Felt play food

If only my real-life fried eggs turned out like that…

It started with eggs. My son is obsessed with scrambling the eggs we have each Sunday for breakfast. He likes to sit up on the counter right beside the stove and use the spatula to mix and scrape. I think he thinks Sunday breakfast is pretty awesome. And tasty. So I found a tutorial from Wee Folk Art for two sweet little felt fried eggs and it seemed like an achievable little project. And I was right! I even won the crafty inspiration lottery in that I already had all the things.

I didn’t print off the pattern, but instead just eyeballed something egg-ish shaped, which ended up fine.

My freehand blob shapes worked out alright. Rather eggy.

Then the eggs looked lonely. And the second half of that egg tutorial? Yup, a felt bacon tutorial. Had to go for it. I love how these ones use hidden pipe cleaners to achieve authentic bacon crinkles. Genius.

These bacon strips and “fat” strips were also more or less eyeballed. How hard can it be to cut bacon-sized rectangles and some squiggly bits? Not hard.

Bacon!

And then? Then I wanted to make a whole box of play/felt food. I am both blessed and cursed to work for a child development centre that is pretty well stocked with an amazing selection of toys, which means I have all this inspiration that turns into big dreams for what I could make or put together for home. Dress up boxes, kitchen/food boxes, music boxes, sensory boxes (okay, I did that one), craft boxes, nature boxes… my imagination has gotten a bit carried away, really. I do not have the space for several huge bins of toys on various themes. My 2-bedroom condo does not need to resemble a well-stocked child development centre to meet my one kid’s needs.

…But I could at least round out the play food collection with some fruit. Make it a proper breakfast and all.

Strawberries!

So I made some strawberries! For these I mooshed together two tutorials I found. One was from While She Naps, which helped me do the main red part, and the other was from While Wearing Heels, which gave me the idea for the subtle ‘seeds’ done with thread. Only difference is I used black thread and didn’t make them as sticky-outy. Then I freestyled the green leafy stems and tacked them on.

I told him to smile; this is what I got.

Anyway, this is as far as I got with my MAKE ALL THE THINGS endeavour. I love the look of hand-sewn felt food. I just need to pin down what else my son would like to play with next. And it has to be doable. Garlic? Delicious breakfast staple that it is…

He actually played with it. Win.

Toddler action shots are always blurry. Because of all the action. Action breakfast!

(Never again to be this lacking in cat hair. Treasure it.)

So there’s the little breakfast plate I’ve made so far. What else would you make next? Bonus points if it’s an easy one. I’m trying to go for foods that my son is familiar with and would eat. Lettuce looks easy but leafy greens aren’t exactly his favourite food (he will very carefully pick them off any other food they might be touching, hand them to me with a disgusted look on his face and simply say “THIS.” as in, get this filth off my food stat!), so I imagine he might not know what to do with lettuce.

What should I make, guys?

Dryer ball makeover

So remember back when I made some awesome felted dryer balls from leftover yarn? They were quirky wound balls that I wet-felted inside some pantyhose. Here’s how they looked back when they were freshly made:

December 2010: So fresh and so clean, clean.

Aaaand, that was over two years ago. And that was before diaper laundry. Diapers that have velcro tabs that don’t stay attached to their little laundry tab attachers no matter how hard you smoosh them down or how clean you keep the velcro. At least, mine sure don’t. So, loose, grabby velcro tumbles around in my dryer on the regular. Which probably explains this state of affairs:

March 2013: Bits of that red one are stuck to all my clean clothes.

But after buying three awesome new dryer ‘ballz’ from my awesome friend Danica at Emballizm, I got the idea to cover the outside of my old ones with wool roving and re-felt them to make all the ugly mess go away. And it was so easy, dudes. I bought some colourful (and pretty cheap) roving at my local yarn store (or LYS, if you speak fibre-nerd-ese) and a felting needle. I’d never needle felted before, but I’d seen it done and it looked so painfully easy (jab-jab-jab, repeat) and since I already had a wool base to felt onto, I was all psssh let’s do this shiz.

Here are my colourful colours:

Fluff! (And clearly, photography was not taken into account when purchasing said fluff. Raggedy it is.)

I approached this task with freestyle zeal. Put a blob on, felt it on, wrap a blob around, felt it on… you get the idea. Stop when it looks done. And they turned out awesome! Here they are before their first maiden voyage.

A very satisfying makeover. They look like little Earths that got egged.

I had so much fun doing this. (Though I potentially developed some unfortunate shoulder strain from the repeated jabbing.) I have a bunch of the roving left over and am trying to figure out how best to use it. Make more for gifts, probably!

Sensory bin: Why didn’t I do this sooner?

“DUMP DUT!”

