Play Kitchen

I recently made a play kitchen for Little J! I made it back in August during the staycation, but I'm sharing it today:

This is what it looked like. I made the table top and recessed sink out of felt and turquoise oil cloth.

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The base is the sand and water table we bought for the summer. We really like this table and have used it inside with water (less than on the left side in the picture) and outside with sand back when we were on our staycation.

The beauty of using our sand and water table for the play kitchen is that I have no more to really store (already had to store the sand and water table) and I could make the sink recessed, which I think adds to the fun.

For stability I "upcycled" a pampers box for the top (the oilcloth is kind of like a pocket for the cardboard). I'm really happy with that decision too because if someone stands on the kitchen (not that kids ever do things like that!) or it gets a lot of wear, I can just put new cardboard inside.

Personally, I actually don't like turquoise, but the sand and water table and the dishes were already pretty bright so I wanted to stay with the color scheme. I was thrilled when I found the turquoise oil cloth. I even stayed with the color scheme for the tea towel. I used leftover ribbon from my elephant, but I could have made the tea towel without ribbon. The tea towel is a piece of white fleece.

The burners flip to turn on and the knobs move a bit with coat buttons. For the burners, I found red and black velcro. The main black stove top (hob) is black felt with some "crunchy velcro" (hook) and the burners have a red side and black side with "soft velcro" (loop). I sandwiches some black ribbon in the burners and sewed that under the stove top so the burners can't get lost.

My D'uh Moment came when I was sewing the burners together and didn't like how the black thread looked on the red side. Then it ocurred to me: who says you have to have the same color in the top and lower bobbin? So, I ripped out my stitches (I had only done one, thank goodness) and sewed on the with red and had black underneath.

Importantly, Little J really likes his play kitchen. He has had a lot of fun with it, mainly just piling "dirty dishes" into the sink...

...but sometimes he also washes them with real water.

If you are interested in making a play kitchen, especially one for a boy, you might like a board I have on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/jessicahk/a-play-kitchen-with-play-food/

Thanksgiving's Coming!

It's time to start saving your toilet paper rolls if you want to make Thanksgiving Crackers!

I don't think we will celebrate Thanksgiving this year--there are a lot of other things going on and Little J is too young to care. Plus, being in the UK he doesn't know he will miss it.

But, if you are thinking about making these crackers and want more details, my original post is here.

Brown Bear Book Recap

 

Here is a recap of all of the pages I recently made for a touchy-feely quiet book based on one of our favorites.

Because felt doesn't fray I placed the different textured fabrics behind the felt and then top stitched around my shapes. That worked much better than dealing with the hems of the other materials. Or so I imagine, I didn't even try it that way.

Here are all the pages I made together:

In order (in the book, I made them from simplest to most complex) the pages are:

The Brown Bear

The Red Bird

The Yellow Duck

The Blue Horse

The Green Frog

The Purple Cat

The White Dog

The Black Sheep

The Gray Elephant

 There is a goldfish page before the elephant, but that's not pictured because a friend made the goldfish for Little J.

Each animal is on the color of the next animal so we can "read" the book. I think if I could do it over again, I would have put them all on white so that I wouldn't have had to change my bobbin between pages and also because I don't like some of the combinations.

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Quiet Book: Elephant

This is the last page in the series about the quiet book version of one of Little J's favorite books.

The real book ends with the teacher seeing the last animal, then children seeing the teacher and finally a 2-page spread with the children recapping all of the animals. I didn't think I could replicate that very well, so I created my own ending:

An elephant! I drew the elephant myself and was SUPER EXCITED when I discovered that a local fabric store has a basket of leather and similar remnants. I found a soft, leathery remnant that was perfect for a gray elephant. The best part is that it doesn't fray so I was able to make an ear that moves.

I also splurged and bought little ribbons in all of the colors of the other animals for the elephant's spray. The tail is an upcycled bookmark tassel.

