Embellished Easter Eggs

Maddie and I made these last year because I was convinced that after we finished dying Easter eggs, she's still want to do more.

Years ago, my mom got these silk covered eggs from a student.


They're covered in silk thread and then decorated with sequins and pearl beads. She's had these since I was a little kid, and I always loved them so much she gave them to me.

In my mind, this was an easy project. I should have listened to my mother when she told me she thought it would be hard. I had planned a whole tutorial on covering the eggs, but well, just do it however you can manage it.




Because this part is impossible. Or better yet, but pretty looking styrofoam eggs and dye them or glitter coat them.

You'll also need a package of assorted sequins and sequin pins.




My little OCD child next sorted our sequins.




Then go to town affixing sequins with a pin right into the egg.




Maddie loved doing this. It was easy for her to pin, and even a great textural experience (dipping your finger in a big bowl of sequins is awesome!)




I ended up having to scramble and cover more eggs for her to decorate. Now they reside with my mother's silk covered eggs. Not quite as elegant but a fun activity and a fun decoration!

Advent Wrap-up

 

This is a little overdue, but I wanted to share our traditional Advent countdown. Once again, I tried to keep my daughter crafting throughout the Christmas season. As I mentioned here, I whipped together a quick advent calendar of craft projects, including the elf ornaments above.

 

With 24 craft projects, I thought I had boredom under control and excitement in store. But this year, some were hits and some were misses! My daughter has moved on from my scheduled craft projects to doing her own thing. She's so quick to say, "Daddy, is that a coffee filter? I'm going to do a project with that!" (He's thrilled!) For the first few days, I was about 0 for 5. 

I started off our craftraganza, by making some decorations for Maddie's room. When we moved, Maddie got to pick out the paint color of her room and surprisingly, she chose Pepto Bismal Pink. It actually does look really cute and she seriously loves it. It looked a little jarring with any of our traditional red and green Christmas decorations, so I figured that she needed something new. I started off with the idea to keep her Christmas decorations whites, muted greens and pinks. The music box above is something that her Grandmother bought for her first Christmas in Germany, and it set our tone for Christmas with nightly rituals of listening and singing along. Surrounding her bed, I plotted out a Christmas tree forest, inspired mostly by the Charlie Brown Christmas tree lot. White trees that I drew on packing paper and we cut out together. Then I gave Maddie a pack of price tag stickers that I found at Target. She decorated in her very typical OCD way (I'm quite sure you can tell which ones I was allowed to do.) When she opened that pack of stickers, she was pretty thrilled with the first day of her Advent calendar. It deteriorated from there.

 

The stickers were a hit. Decorated the trees was awesome.   Hanging them up was apparently torturous. She did not want anything on her walls because then there would be no room for her valentines. I kid you not. I basically went all Grinch on her and hung them up anyway. She got teary eyed the second night they were up. She has since refused to take them down.

Our next two projects were to give Maddie a Christmas tree for her village. I was planning to make this Christmas tree to keep with the color scheme, but Maddie likes primary colors more. (By the way, that book leaning against the wall is the "bookstore". We also made a wreath out of a feather boa and a wire hanger. Easy peasy and also apparently torturous.

Then we started to fall in love with crafting all over again.

Most of our projects this year were some great Pinterest finds. These were Maddie's favorites -- the ones that she got very excited to do. From left to right, top to bottom:  Maddie coloring an ornament, snowflake ornaments, edible Christmas trees, snowflake window clings, pipecleaner garlands that apparently were better as a necklace, global warming snow globes (Maddie didn't want to put any snow in hers!), a gingerbread house that would last inspired by this large scale version (this is so typically Maddie. She loves decorating any box into a house!), the borax snowflakes up close, and a playmat of the North Pole (it's actually Elf-correct with a Candy Cane forest and a sea of swirly twirly gum drops).

This is one of my favorites: Borax snowflakes. So cool to watch crystalize over the course of the day. 

And fantastic for our mobile. We also made these candy trees (which I'm really hoping that I can somehow save until next year??)

