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

Wet Felted Easter Eggs ~ Tutorial

Easter is just a hop, skip and a jump around the corner so today we got down to some serious crafty business and made some felted Easter eggs. I know that many of you probably know how to wet felt already but just in case you don't I thought that I would share how we did it :)

I love wet felting with the kids. It's such an easy activity and what kid doesn't totally love playing in the sudsy soap and water! So out came my stash of wool rovings and a couple of plastic easter eggs that I've been hanging onto for these kinds of projects and a couple of hand towels to soak up any puddles of water that might appear *grin*.

We started by stretching out some plain, undyed wool batting that would become the inner layer of our eggs. I really like to use the plain wool batting as filler for my felting projects because it is SO much cheaper to purchase than the smaller dyed rovings and you can use a lot of it without worrying about using up your stash of the good stuff.

Winding the wool batting around our plastic egg as tightly as we could we continued to add layer after layer, alternating the directions of the pieces with each new one added until it was about three times larger than it's original size and then we added a final layer over the white using some pretty pinks and blues to give our egg color. Make sure you create a good sized ball of wool because it is amazing how much it shrinks during felting :)

Next it was time to get down to the business of felting all that wool together. With the cold water running we dribbled a little of the water at a time over our ball of wool until it was nice and wet. It's important to treat your wool very gently at this point because the wool shifts really easily. So with a generous amount of dish soap on our hands we gently started to pat and rub our egg.

Working our hands around in circles all over the egg we gently agitated the wool until we could feel it starting to become a little more firmer beneath our fingers and then we started to alternate with cold and hot water to shock the wool fibers even more to help them knit together nicely. If you haven't tried this before you will definitely start to feel a difference. The fibers on the surface won't slip around as much, it will start to shrink up smaller and you will be able to rub at it with more pressure the firmer it becomes.

Do not worry if it seems like your wool looks really giant and sloppy over the plastic egg inside! My kids rolled their own eggs this time and I thought they would never shrink down but if you look at the above photos you will see how giant my daughter's egg was when she started and how small it was in the last photos. I did help her out at the end to really rub and squeeze at it firmly and I can't say enough about shocking it with some really hot water and then plunging it back into really cold water again all while rubbing it firmly. It really does help it to tighten up more quickly :)

When we were finished felting our eggs we wet felted a couple of little yellow chicks using the same method as above minus the plastic egg inside and then I tossed both the eggs and chicks into the dryer to shrink them up one last little bit and dry them.

The kids could hardly wait to pull them out of the dryer to see just how I was going to get the plastic eggs out from inside of them *grin*. With a sharp pair of sewing scissors I cut a jagged opening across half of the wool eggs so that they looked like they were hatching open and popped out the plastic eggs from inside of them leaving a perfect hollow center where we could now tuck our little chickies inside...

but not before we needle felted on their eyes and beaks :)

All finished and ready for playing with!

There was peeping and cheeping and chickies popping out all over the house all afternoon *grin*.

I hope you have fun making some of your own Easter eggs and chickies :)

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 :)

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

Easter Babies

Our little chicky babies arrived today and just in time for Easter :) It couldn't have been better timing!

Everyone was so excited to peek into the box we brought them home in and help move them under the heat lamp :) Of course we had to have the 'you have to be really gentle' talk with the little man but he truly wanted to be as careful as possible with them and he is going to love them so much *grin*.

They are so stinkin' cute!!! I'm going to apologize now because I think there might be quite a few baby chick pictures in the coming days LOL.

Hugs,
Rosina

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

Spring Chicks

I am moving full steam ahead into spring and surrounding myself with cheery colors and springy items like these little chicks I've been making *grin*.

I had some old sheep's fleece in my craft cupboard that hadn't been carded so I lugged out my big drum carder and cleaned it up nicely to use as the centers of my chicks. I just couldn't bear to use all of my new pretty yellow wool rovings to make them so I wound a tight ball using the natural cream fleece (sorry I can't remember what kind it is) and then just wrapped enough of my yellow corriedale roving around to cover the white and then wet felted them.

I'm really pleased with how the yellow balls turned out :) I was afraid that the yellow would slip on the white as I started to lather and rub it around creating bald spots showing through but I made sure I was extra gentle and it blended together beautifully. For the bottom of the egg shell I used an old plastic easter egg as my form and worked the wool over top of it so that it formed a nice concave shape for the chick bodies to sit in and I trimmed up the edges once they were dry so that they looked like that had been cracked open *grin*.

I was at a bit of a loss though when it came to how to felt a sheet of wool that I could cut out shapes from for the tops of the chick's heads as I've never tried doing it before. All I could think of was that I've seen others do it using bubble wrap or window screen and other similar things to keep the wool together while they agitated it but I didn't have any of that on hand. That was until I spied one of my reusable mesh produce bags! I loaded it up with enough wool roving to make a small 6 inch square, put it in the bottom of my sink on a cutting board and lathered it up and it worked! I think next time I'll work it a little bit longer to make sure it is a little more compact but it felted together enough to cut out little pieces to put on top of the chick's heads to look like bits of broken shell :)

What do you think? Do they look like they're popping out of their shells *grin*. My oldest was giving me a bit of a hard time before I put their eyes and beaks on because he said they looked like tennis balls with stars on their heads LOL.

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 :)

Yarn Along

A post of my current read and what is cast on my needles ~ Inspired by Ginny over at {Small Things}

Well I still haven't decided on what big project I want to do next so in the meantime I'm having fun playing around and making spring chicks *grin*.

I found the pattern on ravelry (linked above) and used a double strand of wonderfully fuzzy Mohair by Marks & Kattens which is very forgiving if you make any booboos as the fuzz really hides all *grin*. I love how it turned out and my youngest two couldn't stop petting it! They are convinced that I need to make many more of them so that I can tuck them into their Easter baskets :)

Looking forward to seeing what you have been knitting this week!

Oh, I nearly forgot to share what I am reading right now! I just picked up a copy of The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I'm barely into the first chapter but I'm really looking forward to reading about how she made her happy life even happier. Right now she's talking about getting more sleep so that she can have more energy to take on her project and that is definitely something I could use. I know I don't get near enough rest and if I take anything from her book it may be to just get to bed a couple of hours earlier each night so that I can wake up and really feel like I'm ready to tackle my day with a happy heart :)

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