For the elephant the steps were:
1 cut shape of the main body

2 sew gray material to the underside of the felt

3 sew on tassel tail

4 sew on pink felt mouth and bead tusk

5 sew on ear

6 sew on eye beads (I made the eye purple because I could)

7 sew on ribbon spray

If I could do it over again, I would not have cut the felt off where the trunk goes, and sewn the ribbons to that felt and then covered it with the trunk. Live and learn. Instead, I had to start the ribbons behind where they are and fold them over. I think it looks ok, but I think I would have saved myself some hassle.

Technically, to go full circle, the elephant should have been on brown, because the first animal is the brown bear. But, I couldn't bear [no pun intended] to do that to the pretty elephant. So, the gold fish are on brown (I don't have a post for those because a friend made them, there are 3).

I hope Little J likes the book and I hope you do too. I found this technique (under-laying the touchy-feely fabric so fun to sew, that I'm using it for other projects).

 The End

 P.S., Why aren't hassle and tassel spelled the same way?

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Quiet Book: Bird

We’ve made it! The last animal based on the originals in our animal-themed inspiration book.

My mom had given me a few red faux feathers that were just perfect for this page. Almost everything for this page was something we already had.

In reality, the bird was easier than s/he looked.

The steps were:

1 cut shape of the main body and the middle of the wing out of felt (my main body part was kind of lemon-shaped)

2 sew red fabic to faux fur to make a fabric-fur-fabric “sandwich”

3 sew “sandwich” to the underside of the felt. The head and most of the wings will cover any imperfections

4 sew on brown, pink and red wing felt pieces

5 sew on head and beak felt pieces

6 sew on eye beads

7 sew on feathers

Yeah, number 7, maybe that was a little tricky.

I laid one feather down and carefully sewed the shaft to the page following the curve of the main body where the wing joins up to the body. I made a lot of stitches because I don’t want Little J to rip it off and for something to happen (he never plays with this alone anyway because of the beads). I stopped at about where the body ended and repeated with the other feather. Not as hard as it might seem, but took a few stitches before it felt like it was working.

The bird is on yellow because the next animal in the book is the yellow duck.

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Quiet Book: Bear

You might think the bear, the first page of the book, would be the star of the show, but I don't think he was our most complex animal:

And, I should mention, I'm using the term "complex" loosely. Because I made the animals by sewing the touchy-feely fabric under a felt cut-out, it wasn't nearly as challenging as if I had had to worry about fraying!

The bear is made of a few different scraps: faux fur, anti-slip shelf-liner, microfiber and felt. I had a light brown felt scrap that I also sewed the shelf-liner too. I think that won't be machine washable (what do you guys think?), so this will be a spot-clean-only toy. He's on red because the bird is next.

The microfiber is from some arm-covers for our recliner, so I felt very pinterest-y when I upcycled it :-)

The steps for the bear were:

1 cut shape of the body and legs out of felt
2 cut the faux fur, shelf–liner and microfiber a little bigger than needed (or whichever materials you are using) and sew together

3 sew the brown scraps to the underside of the felt

4 sew on felt pieces to make face

5 sew on nose and jaw pieces

6 make French knot teeth

7 sew on eye beads

We're almost there, only 2 animals left...

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Dilbert Halloween Costume

This Halloween Little J is celebrating that both of his grandfathers are engineers. I made him a:

I searched through Pinterest and Google Images and couldn't find another child's Dilbert costume, so I had to design the tie myself. I started with the tie tutorial on Very Homemade. But I added two hidden compartments to hold red pipe cleaners to get that iconic Dilbert shape.

And, did I mention that I couldn't find red-and-black striped fabric with stripes wide enough, so I had to sew on each stripe?

It's just a coincidence that he was another comic strip character last year.

I hope you also get a kick out of this costume. And, even though it's early, I want to wish you:

 

Quiet Book: Horse

Well, the pages on our animal quiet book are getting more and more complex.

