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

Happy Easter

Wow, it has been one crazy weekend and then some! Today is the first day since last Wednesday that I have been home all day and haven't had to travel into the city and it feels SO GOOD. Between swimming lessons, science group, picking up chicks, easter celebrations and an impromptu trip to Costco it's been go go go here :)

We had a lovely Easter though. On Saturday we had dinner with my sister and her husband and then my mom and I had a sleep over at their house so that we could go to the movies and catch a little retail therapy *grin* and today the kids and I went to my parent's house for an Easter lunch.

After the great success I had making ice cream cone cake pops last summer I thought I'd try making some Easter themed ones so last night I whipped up a cake for making the balls. Hubby thought I was nuts *grin*. Out came the fresh cake from the oven and I proceeded to smash it up making a gooey mess with icing LOL.

I love playing with these although rolling the balls in the chocolate was a little trickier as they had a habit of spinning on the sticks. Nothing a little stint in the freezer couldn't cure though and they were good to go *grin*.

We had all sorts of yummy finger sandwiches, vegetables and desserts...

my mom had plenty of treats for the kids...

and I think they ate enough cake pops and pez to induce a sugar overdose LOL. Thank goodness it's all over and tomorrow it's back to normal we go :)

Hope you all had a wonderful Easter to!

Hugs,
Rosina

Happy Easter

Happy Easter :)
Today we had our special Easter tea party with our favorite chicky plates *grin*.

I know I had said that I wasn't getting the kids any candy but I couldn't resist these Easter themed candy apples! Aren't they the cutest things you've ever seen?!

Hey, it's not all sugar... there is an apple inside of them. They're partly nutritious! LOL

We had my dad hide the Easter baskets for all of the kids outside around the house, up the mountain trail and in the greenhouse. They had little notes written like riddles to give them hints as to where to locate their baskets to help them out since there's 40 acres to roam :)

My oldest son was the last to find his. It had cleverly been hidden up in the rafters of the greenhouse. He had figured out the riddle but when he searched amongst the raised beds and garden pots he neglected to actually look up! It was probably a good 10 minutes before he spotted it. Fooled him we did! *grin*.

Here's my finished set of bowling pin bunnies!! LOVE them :) I think I'm going to have to make more of these and give them as gifts since they turned out so stinking cute!

They're an absolute hoot to play with to. They stand up perfectly and we used a tennis ball to whack them with *grin*. I just had to snap a picture of them as they started to flop around with their ears flying in the wind after the tennis ball bopped a few of them :)

Hope you all had a wonderful day!

~ Rosina

Bunny Fun

It's Easter weekend!!
I like to keep the candy consumption on holidays to a minimum and it's especially hard when everyone wants to give baskets full of those tasty chocolate bunnies at Easter. So to combat the sugar overload that I know is inevitable I've been lovingly creating handmade gifts for the children to replace the candy from mama :)

Oh my goodness, there is no shortage of craft tutorials on the web and you could seriously craft something new everyday till you die! LOL. Needless to say it was pretty easy to find some super cute bunny themed gifts to make :)

I bookmarked these adorable bunny bowling pins last year when thelongthread shared about them on the Storque knowing that I was going to have to try making them! I've been collecting brightly colored fabrics for them and last night in the wee hours of the morning I started cutting, dug out my button stash to sew on their eyes and embroidered their whiskers :)

They're turning out fabulously! I have this wacky sort of quirk about hoarding fabric scraps *grin*. I very rarely throw them away. Larger scraps are kept for quilting and other smaller sewing projects and the selvage and other tiny trimmings that I slice off of my cloth bags that I make I have in bag in the craft closet waiting to be recycled so that I can keep them out of the garbage can. Well this was a perfect project for re-using them!

I stuffed all of the bunny bowling pins with them :) They created super dense and heavy bunnies and the strips compacted nice and tight inside the bunnies just like they had been stuffed with batting. I just finished sewing up their bottoms and can't wait to give them tomorrow as surprise presents :)

My little bunny finger puppets that I had mentioned making a couple of days ago have turned out perfectly to. I just LOVE their little pom pom tails and they were so quick and easy to make. My little 4 year old is going to have so much fun playing with them :) Well I better get back to sewing if I'm going to finish off the last minute touches the my goodies.

Happy Easter everyone :)

~ Rosina

Flickr Favorites ~ Easter Crafts

1. home made fluffy easter chicks, 2. Egg-cellent Easter Grass, 3. easter eggs, 4. Chicks sandwich

I thought that with this coming weekend being Easter and all that I would share some really great Easter crafts that you can do for yourself or with your kiddies :)

All of the above photos in the mosaic have links to their tutorial pages and below are some more of my favorites that I've ran across so far this year. Have fun crafting!



Super cute Easter Chick bag made with placemats!

Turn an empty oatmeal can or tin into a creative Easter basket :)

Love these fuzzy chenille carrots!



Easter bunny treat bags or party favors made with envelopes

And I've got to make some of these adorable Ballet Bunnies!! So cute :)

Want to join in the fun and share your flickr favorites? Hop on over Easter bunny style to Misty's blog and join in!

~ Rosina

Feltastic Bunny Finger Puppets

You can never have to much felt, that's my motto!

A brand new dollar store just opened up nearby which meant that there was going to be an isle overflowing with crafty goodness and I was right :) There were stacks upon stacks of soft & fuzzy felt and at only a quarter a piece which is cheaper than I can usually find it at I loaded up *grin*.

I'm really not a felt hoarder.... honestly I swear I'm not! LOL. No I definitely had a legitimate reason. I'm making these super cute bunny finger puppets as Easter gifts for the kids :) I just finished cutting out all of the rabbits out of the felt and have one half sewn so far but when they're finished they'll all have little pom pom tails and embroidered faces. I haven't decided who's getting them yet or if maybe I'll just hide them among the flowers for our Easter hunt. Either way they're going to be cute :)

Are you making any special gifts for Easter this year? I'd love to see what you're up to :)

~ Rosina