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 :)

Nibble Nibble Little Mouse....

Who is nibbling at my house?
The kids found the hole in the photo below chewed through part of the wall in our chicken house and it was nearly as big as a tennis ball. Something was trying awful hard to get in to either eat our chickens or steal eggs :( Either way not good but we found it in time to board it back over again to thwart any further attempts to break in. I definitely don't want anything to happen to our girls!

I have to say I have thoroughly been enjoying the egg laying winter lull that the chickens have been in though. In the warmer months when we are getting 12 eggs each and every day it can be tough to be come up with creative new way to use them up! I do sell some to my mom and sister when they need them but quite often we have more than we possibly eat and getting 5 or 6 each day is such a nice treat *grin*.

But even with the drop in egg production I ended up with an extra 3 dozen in the fridge the other day right after we did our big two week grocery shop and space was pretty tight so those eggs had to go. Not to worry though they weren't headed for the trash but a recycling of sorts *grin*.

I put all of them into the largest soup pot I had in the cupboard and hard boiled them. Next I popped them into my food processor, shell and all, by the the half dozen and pulsed them into a lovely egg salad buffet loaded with calcium rich chunks of egg shells that would make a delicious and nutritious treat for the chickens :)

Extra eggs?? No problem! LOL. And I know the shells on their upcoming eggs are going to be tougher and healthier for it :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Fish Hatchery Field Trip

Each year I try to set up or make sure we join in some fun field trips being offered to homeschoolers here on the island and thought it would be fun to organize a trip out to a nearby fish hatchery this year.

There were about 30 of us total and the children got to watch the harvesting of salmon roe (eggs)...

and the milt (sperm) from the male salmon.

Salmon roe are incredibly hardy little rubbery feeling balls and can handle quite a bit of touching so the kids all got to hold some and name them :) The little black spots are their eyes and in the incubation room above were trays and trays of mixed salmon roe and milt waiting to hatch and turn into little Alevin in about 3 months.

When we were finished in the incubation room we had a chance to watch some of the workers taking samples from some of the salmon. They do this randomly and they were taking a piece of the liver from this fish to be sent to Nanaimo for analysis.

Did you know that hatchery fish don't have dorsal fins?

I actually didn't know this but when the young salmon they raise at the hatchery are released into the rivers and streams they have had their dorsal fins removed so that they can easily be identified when they are adults. The above salmon is a wild salmon and you can see that its dorsal fin is still intact :)

As we finished up our tour we all headed down to the river to watch some of the salmon that were spawning right outside the hatchery naturally and came upon a black bear that had come to check out the salmon as well.

He wasn't there purely as a spectator though...

and minutes later he had snatched up one of the salmon and proceeded to take it into the forest for a little afternoon snack *grin*. I guess it was good that we were on the other side of the river when it happened but unfortunately I couldn't get a clear shot of him without all of the fencing in the way. Still very cool for the kids to watch :)

Hope you all had a great week to!

Hugs,
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