Like the cat, the Horse was made out of a few different fabrics:

The horse is on green because the next animal when the pages are in order is the green frog, but in reality, I did them by complexity, not in order.

The horse is made from a pair of old overalls that had a defective snap -- the metal poked through and was sharp. Not even good enough to donate, but I've enjoyed having denim I don't mind cutting up. I decided to keep the belt loops for added interest. The main and tail are from some light blue faux fur (lucky I had that bizarre item on hand). 

The steps for the horse were:

1 cut shape of the body and legs out of felt
2 cut the denim and faux fur a little bigger than needed and sew those together to make a fur-denim-fur “sandwich”

3 sew the denim and fur to the underside of the felt (again, I top stitched on the felt)

4 sew the felt legs, head and hooves on. I did a straight stitch and they aren’t as poofy as the frog legs.

5 sew on little blue scrap on the face

6 make white French knot teeth
7 sew on eye beads

I really like how the horse face turned out. I wish I felt that confident about all of the animals.

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Quiet Book: Cat

For my animal quiet book, the duck, sheep, dog and frog were pretty straight-foward because their bodies were only made of one material, but, I was trying to copy the animals from one of our favorite books...

So, eventually I came to the animals, like the cat, that had multiple colors and textures in their bodies.

The cat wasn't actually too bad. In fact, I made the cat a bit more complicated than I needed to.

I pretty much only wanted to use scraps for this book and I didn't want to be left with loads of purple fabric. So, to make the cat more interesting I used sheet protectors/document wallet clear vinyl and purple sequins to make the different sections more interesting.

I didn't want to be left with purple thread I might never use again either, so I let myself use white thread. The cat was more complex than he needed to be, but really, not that hard....

The steps for the cat were:
1 cut the main body shape
2 sew a piece of purple fabric (kind of a stripe) to two pieces of vinyl for the thighs/butt.
3 sew a piece of purple fabric to piece of vinyl that will make the torso. So, you should have vinyl-fabric-vinyl-fabric. Lay that under the cat opening and pin more purple fabric under the vinyl (as you pin, put your sequins in if you are using any)
4 sew around the opening
5 sew on the felt legs and head
6 sew on mussel, nose and tongue felt
7 draw embroidery floss through for the whiskers
8 sew on eye beads

The cat is on white because the next animal is the white dog.

If I had to do it all over again, I think I would skip the sequins <gasp!>. I really want them to work, but they hardly ever slide, even with the vinyl and smooth fabric.

Also: I would have put the cat slightly off-center. I love when things are centered (who doesn't?) but centered means that the completed book folds about 1/8 - 1/8 past the cat shoulder onto the vinyl. I really wish it folded on the fabric.

Oh well, Little J hasn't complained ;-)

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Quiet Book: Dog

One of the next pages in the animal-texture quiet book was the white dog:

Again, this was one of the easier ones to make because most of the dog is one texture. The dog's body is a stretched out wash cloth. Like I said before, I was using this project to practice sewing curves and create a texture toy for Little J while using up scraps. Gotta love upcycling, right?

The dog was pretty straight-forward:
1 cut the main body shape out of the black felt. I didn't cut out 2 legs because in the book these are copied from those legs were in shadow and kind of grey.
2a sew white material to felt from the back, top stitching on the felt.
2b slide in red ribbon with bell or other item when you get to the neck. I went back-and-forth a few times on the ribbon to make it secure, but I wish I had used a wider ribbon so I would have had more stitches.
3 sew on legs, eye-spot, tongue, nose and ear felt
4 make teeth with white embroidery floss French knots.

A really nice thing about this project, that I haven't mentioned before, is that by putting the different textured materials behind or under the felt opening, you don't need to worry about fraying. The felt won't fray and you never see the edges of the texture material anyway.

The white dog wasn't on black to make him show up better, but really because the next page was the black sheep so we could "read" ahead what the white dog was seeing.

