orange acrylic paint. Once it was dry I took the prickly half of a stick on velcro square, cut it into 5 pieces and stuck them about where I thought the face features should go.

The cookie container we decoupaged on the inside, using watered down school glue and 1″-ish squares of yellow and orange tissue paper. Rebecca worked on the lid, and Penelope helped me with the main container. She loves mashing a paint brush around! We added a little bit of Crayola Glitter It! Tempera Mixing Medium, (which is basically just glitter glue), to the watery glue to make our pumpkin glittery, because glittery is better.

For this ‘pumpkin’ I just cut the velcro square up into 4 pieces. Both layouts worked.

We decoupaged the inside of the container, but if you are using a real candle (and hopefully a glass container) you should decoupage the outside so that the glue and paper don’t catch on fire! We used an LED candle so that I didn’t have to worry about the girls tipping it over when they were playing with the felt shapes, and of course, I wouldn’t put a real candle in a closed plastic container!

Put your LED candle into the container, and Play! And then of course, cut out more faces. Keep extra felt and scissors next to your pumpkin, because you never know what sort of shape you will need next!

Also, I think I will be having another barrette giveaway real soon, because they are sorta fun. And I need to practice the whole publicity thing! Clearly either no one loves free things, or I am not very good at getting the message out yet… Practice!

I may be a Californian, organic farmers market produce buying, canvas shopping bag toting, biking the kids to school mom (but not skinny or tan or particularly blond anymore…) but I still have an enormous soft spot in my heart for candy corn. They are utterly at odds with my post-kids value system, but I can’t seem to care. Maybe I should add irrational fruit cake to that first list!

So for the glorious month of Halloween I had to make some candy corn barrettes. I think they are adorable. And look at my model’s nose, isn’t she cute! Mom, yes. These barrettes will make you cute too! And you can make them! Just download the pattern and follow the directions. P.S. I cannot take responsibility for any candy corn binges that may be triggered by these barrettes. (^_^)

Given the pattern pieces you can whip this together in whatever order you want, you really don’t need any instructions, do you? But the order I do things in ensures that you will only have to thread your needle once with each color of embroidery floss, and that the back will be trimmed to fit the exact way you’ve sewn the front.

Materials:
* Candy Corn Barrette Pattern
* Bits of felt (wool is nice) in white, orange and yellow. These colors are easy to find in the craft felt section. I used Holland wool felt from Magic Cabin in White, Pumpkin, and Lemon.
* Matching embroidery floss
* One barrette, the pattern is sized for a 1.5″ long barrette, scale if you have a different length. I use the non-slip ones that have some kind of rubbery sleeve over the barrette’s prong.

(1) Scale your pattern to match your barrette length, and print. Compare your barrette to the barrette in the illustrated assembly diagram to make sure the size matches.

(2) Cut out all the pieces.

(2b) If you want a face, embroider it on now. The one Rebecca is wearing is a simple smiley with french knot eyes and a back stitched mouth.

(3) Take your backing piece, and center your barrette over it. Mark two points on either side of the base of the barrette’s prong. Cut a slit between the two points.

(4) Open the barrette and insert the prong through the slit in the felt backing piece as far as it will go. Close the barrette to hold it in place.

(5) Thread 2 strands of yellow floss onto your needle. Overlap the yellow base piece of the candy corn over the center piece and sew with a running stitch.

(6) Position the center and base pieces over the barrette and backing felt and sew the rest of the way around the yellow base piece of the candy corn. Secure and cut your floss.

(7) Thread 2 strands of orange floss onto your needle. Slide the white tip piece just under the edge of the orange center piece and sew them together.

(8) Continue your stitching along the edge of the orange center piece, slip your needle in between the layers of felt to the remaining edge of the center piece and sew that down. Secure and cut your floss.

(9) Thread 2 strands of white floss onto your needle. Sew down the loose point of the candy corn. Secure and cut your floss.

(10) Neatly cut around the candy corn trimming away the extra backing felt. Done!

Tips: I start my stitching with a small knot hidden between the layers. I secure my tail by taking 2-3 tiny lock stitches right on top of each other, then skimming the needle through the back of the felt and cutting it off very close where it comes out.

Useless trivia: I had to shoot this whole tutorial twice because the first time it looked SO AWFUL! (;_;) I got as far as uploading all the images, starting to look at the tutorial previews and I just couldn’t take it. (>_<) Why are tutorials so much more work than you are expecting? I can’t answer that.

So, I ended up making a lot of these, and I will be giving out TWO, (not the one with a face) randomly, to people who comment on this post by Friday the 15th. I will be rolling the dice and packing things up Saturday morning (16th), Pacific Time for you last minute people. One extra entry if you blog about this tutorial/giveaway, 5 extra entries if you make one of these barrettes and put a picture up publicly on your blog or flickr, or wherever. Because that makes you awesome. (^_^) [Edit: That is silly, why would you want one of my barrettes if you made one yourself? If you do want one, go ahead and add 5 comments for yourself, or you can add one comment that says Monster Ball Pattern, and I will enter you in a separate drawing for one of those. You know, if only one person makes them before next Friday, you are a guaranteed win!]
[Edit: The giveaway is closed, but you can still comment on the tutorial if you have questions, etc.]

Tomorrow (night probably) I will be putting up a couple of these barrettes in my Etsy shop if you just want to buy one. Hand stitched! Natural wool felt!

And remember that cute monster ball pattern with candy pocket in my Etsy shop, if you need to make something extra special to give someone candy in.