As you can probably tell from the many links throughout this blog, this season I was not at my creative best. My lack of creativity may have been a product of a long hard fall. Or maybe it was the fact that I remembered the whole thing on November 29. But regardless of the amount of time I put into doing craft projects over the season, it just magically makes everything so much more Christmassy. Not just making decorations but the process of counting down, building in more quality time during a normally busy time, and handmaking something that will someday mean a lot more than the Popsicle sticks you made it with. 

Twas the Night before Halloween

I have been all about Halloween this year! I think it has a lot to do with the fact that Maddie loves this holiday SO much and secondly that her school is not really celebrating Halloween this year.  She did however get to attend a "Fall Family Night" where they got to craft pumpkins. That's hers above with the cool shades.

I've been trying to instill as many Halloween traditions as I possibly can. Including doughnuts, which I think are intrinsically characteristic of Halloween -- maybe that's just me. So we made these, my absolute favorite: Caramel Filled Chocolate Doughnuts.

And this lovely craft was born of an attempt to keep Maddie busy during the recent Bills-Saints game. (Daddy gets one televised Saints game a year -- don't mess with him!) I cut out some white fabric and pinked it a little bit. Then Maddie and I put a little wooden ball in the center and used washi tape like a scarf. Maddie did all of the faces. And of course, now she says she's scared of them, but I think they're cute.

Then for a nice new tradition, we decided to add this:

Apple Pie Caramel Apples. Delicious! It's just an apple dunked in caramel and cooled, then dunked in white chocolate and rolled in cinnamon sugar. My favorite from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory but surprisingly easy to make.

I also came up with this little Halloween edu-craft. One of the big benefits of a glass top table is that it's super easy to do stuff like this (not so easy to photograph though!). Maddie has been working on her shapes, so I thought it might be fun to make a cobweb. I used washi tape to create an octagon. Then I helped Maddie tear off pieces to make the inside of the web. 

My hope was that we could then point out different shapes that we had made. Of course, my child is just a little bit compulsive. Her plan is to completely fill the octagon. It's still a work in progress.

Maddie's Project

I recently read a New York Times article on Melissa and Doug and their story of the company that makes toys that promote an imaginative spark. As I read the article, I wondered if we are too materialistic in our house. Do we rely on the easy toy to entertain?
And then yesterday, Maddie said, "I want to make a car." I back-seated this conversation* and tried to see if she could own her craft project.

(*back-seating a conversation: you know, when you hold your breath and see what they'll say next and try not to steer. Comments like "wow" and "and then what" are key to the back-seater. Man, I should TM this team.)

I was shocked to see that she could establish her own plan to build a car. And here it is.
How-to-Build a Car by Maddie




First, you need a big box.
Then you stick on paper using tape.




Next you color the inside. (We used bingo dabbers which worked out amazingly!)




Paint two sides blue for the windows.




You might need to get under the hood.




Cut out four big, black circles and four little, white circles. Glue the white circles on the black circles and you have some tires. Stick two on each side with tape.




Cut out a cardboard circle and color it.




This will be your steering wheel. You can stick it on with yarn. (I interpreted this as make two holes in the wheel and the box and thread it on as you would a button.




Cut out a hole for your feet. (I suggested yarn suspenders to help her carry it around.)




And that's a car. (Wow, my house is a mess. But look at that cute kid!)




Look out! Here she comes!

Boredom Busters

I think I'm finally starting to figure out three-year-olds! This is great news as Maddie turns four this week. It means my learning curve is exactly one year behind.

I think the secret to threes is being prepared to direct a three to something that will keep them interested. Sometimes it's a kick start for independent play so you can get stuff done. Sometimes it's just shake all the energy out with something really active.

I found a lot of help with this book:



Unplugged Play by Bobbi Conner, available here.

Unplugged Play is all about promoting old fashioned play --the simple games and activities we used to do as kids. Before Toys R Us convinced us we needed 10,000 toys and Siri became my nanny.

One of the things I love about this book is the cupboard list. I have two boxes in my house where I collect play possible items: toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, old TV dinner trays, etc... But Conner suggests some things that I never would have thought about and helps you get a vision for what to do with them.

When I first read the book, I started folding over corners, but I would forget about the things I wanted to try.




