Yarn Along ~ Lepidoptera

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

I finally feel like it's that time of year to pick up knitting needles again and found this great lacey sock pattern called Lepidoptera :)

I had bought this soft alpaca yarn earlier this spring thinking it was going to make a great baby sweater for my sister but alas she had a little boy and the pink was definitely not going to do! So into the yarn stash it went until last weekend when I finally found the perfect use for it. A soft pair of socks for my daughter. 

And she is just itching to get her feet into them! We are constantly having little 'try on' sessions and I haven't even got one sock half finished yet LOL. It's a super easy pattern though. Nothing tougher than making a few extra stitches and it has my all time favorite heel to... short rows. Yay!! If I can avoid doing the regular heel flap type sock heel I will and in this pattern she simplifies the short row process even further by taking out all of those yarn overs that you normally find making it faster than ever and there is a video tutorial to go along with it so you can follow along if you happen to get stuck.

For my book I'm reading Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill and it is a must read!!  It's the true story of her life as a tree planter here in BC for 20 years and was absolutely fascinating to read about areas right here in my backyard and get a peak at what their lives are really like as we see them so often around this neck of the woods and I must admit I've always wanted to know more about them. Her writing transports you instantly into the thick of the BC rainforest and leaves you wanting more :)

I'm looking forward to seeing what you all have been knitting and reading this week to!

Happy knitting,

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 :)

Yarn Along ~ Cowl Love

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

I'm a little late getting my yarn along posted this week but I couldn't pass up sharing how the cowl I was working on for my daughter turned out :)

This was seriously the easiest project to complete. It took me two evenings while watching tv to knit it up and I probably could have done it in one but I wanted to stretch it out a wee bit. If you can knit and yarn over then you've got this pattern licked with your eyes closed *grin*.

My daughter just loves it :)

The soft acrylic yarn I chose is perfect for snuggling her nose into without any itchies and it matches her winter coat perfectly. You can find that pattern and all the yarn details on my ravelry page here. I did not block it like the pattern indicates so it kept its wavy appearance and also definitely kept it tighter for fitting her small neck. I think I'm going to have to make one in turquoise for myself!

I forgot to snap a photo of the book we are reading right now so I just have links to share but we have just finished up the Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan for our homeschool book club and we all loved it. There is so much action and if your kids are into Egyptology they will thoroughly enjoy this book. This is the first book in the Kane Chronicles so we are looking forward to getting a copy of the second book from the library to find out what happens next :)

Hope you had fun knitting up a storm this week and I hope to get over to see just what you've got on your needles!

Hugs,
Rosina

Yarn Along ~ Cowl Licious

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

Here we are again for the weekly yarn along and I'm not sure what happened to my week! I know we weren't overly busy unless you count playing in the snow and flying kites as hustle bustle *grin*. Hubby was home for a couple of days though and that is always a joy since he is away for so much of the year working so that must have been it! I was in a cocoon of happiness with us all getting to be together *grin*.

I finished off the last little baby sock that I was knitting and I now have two completed pairs. There is still yarn left so I know I'll go back in a bit and knit up a couple more but I needed a break from those teeny tiny size 0 needles and something that was easy and needed minimal focus LOL.

You would think that with all the things I have faved in my ravelry queue it would be easy to pick something new but it was quite the opposite. I hummed and hawed, checked to see if I had needles that would work, sighed over my meager yarn stash and then fell in love again with this cowl. I had saved it planning to make it for my 8 year old daughter and then promptly forgot all about it *grin*.

It’s a one size fits all pattern but I’m using a larger 5.50mm bamboo circular needle and with the chunkier yarn I’m confident that this will fit her quite well. Plus I don’t plan on blocking it as I love the textured ripple of it as it is and it also helps to keep it on the smaller size :)

The chunky marble yarn by James C. Brett is gorgeous to the touch. It’s soft and squishy, 100% machine washable and I know my daughter is going to enjoy having it around her neck. Not at all itchy!

As for my book this week I actually haven't done a stitch of reading unless you count my lazy perusing of January's edition of the British Country Living magazine reading :) I just LOVE this magazine and all of the beautiful photos and articles.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you all are knitting this week!

Hugs,
Rosina

Guardians of Ga'Hoole ~ Owl Cookies

Yesterday I surprised the kids with a special outing into town to watch the new animated movie The Guardians of Ga'Hoole based on the book series by Kathryn Lasky and to get a chance to see a real live owl!! The MARS (Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society) was at the theater to do a little talk all about owls and what their rescue society does and they brought along 'Shakespeare' a Barred Owl who is their educational ambassador. The kids loved it! Both the owl and the movie :)

As soon as we returned the home the kids began pretending they were owls and so far it hasn't stopped *grin*. So I thought it would be fun to make some owl cookies and owl masks to keep on with the owly fun!

I had ran across a picture of owl cookies on craft gossip but they were made from store bought sugar cookie dough and since we don't have anything like that readily available here I thought that it would be just as easy to whip up a batch of sugar cookie dough :)

So here it is... the make your own dough version of it *grin*.
Trust me if you can make cookie dough and know how to wield a rolling pin then this is going to be easy LOL.

