Come Join Me Over At Rhythm of the Home Today

I'm so excited! The new winter edition of Rhythm of the Home is out and I'm sharing how to carve your own rubber stamps over there today :)

So grab a cup of tea and enjoy all of the wonderful articles, recipes and crafts being shared and check out the giveaway over at the Rhythm of the Home blog that is going on today as well to kick off the new edition. See you there!

Hugs,

Rosina

Celebrating Martinmas

Yesterday we celebrated Martinmas or St. Martin's day :)

I wanted to replace last year's paper mache leaf lanterns with some pretty new star shaped ones so we spent the morning cutting out our cardboard stars, gluing in yellow vellum paper to create the star shaped windows and adding wire handles so that we would be able to carry them on our lantern walk in the evening. They turned out beautifully and were perfect to go along with the special story I told them of needing a little home to keep Autumn's spark safely within during the dark and cold months :)

As it grew dark and we had finished our dinner I had each of the children bring their lantern so I could place a bit of spark (LED candles) in each of their lanterns and off we went through the dark. It was pouring rain outside so we weren't able to go outdoors this year but instead we turned off all of the lights in the house and made our way from one end to the other a few times singing our lantern songs *grin*. So much fun!

We made a special recording of the song we used this year so that we could look back next year and I thought it would be nice to share it along with the words with all of you as well :) The original German song is called "Ich geh mit meiner Laterne" and this is an English version of it. (You will have to click through to my blog to see it if you are reading this via email)

I go outside with my lantern, my lantern goes with me
Above the stars are shining bright, down here on Earth shine we.
The cock does crow, the cat meows, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom.
‘Neath heaven’s dome till we go home, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom.

I go outside with my lantern, my lantern goes with me
Above the stars are shining bright, down here on Earth shine we.
So shine your light through the still dark night, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom
‘Neath heaven’s dome till we go home, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom.

As I looked for the tune to sing it to I actually came across quite a few versions but really liked this one and you can even find a video that shows the sheet music to go along with it here :) The other song that we sang was "Glimmer Lantern Glimmer" and you can hear it in a video here.

 The sunlight fast is dwindling,
My little lamp needs kindling.
Its beam shines far in darkest night,
Dear Lantern, guard me with your light.

Happy Martinmas!

Rosina

Blue Ribbon Rosette ~ Tutorial

My daughter has a fun little my first pony book that she was given on her birthday a few years ago and inside was a game to play and little paper award ribbons to give to the first, second and third place winners. Well over the years the paper rosettes have grown rather worn and we've replaced a few ourselves but this time I thought it would be fun to make a really nice one out of felt that would really last and share the tutorial on how we did it with you :)

As this was supposed to be her project with just mama supervision I got her to do all of the tracing and cutting so you might see in some of the photos that there is a little bit of black ink showing on the tips of the felt ruffles :)

We started with a glass that was 3 inches in diameter, using it as our template for our ruffled rosette and traced twelve of them to be cut out of our felt.

Once our circles were all cut out we moved onto the next step of folding them into little triangular sandwiches by folding the circle first in half and then in half again just like in the photo above for just 10 of them....

and then started to space them as evenly as we could around one of the leftover circles.

This part is a little tricky so I helped her out and to make it a little easier on myself for the spacing I took four of the folded circles and placed them onto the base at the north, east, south, and west compass points so that I had a rough idea of how far apart to put the remaining pieces.

As you pin each one down you want it to overhang your backing by about a 1/4 to 1/2 an inch. You definitely don't have to be precise! But you do want to have that extra space so when you sew on your final backing at the end it will hide any embroidery stitching and so on that will be visible on the underside.

With all of the pieces pinned down she used a bit of regular cotton sewing thread and hand stitched all the way around the base of each of the points to tack them down in place.

DON'T remove  your pins yet! Trust me keeping them in will keep your rosette nice and stable as you continue to work on it :)

So with everything stitched in place we used a smaller glass, this time 2 inches in diameter, to make our rosette center. It really doesn't matter what sizes your glasses are as long as they are both roughly 1 inch different in diameter from each other.

She thought it would be nice to use a darker blue felt for the center and I agree that it really did make the rosette pop! 

I helped again with this part, embroidering the first place onto the felt with white embroidery floss and just using a running stitch to secure it to the front of the rosette.

You will notice that you still have one of your 3 inch circles from the very beginning left over and this is going to be your backing. You will also need to cut three strips of felt 5 inches long and 3/4 of an inch wide for your ribbon tails.