So I made this, my boredom buster bottle.

All of my favorite activities were written on large, colored Popsicle sticks. The sticks are color coded: red, easy independent play; yellow, needs some mom help; and green, outdoor play ideas.



Each stick has the name of the activity in bold. On the back is the page number of the activity description and the materials needed.

That way, I can tell Maddie, "Pick a red one!" Then I can read the instructions and know that I have all the necessary items (or tell her to try again.)

And hopefully this will keep us happy for a while, because Conner has activities all the way through school ages.

A Princess Party -- The Sequel

Remember how last year Maddie wanted a princess party? Well, surprise! She wanted another one this year.

Since I used up all my ideas last year, I scoured the internets searching for inspiration and came up with a few new ideas.

This could be no generic princess theme; this girl knows all the Disney princesses and expected them all to be in attendance.




Starting with decorations. I made accordion rosettes out of construction paper and glued on little medallions of each princess (plus Mulan and Pocahantas, if you're technical.) These graced our side board. On the mirror, I used a dry erase marker to write "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"


And of course we needed to have Tangled lanterns for the back deck.



My favorite touch was the poison apple buffet: four varieties from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory including Apple Pie and Cheesecake. Yum!


We also tried to theme-ify Maddie's favorite food. Ariel's Shells and Cheese, Aurora's Magic Forest (broccoli!), and this Pinterest fail: Snow White's Gems (pictured much better here).


For fun, I made Maddie a play castle out of cardboard boxes, poster board and pink duct tape.



And as a party game, we played Under the Sea. I tossed a bunch of dollar store toys (bouncy balls, animal forks --or dinglehoffers, thank you!-- gem ice cube thingys, beach toys, etc...) into Maddie's Princess pool and filled it with water. I topped that with heaps of blue and green ribbons (waves and seaweed, get it?).


The kids really seemed to have fun digging in the water and kept throwing things in to find them again.

And that's the party. I'll try to post some pictures of the birthday girl and her guests soon, but I have to check with the official party photographer first (aka Dad). The funny thing is that there are still nine more days until her actual birthday. More celebrating to come!

Summer To-Do List

I'm sure everyone has this problem. You say, "This summer, we're finally going to..." And then, you blink and it's September. Right?

That's why I love summer to-do lists. Both for the anticipation of summer and the satisfaction of checking things off that you otherwise wouldn't have done.

I love this summer list:



That I saw on Meg Duerksen's blog a few years ago.

But I wanted something a little more suited for our gallery wall. So I broke my list up in favor of pennants:



Each item got its own little pennant, which we strung throughout the whole hall.




Under each to-do is a colorful pennant. Item completed? Flip the pennant. By the end of the summer, our living room should be very colorful!




I had the colorful, patterned scrap paper that I used for our finished flags, but Maddie got into this project and did some of her own, too.



Lots and lots of fun to-dos, like fishing, field trips, picnics and more.

Cut-outs and Time-outs

OMG, I haven't blogged in so long! My time-out started off as being a well-planned blog series that I never had time to get started. And then it turned into some major changes on our home front (mostly good that I promise to tell about at some point in the not so distant future) that required some additional time. And about six months ago, my laptop battery died. We finally replaced it and I decided it was time to start backing up the 16,000 MB of photos we have on it. That's taking a lot of time, too.

So life's been busying, but now I'm hopefully back to blogging again. Of course, the longer you stay away, the easier it is to get out of the habit! Fingers crossed for good habits.

I wanted to share my go-to independent project: cut-outs. This all started around Valentine's Day as a simple valentine card.




I cut hearts out of construction paper and Maddie would paint them with watercolors or sometimes color with markers. When I knew I would be busy babysitting or cooking dinner, I would prep by cutting out extra hearts and putting them on her art table. She would happily sit and paint for a bit.




After Valentine's Day was over, she kept asking what was next.




So we did Easter eggs.




Then butterflies.




And most recently flowers. (Please notice I had to add a thread stem, per her request.)




With our flowers we were able to give Maddie's great grandma a bouquet of flowers for Mother's Day.




I have no clue what is going on in Maddie's head here. But GG sure was happy.