I’ve read plenty online lately about creative parents who put stuff in bins for their kids to explore. Usually with themes. Nature, various holidays, you name it. I was intrigued. But I… I don’t do themes. I do whatever’s around. Bonus: my kid will still love whatever I gather up for him to mess with.

But yet, I hesitated. A bunch of tiny things in a bin at the hands of a toddler with various scooping options? That sounds messy. Toddlers don’t keep things in appropriate containers (Cheerios go on the floor!), on appropriate surfaces (Spaghetti on my highchair tray? How about on the wall?), or out of inappropriate places (Look! My train is floating in the toilet!). But I came to my senses when I realized that a bin like this would surely buy me several consecutive minutes of peace, so here I am being one of those creative parents who has resigned herself to repeatedly sweeping up tiny things from her floor. The Occupational Therapists at work would be so proud of me making my son a “sensory bin” to explore.

Scooping and dumping. A toddler’s dream.

Now, apparently you can put any old anything into a sensory bin (judging from Pinterest search results). Because of the nearness of our grocery store (across the street = win), I filled ours with dry, shelf-stable, cheap food: dry macaroni, popcorn kernels, and a few black beans. I threw in a few of A’s small trucks and cars and other tiny toys, gave him a cup and a scoop and a dump truck, and he was set.

Loving it.

He played with it for about 20 minutes. There were at least 5 dumps onto the floor in that time. It went something like this:

I sit down to relax.
Clattering spill noise “Mess!”
“Oh baby, this stuff stays in the bin.”
“Mama help.”
“Okay, I’ll help.”
We clean up together.
I sit down to relax.
Clattering spill noise…

It was still worth it. If nothing else, having this around will give us many, many opportunities to practice team work while cleaning up together.

Digital download: Recipe template

I used to be masterful at MS Paint. In my eyes, MS Paint is the only thing Microsoft really ever did right. It was elegantly simple and yet surprisingly useful. I could draw a crappy picture of my friend Jason eating dirt and send it to him, and he could draw one of me eating dirt and send it to me. It was a beautiful thing.

I use Macs now and, to this day, I mourn the fact that the Mac OS lacks an MS Paint rip-off. I have searched for one and have come up wanting, people. It ain’t out there. Sob.

So if you’re like me and you have a Mac and want to draw a thing, you have to use something complicated to draw your thing (*snicker*). Like Photoshop. Except Photoshop is for people who have money to buy Photoshop, so I use Gimp. It’s painfully slow and laborious for a lazy learner like myself, and I often resort to a button-mashing type of effort, but lo and behold: I DREW A THING. Here it is:

Download full size image here!

It’s a template for recipes.

My husband and I have a binder of recipes either hand-written or printed out from email/online and some of them are covered in spilly dribbles and/or tomato stains. Some of them are over 90% crumpled up. Some of them have been written all over with modifications and things circled and giant arrows and emphatic stars that were the result of a dramatic rage brought on by having forgotten to buy an ingredient from the store because of unfortunate formatting. Basically, it’s a hot mess, this book.

I’ve been meaning to copy & paste all our collected recipes into a pretty, consistent template for printing so that everything can be put under dorkgasmic page protectors and if any of our friends were to happen upon our beautiful homemade recipe book they would surely think I was one of those people who had my shit together, surely. I searched the internet for such a template and found monstrosities of clip art pizza slices and cartoonish blokes in chefs hats. NOPE.

Anyway, dear internets: I share this with you. Use it! I know I will.

Things I covet: Jewelry organizers

I can never remember how to spell jewelry… jewellery… JOOL-REE. Anyway, I have a bunch that I almost never wear because my toddler has the grabby hands. So naturally, I need someplace to put it where I might happen upon looking at it and remember that I should probably attempt putting some on. Sometimes. Rotting in a drawer or box (my current setup) is really not the ticket.

Since we don’t have a lot of dresser-top space or other storage that makes sense, I’ve had this idea in my head for ages to make some kind of wall-mounted jewelry organizer, especially for hanging the long danglies like necklaces.

This burlap number is my top choice, currently:

Source: Songbird blog

We even frequent a coffee shop here in town and I know they’ve got burlap coffee bean bags that they often give away to anyone who’s interested. So that might be some awesomeness in my future. So, the above organizer uses simple hooks to hang all the earrings and necklaces, but I love the idea (below) of attaching drawer pulls (upside down half-moon cups or plain knobs). I think it might be fun to scour a hardware store and come up with a few different ones that might work together. See?

Source: Better Homes and Gardens

So cool. I’m thinking about this so much that I have begun scheming about when I can next get my arse to a hardware store. I kind of love hardware stores. But that’s an aside. Check out this necklace hanger idea using tree branches:

Source: Flights of Whimsy

So gorgeous, especially in the teal frame.