Position your three ribbon tails how you would like them to look and pin them onto the backside of your rosette with their ends far enough towards the center that they will be fully  hidden when the backing is stitched on.

To finish we just used regular cotton thread again and my daughter used a simple whip stitch to secure the backing to the underside of her rosette hiding all of our knots and not so pretty stitch work *grin*.  The final touch was to add a brooch pin that I luckily had but you can easily find them at any hobby/craft store or even your local dollar store may have them down the craft isle.

And that's it!

A super cute blue ribbon rosette for the winner in your household :)

You could personalize these with pretty much any little saying. They would make great birthday boy/girl ribbons, or don't forget about Mother's day that is coming up this weekend. I can see this with #1 MOM on it just for me *grin*.

Have fun making some :)

Hugs,

Rosina

We're Sending Egg Mail!

How did I not think of this?!

Mailing large plastic Easter eggs for friends and family is like having the cadbury bunny lay an egg in their mailbox but even better LOL. When I ran across the idea here I went to the nearest dollar store to see if I could find eggs big enough to hold a bunch of goodies and accommodate a mailing label that I could write on large enough to be legible.

Two stores later I hit the jackpot! Brightly colored eggs that were a good 7 - 8 inches long and didn't feel to flimsy so that they would be able to take a good knocking around in the mail truck.

We filled them with chocolate, stickers, easter stamps, bunny masks and felted eggs that we had made. Nestled it all in a bit of paper easter grass and taped them tightly shut :)

Watch your mailbox... one of these just may be for you!

Hugs,
Rosina

Easter Bunny Masks

My daughter totally loves to dress up. Full length princess gowns, ballerina tutus and hand me down halloween costumes from her cousins. She especially loves all sorts of masks but somehow I don't think her hairy beard and moustache disguise or her bandit masks are going to cut it on the Easter scene. I was going to have to come up with something new and preferably of the 'bunny' variety *grin*.

So what I did was take one of her old masks and traced through the eye holes on to the center of a plain piece of paper so I got them spaced pretty much where they needed to be and then just winged it and drew some bunny ears and a simple face shape to go with the eyes. A little trick to getting both sides of your drawing symmetrical when you're finished drawing your pattern is to fold your paper in half so both halves of your drawing are back to back and then pick your favorite side that looks the best and cut out your pattern while folded with the good side up so you end up with both sides exactly the same :)

After pinning my pattern onto some felt and cutting out two pieces for our bunny mask I had some worries that the ears might flop over my daughter's eyes when she was wearing it because they were so narrow where they met the rest of the mask.

So to remedy that I sewed in pieces of stiff clear plastic onto the ears on the inside back layer of the felt, putting in a few stitches at the very bottom of the plastic. I also made sure that I placed the plastic far enough down close to the eye holes so that it wouldn't still flop because it wasn't far enough past the brow line of the mask. The plastic we used came from some of those 'windows' they put in some boxes. That's why there are still some strips of cardboard leftovers still stuck to them :)

With the ears reinforced, I sewed on some contrasting white for the centers of the ears, added a little triangle nose and some elastic to keep it on her head and then pinned the front and back pieces together to finish sewing it together which I fully intended to do until L asked to do it herself. Of course I said yes! I love that she wants to join in and do more and more sewing. Her growing confidence in herself and her budding skills are so heartwarming to this crafty mama :)

So slowly and surely she made her way around the mask keeping a close eye on her seam allowance and getting a good lesson on how to maneuver curves *grin*. She did an awesome job and kept it darn straight. Atta girl!

With the threads snipped my little girl transformed into a fuzzy little bunny and promptly hopped away LOL.

I wish I knew how to take my paper pattern and turn it into a PDF for you! Maybe someone reading this will be able to share the secret with me *grin*. And in the meantime I hope you'll grab your pencils and whip up your own bunny version :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Mini Heart Bunting Valentine Cards & One For You

Each year the kids and I have fun making valentine cards to give away to friends and family and in addition to this we decided that it would be fun to participate in a valentine card swap this year as well that will provide us with oodles of mail which is just plain fun anytime.

What I hadn't anticipated was making 38 cards! Yes, that was definitely more than I ever could have imagined but creating things with the kids is always fun :)

I love making bunting and my daughter always wants to use my sewing machine so I thought I'd combine the two together and so our little mini heart bunting cards came to life :)

We started by cutting out little rectangles of burlap fabric slightly smaller than the face of our cards and pulled out a few threads from each of the sides to give it a frayed appearance. Then between the two of us we traced over 120 miniature little hearts onto the paper side of some Heat n Bond paper that we would later iron onto an assortment of red fabrics.