4 eggs
2 cup sugar
2 cup unsalted butter

Cream the butter and sugar together. Add one egg at a time and beat really well until the butter mixture is super light and fluffy.

1 tsp. baking powder
5 cups all purpose flour

Add the flour and baking powder to the butter mixture and mix just until combined. You don't want to over mix or it will start to turn your dough tough. Once you've got it all combined, scoop out roughly 1 third of the dough into a separate bowl. Don't worry about being completely accurate, just eyeball it up. This is going to be the center of you owls eye :)

Now add
1 cup unsweetened cocoa
to the remaining 2/3 of your dough and mix until the cocoa is blended in evenly. This is going to be the outer part of your owls eye.

Now comes the fun part of shaping your plain white dough into a big snake shaped log. On a piece of wax paper, saran wrap or a non stick silicone mat (whichever you have will work) roll and squeeze your dough outwards in a log shape until it is about 18 inches long. By the time I had the length my roll was about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. As soon as you have finished wrap your log in saran wrap or wax paper and place on a flat surface in your refrigerator for about 10-15 minutes to firm up so you can handle it without worrying about dimpling or breaking it.

Next is to take your chocolate colored portion of the dough and shape it into an 18 inch long by 8 inch wide rectangle. Of course the kids couldn't resist squeezing and squishing the dough so this was a perfect job for them *grin*.

We did it on another sheet of wax paper and then I put an additional piece on top and ran the rolling pin over it to take all of the humps and bumps from the hand prints out of it :) Do not refrigerate this portion of your dough. You want it nice and soft for the next step!

Your log of white dough should be firm enough now to take out of the fridge now. Unroll it and place it on top of your chocolate rectangle and you are going to roll the chocolate layer around the white just like you were rolling up cinnamon buns :) Use your wax paper on the bottom of the chocolate layer to keep your hands from getting sticky and to aid in the smooth rolling of it. Don't worry it is definitely not hard to do and once it is all rolled up you can roll the whole log around on the counter in the wax paper a couple of times to make sure the two layers stick together nicely and you get a nice round shape. Place the entire log in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes to firm up again.

Now that you have one multicolored log of sugar cookie dough you're ready to put your owl faces together! Take your knife and slice off rounds of your dough roughly 1/4 - 1/2 inches thick...

and place in pairs on your cookies sheet. Make sure that the two pieces touch each other in the center and you will find that there will be a slightly flat side on each of your rounds caused by the pressure of cutting your log on the counter so place those flatter sides together in the middle :)

For the beaks use unsalted or raw cashews. Press them into the lower part of your center seam leaving the pointier part of the cashew out of the dough so that it looks like a hooked owls beak. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 350 degrees fahrenheit for 10 - 12 minutes or until just starting to brown and firm up around the edges and the centers are slightly puffed up.

As soon as your owl faces are cooled you can use your favorite icing recipe or frosting from a can if you like *grin* and add your eyeballs and lashes. I used reeses pieces because we had them on hand but you could use smarties or m&m's if you like to.

Just in case you want to know what my icing recipe is it's a simple butter frosting of 1/4 cup of butter and 1 1/2 cups icing sugar beat together with 2-3 tablespoons of milk until it comes to a squeezable consistency that you can squeeze through your piping bag. Another super quick way to create your chocolate icing would be to melt chocolate chips or bakers chocolate squares in a heat proof bowl. This works really well in a pinch *grin*. Another tip is if you don't have an actual piping bag you can use a regular ziploc baggy and just cut off one of the bottom corners and voila you have an instant piping bag :)

This recipe made 24 big owl faces and I hate to say it but we've eaten half of them already! LOL.

Sooooo good and super cute :)
Have yourself some owly fun to!

Hugs,
Rosina

Valentine's Garland ~ 'Sew' Easy To Make!

We are totally into Valentine's Day mode around here! I know it's a little bit early but if we don't do it now we may not do it at all *grin*. I love paper garland and thought it would be so much fun to make a Valentine themed one.

I made some quick cardboard templates of X's, O's, hearts & kissy lips. Of course we had to have big kissy lips to go with our X's & O's which if you aren't familiar are for kisses & hugs. Perfect for Valentine's day :) I made the templates out of an empty cereal box and traced them onto construction paper and then my little crafty helper, L, cut them all out for me :) Kids and scissors just seem to go hand in hand so this was one fun project.

Then came the fun part for mom :) I took each piece, repeating them in a pattern and sewed them all together with the sewing machine. So easy!! I mean there is no work involved. The machine stitches through them without any trouble and as I finished each one I gently pulled it and the thread out in equal intervals between each piece.

Done :) We swapped the kitchen curtain and put up a fun red gingham one, hung our newly made valentine garland & added some cute little tin birdies that I attached to the curtain to :)

It is so stinking cute and anyone can make this! Have fun creating one of your own :)

~ Rosina