Posts Tagged ‘toy’

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New Pattern! ‘Tree Bowl’ on Etsy

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Last year was not a great one for my development of my Etsy shop. I did not get a single new pattern in! Last year I wrote up three patterns for the next One Yard Wonders, half finished two soft electronic patterns that I gave up on because I didn’t want to deal with possible people-shocking-their-children liability issues, worked on some doll house food I never finished that I’d still like to re-visit, went through a ‘sticks and string’ dreaming-about-a-book period that I don’t think even made it to the blog, and then there was that doll pattern that has been sticking me up for months. Not one of those made it to my Etsy store, and in December I shut the whole thing down until now, because I was so depressed about it! But it is open again! Hurray!

Obviously the One Yard Wonders patterns are not a ‘failure’, but it was several months worth of working on patterns that were *also* not going to my Etsy store. 2010 was a sad year for that store, no progress! 2010 was also the year that Penelope went from 6m to 1.5yr, so there were lots of reasons for no progress, but I still felt bad!

But by picking a reasonably small goal though, I’ve made it from start to finish on another pattern, which is good, because I’m probably going to be going back to work for several months now, and getting very little done other than basic house and child survival. We will see how the blog fares through that, if I suddenly disappear completely until June you will know why! I still don’t know exactly when my contract will start though, so I’m in an odd holding place, trying to get things wrapped up so we can survive being a two-working-parent household, briefly anyway. I am so rambling right now. But YAY, new pattern in my Etsy shop.

Also, YAY, we won Rebecca’s school lottery and will be going to our local progressive hand-on parent-participation PUBLIC school. Which means FREE (almost), which means we will not be (trying to) save 20k (and then 40k for two kids) to spend on private education (that was going to be a difficult budgeting problem!), and I am SO glad we don’t have to choose between a great school and retirement. Maybe we will go to Egypt (NOT right now) and see the pyramids instead of paying for private school… Stay tuned, six years from now I’m sure I will be stressing about this all over again for middle school…

Singing don’t worry, about a thing,
’cause every little thing, it’s going to be all right…

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Posted in Crafty, Life | 2 Comments »

Dowel Construction

Monday, March 14th, 2011

We’ve started rotating major toys through the living room about every week. I’ve never managed any kind of toy rotation, so It’s been pretty cool. Also, as I allow my living room to be devistated by blocks, it’s also relatively easy to clean up, unlike when I was trying to keep the living room clean. The blocks all get tossed into the same bin, but if there is ‘nothing’ in the living room, it fills up with stuff from all over that takes much longer to clean up. So by embracing the disaster, I have overcome it? It’s working pretty well so far.

Two weeks ago we built a puppet theatre out of 3/8″ dowels, rubber bands, 3-4yds of sari fabric and an old curtain. It was pretty cool! Although shortly after it was built Rebecca declared that it was actually a ballet stage, and showed how the curtain slid back for the show, proceeding to our ‘outermission’ and ‘intermission’ entertainment. ‘outermission’ being the show part of course!

It was a really awesome structure for minimal construction time, I think it took about 10 minutes, and it is now folded up and broken back down into six dowels for our next project. Flimsy yes, but it lasted two vigorous weeks, bending but not breaking. Pretty cool. The bookcases behind are sort of what holds the whole thing up. I made the face frame out of four dowels, two uprights and a cross piece at the top and one across the middle for the curtain. Then from each of the two top corners I attached another dowel, going out and back toward the book cases, to end tucked under a foot of books on a conveniently located shelf. The roof is tucked into a tent shape from the top shelf of the book shelf, and draped over the dowel structure. I was a little worried that someone would pull a shelf of books down on their head, but nothing shifted the whole week, so I guess it was okay!

The second week we added a table and cash register, plastic shopping basket, and put out the bins that our play food gets stored in on top of some cardboard boxes we keep for playing. Practically instant Farmer’s Market/Grocery Store.

Now I’m wanting to get more 1/2″ to 3/4″ dowels for more temporary play building construction. Dowels + rubber bands + light drapey cloth = lots of fun! And as a bonus it doesn’t involve all the chairs in the house being commissioned for forts and us eating dinner sitting on the floor…

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Spoonflower Dolls

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

We survived our brief trip back east, and I am tired! And I have no real plans for the holidays, not even sure which ones we are celebrating. We celebrated St. Nicholas day in Vermont, that was fun. We will celebrate solstice and the new year I guess. How exactly I don’t know. But Penelope actually slept all last night, so I’m running out of excuses for not having any brains!

This is something I’ve been working on for a while, soft dolls printed at Spoonflower. I managed to fit three dolls into half a fat quarter of organic jersey (which is larger than a fat quarter of quilting weight woven, happily) so I was able to order six little dolls on one fat quarter. I made one rag doll, which was my goal, that I haven’t sewn yet, and then along the bottom I fit two swaddled babies. One is the one above, that I think is okay, but I’d like to fix it up.

The other is one that Rebecca drew – I printed out an oval for her, and she scribbled a face and other bits all over it. Here she is sewing around the edges, and in quite a bit from the edges…

And here you can see her finished doll, isn’t it cute! (along with the second print that she is cutting out.) She did the cutting, and the sewing and the turning and the stuffing! I still have to thread her needles and knot them, I keep meaning to work on that with her, and I had to sew the doll shut for her because she was getting tired. Can you tell, I am so proud of her that she can sew a simple doll mostly by herself at 4?

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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…

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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…


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Playing Mail Man

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

I’m not supposed to be blogging right now, I’m supposed to be meeting my deadline. But it’s been a week! My house is getting messier and messier and older daughter spent an unheard of amount of time in front of the computer today. So here, here is something I whipped up before I was sucked into this One Yard Wonders 2 thing.

Birthday. Mother suggested that she would appreciate play acting props, careers other than ‘princess’. I chose mail man. This hat, other than being too small, worked wonderfully from my imagination to implementation!

The bag, well, it is recycled from a shirt in the rag bag. I got a new serger! Named Sammy. This was practice using it, quite a different thing than I’m used to, it was quite fun! I made the strap about twice too long and tried to just lap it and sew to make it shorter, but that was a disaster, ended having to undo the bag seam, remake a bunch of it, but it was still a quick satisfying project. So what if I did write the letter shapes with permanent marker rather than erasable marker… It is still quite good for play acting, not going to be winning any design comps with it though!

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