With our hearts traced, ironed onto our fabrics, cut out and then permanently affixed to the top of our burlap rectangles in a semi circle formation it was time to get stitching!

Using a nice bright red thread my daughter stitched on the string for our bunting so that it no longer looked like our hearts were just floating all alone finishing the mini heart bunting...

And then she took each of the finished burlap rectangles and stitched each of them to the front side of each of our little note cards. So much more simpler than mucking around with glue and then waiting for everything to dry! Plus getting to use mama's sewing machine is always such a treat :)

I just love how they turned out with their little red stitching from the sewing machine and I was so happy that my daughter had so much fun sewing them. Originally I thought that she would maybe make it through half of the cards we had to make but she just wanted to keep sewing and sewing which actually turned out to be a good thing because we now have extras to share with you!

So if you or your children would like a little surprise Valentine card sent to you in the mail just let me now in the comments below and make sure you leave me a way to get in contact with you for your address :)

The first five commenters will have one personally sent to you by my happy heart stitcher *grin*.

All of the Valentine cards have now been spoken for :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Painting with Wool ~ Wet Felting

My little girl and I had fun today playing with some of our felt rovings and creating felt scenes :)

I know that many of you felt quite regularly but I thought I would take some photos of our progress today and share them just in case some of you are unfamiliar with how to wet felt wool :)

It's a really fun craft and you only need a few different colors of wool rovings to get started. We used corriedale rovings that I purchased here and you want to start by taking small chunks of your roving and pulling it apart evenly so that it is all fluffy and lay them down on a sushi mat or sheet of bubble wrap. Lay down one complete layer going horizontally and then repeat the process laying down your wool vertically and again the opposite way so you have three layers of wool.

Now you can get really creative and start adding the details to your picture :)

It's like painting with wool *grin*.

L wanted lots of flowers so we tried something new and cut out flower shapes from a sheet of the pre-felted craft felt and then placed a few loose strands from our wool rovings over them to hold them down as I wasn't quite sure how they would felt :)

When she had all of the final touches added we placed the wool covered mat on a cookie sheet, covered her picture with a piece of mesh and started to slowly dribble water all over it until all of the wool was wet. The cookie sheet will keep all of the water nicely confined so that you don't end up with a giant water puddle on your table :)

Drizzle a little bit of liquid dish soap over the top of your mesh and start to slowly and gently rub the surface of your mesh. You will start to notice that the wool begins to work together and doesn't move around as much under the netting. Make sure you lift the netting off of the wool every couple of minutes though as the wool fibers will start to work their way through the holes in the mesh and you don't want your picture to get stuck to the netting :) Keep doing this until all of your wool looks like it has bonded together well enough that you can lift it gently and it won't all fall apart.

Now that you have one solid sheet of felt, albeit a delicate one, you can roll your mat or sheet of bubble wrap up tightly with your felt and netting inside and roll it back and forth. This will squeeze out some of the excess water and continue to agitate your wool and help it work together even tighter.

Continue rolling for a couple of minutes, then stop and unroll it, pull up the netting to keep it from sticking to your felt and then turn the entire piece of felt 90 degrees so that when you roll it up again it will agitate the wool in a different direction from the last time. We kept rolling and unrolling for about 10 minutes and then I took the whole thing over to the sink and plunged it into hot water and then cold water a few times to really shock the wool so it tightened right up.

Now that you are all finished with the water you can unroll it, remove the netting and roll it up in a tea towel to suck out the excess water :)

And here is her finished picture. I think she must have had an Easter theme in mind with the little bunny in the flowers :) I just love how it turned out for her and tomorrow when it is completely dry we're going to hang it up on the wall.

Have fun felting!

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more crafty ideas or inspiration? Pop over to Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday and see what others are up to :)

Fluffy Tissue Easter Chicks ~ Kids Craft

Easter time's a coming, Easter time's a coming.... *grin*.

I loved making these fluffy tissue chicks when I was a little girl, twisting little bits of tissue paper on the end of my pencil and sticking them onto paper in the shapes of hearts, chicks and other animals. I'm seriously just like a little kid when it comes the crafting! I can't wait to get in there and cut and paste along with the kids no matter what the occasion LOL.

Since Easter is actually just about here I thought we'd better get going on some special crafts! Out came the construction paper, odds and ends bits of tissue paper, pencils and glue and we got cutting :) This is such an easy craft with such cute end results that you've got to try it if you haven't before!