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Quiet Book: Sheep

In my animal-texture quiet book based on one of our favorite children's books, the sheep is another favorite page:

I find the more I tilt my screen, the better I can see the individual loops.

The black sheep was one of the easiest pages, but very tedious. Again, I used scraps for this page - yay: isn't it great using things up??

The steps for the sheep were:

1 cut the body shape from the felt. Again, like the other pages I basically traced the animal from the book to get the initial shape.

2 sew black material to the back of the felt

3 -- this is the tedious one, great for doing while watching tv -- I took black yarn, knotted it, went through the black material from the back, then back into the material, leaving it a little loose to form a loop. Then, I knotted the yarn in case Little J got rough with it and wanted to pull on each loop. Then, I repeated that step and made a ridiculous amount of loops. It feels really neat though, and looks pretty close to the original book.

4 sew on felt legs, ears and face

5 sew on felt hooves and inside ear pieces

6 embroider (and I use that term loosely!) the face

7 sew on eye beads.

The sheep was on orange because the next page is the goldfish, but a friend made that page so I don't have a picture.

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Quiet Book: Frog

As I mentioned previously, I recently made an animal quiet book for Little J to practice sewing curves, use up scraps and give him another toy with texture.

The Frog is another one of my favorite pages in the book:

The frog is on purple because the next page is the purple cat.

The frog is made from an old green, cashmere glove that I mended so many times I finally replaced it. It's very soft.

The steps for the frog were:
1 cut shape of the body and legs out of felt
2 sew green material to the underside of the felt (again, I top stitched on the felt)
3 sew on bead dots (I picked 5 beads that each had a different number of sides to keep things interesting)
4 sew on felt feet. Here I made the stitches where I wanted them for the webbing and then cut out the middle bits. I'm not happy with the color green I picked for the feet, but they do match the beads for the toes
5 sew on toe beads
6 sew on eye beads
7 sew on leg felt and mouth felt, which can also cover any sewing mishaps.

The frog is one of Little J's favorite pages!

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Quiet Book

Little J has a book he's quiet fond of and recently I decided to copy it to make it a texture quiet book. He really likes textures, so I thought it would be fun for him and a great way for me to practice sewing curves (I just got my first sewing machine for Christmas).

With a few exceptions I only used materials I already had. Good use of scraps! Yay!

The first page I replicated was the yellow duck:

The yellow duck was really easy compared to the other pages because there was only 1 material for the body. For each animal I nearly traced the animal from the book, then cut a hole in my felt. (I bought my felt from Purple Room Crafts and have been really happy with the quality and the very, very little shrinking.)

The steps for the duck were:
1 Cut felt shape for body,
2 Sew yellow material to underside of the felt (I top stitched on the felt, around the opening), learning a lot about curves (let's not talk about the weird point at the tail)
3 Sew felt feet and beak onto the felt background
4 Sew bead eye on. I actually have a little scrap of white felt under the bead eye. (I also bought my beads from Purple Room Crafts.)

The yellow body is just a scrap of cotton. Not as interesting as the other pages, but I really like how the duck turned out. The duck is on blue because the blue horse was the next animal -- so we could pretend to read the book.

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.

Thanksgiving Crackers

 

 I love corn-on-the-cob, and since moving to the UK the idea of Christmas Crackers, has really grown on me. So, I was intrigded when I stumbled on this:

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in the days before Pinterest (remember back when you had to actually use Google to get craft ideas?).

Basically, the idea of a Christmas cracker is that it's a tube wrapped kind of like a giant piece of candy. It has a "snap" that goes off when pulled. Everyone at the table gets one and holds his own with his right hand and his neighbor's with his left (arms crossed). Then, at the same time everyone pulls. Traditionally, like a wishbone, you get the prize(s) if you get the bigger end, but nowadays most people each get their own no matter what.