So my plan (Ha! As if I have time!) is a lovely frame, possibly painted, burlap in the middle, with the drawer pulls and knobs and hooks dressing it up a bit. Pretty. I even have a spot in my bathroom scoped out to hang the thing. Now I just need the time. Right. That part. Well, a girl can dream.

Nursing necklaces are back!

As a happy surprise (to me), my original chewable nursing necklace with the spiral design has been very popular over on my Etsy shop, but I sold out of the ones I made ages ago! And what with all my recent distraction and braindeadness due to working, I hadn’t gotten around to making any more, let alone making any new and different and exciting ones. Well okay, I can’t promise that this new design is exciting, but it’s new and different anyway. So check it out!

What do you think? Head on over to the astitchinlime Etsy listing for a proper blurb and some more photos. ‘Cause just making time to photograph this little puppy this afternoon has worn this girl out. (Psst! I’ve even got another spiral one up for grabs again!)

The come-back post, featuring play-dough

Aaaayynd we’re baaaaaayck!

I never left, really. Just the posts did. I got a grown-up career job, and while it’s part-time, it is somehow consuming all my time and energy. So! That all makes for lousy bloggerly dedication in a hurry. Because my only moments of free time now are spent with a bag of kettle corn in my lap watching old episodes of The Simpsons. That’s the amount mental energy I’ve got left, chicken.

But the good news is, it’s almost Christmas which means that cultural and social forces are motivating me to get a bloody crafty move-on! At last! Despite my lack of time, I am forcing myself to put my report-writing work away in the evenings and make some shit. Last night I made play-dough for Baby A, who really should now be more appropriately named Toddler A. Here’s how it turned out:

I made it using this no-cook recipe (there are many out there on the webs) after we saw it made that way at a local baby group and it turned out perfectly playdoughy before my very own eyes. Plus it looked easy and I basically had all the stuff anyway. (‘Cept that dang white flour, which I had to pick up from the store last night and ended up covering myself in said dang white flour, as is inevitable when handling a bag of flour. What’s with that, anyway? Surely we as a civilization possess the technology necessary to produce a sealed flour bag.)

I split the batch into four equal sized heaps and then coloured each bit separately so my son would have a few colours to play with. I used 15 drops of food colouring (red, blue, yellow, and green) for each ball, and the colours are pretty vibrant. I made sure to wear rubber gloves when working the first bit of the food colouring in. Once it was more well-dispersed I ditched the gloves because they were annoying and sweaty.

This was really easy to make. The hardest part was kneading the colour in, but once I gave my hands a break and just smashed it and smooshed it into the counter over and over again, even that part was easy.

So! You should make this, too! Or whatever else you want to make. What are  you making for Christmas gifts this year, anyway?

Progress photo (Summer Sweater KAL)

I.

Am.

Loving it.

Join the Summer Sweater KAL at luvinthemommyhood!

Summer Sweater KAL

A sweater? In the summer?

Well, in the summer it’ll be on the needles. The idea is it’ll be ready to wear by the fall, when the weather calls for it. And check out my yarn! I think it’s the perfect colour for fall. Reminds me of kicking my way through the crunchy, fallen leaves. Shown here are my five lovely skeins of Knit Picks’ Swish Tonal in Foliage (a colourway that’s now discontinued; thankfully I was able to catch it on sale on its way out). Dreamy.

And my pattern: the Ladies Classic Raglan Pullover by Jane Richmond. Looky here:

I’m planning to knit mine up with two inches of negative ease, so it’ll fit more snugly than the one shown above (which is knit with zero ease). What this means for me is knitting a size down from my actual measurements. But in the spirit of tweaking this sweater’s fit to be as close to exactly what I want as possible, I’m going to follow a tip I snagged from Jane herself and knit the body and sleeve lengths for my own (actual) size to accommodate my gangly arms and long torso. And guys? I even swatched properly (and blocked my swatch, I’m that serious) for this thing. I am the most on the ball I’ve ever been about getting the right fit. I’m not wasting my money and time on a garment like this only to end up with something that only fits ‘okay’ in the end. No no. Enough of that nonsense. This one will fit right and it will be glorious. Mantra.

I cast on the other day and have already made a bunch of progress! Thank you to CrazyBaby for going to bed pretty early the last couple of nights.

At that ‘all curled up’ stage. Hard to photograph, but you can get the idea.

And for the ‘KAL’ part: I’m knitting this as part of luvinthemommyhood‘s Summer Sweater Knit Along! I’m really looking forward to having this sweater on my needles over the summer and ending up with (hopefully, probably, LIKELY!) a wonderfully fitting and cozy sweater just in time for fall. And it’s orange! It’s orange. Eff yes! Orange sweater for me!

Come knit along with us!

Green ears

A quick and brainless knitting project.
Some leftover yarn.
A distracted baby.
Bad lighting.
A rushed photo.
A frenetic blog post.

(This post brought to you by superspeed microblogging during precious naptime.)