Cut any color of tissue paper into a whole lot of little 1.5 - 2 inch squares and then cut an egg shape out of construction paper or cardboard for each child plus yourself :) Next take one square of your tissue paper, place the eraser end of your pencil in the center of the square and pull up the sides of the paper and scrunch it all up around the end of your pencil.

Dip the end of your pencil into the glue...

then press your pencil end with the gluey paper down onto your egg cutout and repeat :)

You just keep squishing and sticking your scrunched up tissue paper to your cutout until you've filled the whole thing up and made yourself a fluffy little chicky :) We made ours look like our chicks were popping out of their shells on the bottom but you could even decorate them like easter eggs with different colored polka dots or waves and so on all over them. They make fantastic fronts for Easter cards to. So fun!! I just love the great 3D texture you get from all that tissue paper :)

I had a bit of yellow ribbon in the cupboard so I punched a hole in the top of each of them and threaded the ribbon through to hang them up in our family room window :) It was a good thing I wanted to hang them as it gave me incentive to finally take down the cinnamon stars that were hanging there from Christmas! I know I'm terrible aren't I *grin*.

Have fun making some :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Kimono Sewing and Geta

It was so nice to pull my sewing machine out this week and listen to it hum along. K has been working very hard on his big research project all about Japan and to go along with his big presentation I thought it would be great if he could dress up in some traditional clothing making it more interesting for the other kids.

We had a few crafty books as part of his project that showed how to make zen gardens, theatre masks and among the projects was a very rough idea of how to make your own Kimono.

When I say rough, I mean rough *grin*. Just a few thumbnail sized photos and a couple of suggestions on how to create the basic body shape but the actual cutting, measuring and getting the sleeves to fit in was a bit trickier. It sure makes a guy have a greater appreciation for those little pattern markings that show you exactly how far to sew and where to attach pieces!

While I fiddled around with the finishing touches on the Kimono I rounded up Hubby to do a little woodworking for us and create the wooden bases for a pair of Japanese Geta.

Geta are wooden shoes with a raised platform bottom. They were traditional Chinese footwear that were later adopted by the Japanese and were especially useful in the winter and rainy times to keep their feet high up off the ground so that they stayed dry.

The top of the shoes were a basic cloth sandal style so after Hubby made the base he drilled in some holes so that K could create the straps.

He used jute and some of the scrap fabric from the making of his kimono and he was so pleased with how they turned out :)

Actually he was quite thrilled with the whole outfit *grin*

For a twelve year old boy he still loves to dress up LOL. Albeit it is usually in a pirate costume like Jack Sparrow off of the Pirates of the Caribbean but he was having quite the time getting the hang of walking around in the restrictive kimono and tipsy shoes :)

I think it all turned out rather well :)

I spent $1.50 at the good will for the two sheets and we had the scrap wood on hand already and we created an entire outfit *grin*. What have you been creating this week? I'd love to stop by and see :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Valentine Handprint Cards & One For You

Valentine's day is just around the corner and every year we make something special to give to Omi and Opa. Last year we made valentine paper bag books and this year I thought it would fun to get really messy and make handprint heart cards :)

No kid can resist having their hands completely coated in paint!



The trick is to get them to keep their hands on the paper and not their faces, walls, chairs, oh and hair... hair is a really good one to keep sticky paint covered hands out of *grin*. Why is it that as soon as they know that they aren't supposed to scratch a body part it becomes mysteriously itchy??

With our watercolor paper folded in half and each hand thoroughly covered in red paint we then placed them onto the paper doing our best to keep our thumbs slightly bent and our pointer fingers touching to make a lovely handprint heart :) To be fair we did a couple of practice runs on scrap paper before doing our 'good' cards so that we could perfect our heart making technique :)

One tip before getting your little one to stick their hands to the paper is to make sure that you have your card upside down or the opposite way that you would want it to stand when it is complete. That way your heart will display right side up. We made that mistake the first time and when we stood the card upright to dry we realized that the heart was actually upside down *grin*. Still cute but my little guy was not happy his heart didn't look quite right!

To give each of our cards a little shimmer we sprinkled glitter over the wet paint and then using our alphabet stamps my daughter stamped 'Be Mine' and 'I ♥ U' in the center of the handprint hearts for sweet little Valentine messages :)

I just love how cute they look all lined up on the table drying :)

We got a little carried away with making handprints and ended up with more cards than we actually need so if you or your children would like a little surprise Valentine card sent to you in the mail just let me now in the comments below :)

The first five commenters will have one personally sent to you by my little heart handprint creators *grin*.

All of the Valentine cards have now been spoken for :)

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more crafty ideas or inspiration? Pop over to Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday and see what others are up to :)