Usually crackers contain a paper crown, a really bad joke and a small prize, like a keychain or some other instant clutter fun item.

We decided to celebrate Thanksgiving the year the I was pregnant (very early pregnant, we didn't even know!). We hadn't celebrated in years since moving to the UK. We invited some expat friends over (all adults and teens).

Like the original link recommended, I acquired a few empty toilet paper rolls, yellow crepe paper, green tissue paper and goodies to put inside. I didn't have green ribbon, so I used embroidery floss.

I'll confess, I first used green crepe paper for the outside too, but Ryan and I couldn't even tear the thing open: definitely use tissue paper!

I wrapped the crepe paper around each toilet paper tube. How green is this?! I did find I had to tape the paper at the beginning to get it to stay.

Then, inside each one I put a few Werther's Originals (mainly because we like them and they are kind of a thanksgiving color), a thanksgiving joke I found and a wind-up dinosaur. I searched online for wind-up pilgrims, but didn't find any. If you know of anywhere where I can find some, PLEASE let me know! One year we celebrated Christmas with friends and had a race with wind-up santas from our store-bought crackers, which is where I got this idea. I don't know what dinosaurs had to do with thanksgiving, but I thought they were cute.

This is what they looked like when I was finished. A nice, fun, quiet activity to do while watching tv, or eventually with Little J when he is older -- hopefully by then I can find some wind-up pilgrams!

I really enjoyed this easy Thanksgiving craft. So much so that I bought fill-your-own Christmas crackers for this past Christmas and found special gifts I picked out just for each person. (I kept a folded toilet paper roll in my purse to check the size of items as I shopped, the store-bought crackers were a little bigger but it gave me a great guideline).

Someday, I may to try to make these

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beautiful Christmas crackers I saw (via Pinterest) on MiniEco.

First Halloween Costume

This is what we did for our son's first Halloween:

Charlie Brown! This was a fun costume to "make" because I didn't need very many materials:

1 yellow shirt (if I had put more effort into it I would have used a polo shirt)
1 pair of dark shorts (I used navy, but could have used black)
black fabric scraps to make zig zag, which I attached with sewing tape because I didn't have a sewing machine back then.

This was a really nice affordable costume because I was also able to get the shirt and shorts on eBay. He wore the shorts the next summer, but not the shirt. I purposefully bought a size bigger than I thought he'd wear just to be safe.

I picked Charlie Brown for a baby Halloween Costume because my son had very, very fine blonde hair and a kind-of bald look. That worked really well for this costume. I guess, I tried to play to his strengths :)

A couple of years ago we bought this wreath (bottom picture) at Waitrose during an after Halloween sale. I really like how it has Trick or Treat backwards. I didn't realize that until we got it home. Leave it to the English to do things backwards. I think it will be a family tradition to always take a picture of our son in costume with that wreath.

I-Spy Bottle

Do you remember when you discovered the black hole of time joy that is Pinterest? I do. I was on maternity leave, rocking a baby who would only nap if I held him for HOURS, surfing net for examples of quiet books.

Sometimes, I see things on Pinterest and it's a blow to my self-esteem: I'll never be able to afford a house like that. I can't do that DIY project that because I can't buy [insert something-cheap-from-Walmart here] in England. There is no way I can make that craft, I'll never be that good.

But, sometimes -- probably most of the time -- I see something and my heart leaps for joy! Finger puppet bunnies made of felt? I can do that. Using binder clip (aka Bulldog clip) to keep my iPad wire from falling off the table? I can do that. A homemade toy for my son that only requires pouring things into an empty bottle and sealing it off? I. Can. So. Do. That!

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That is the toy I'm talking about. A homemade I-spy bottle. Pretty huh? I highly recommend reading about how Jill made hers on her blog here. Her directions were easy to follow, but I made mine a little differently -- that's why mine isn't as pretty....

First, I found an empty bottle (mine was from juice, but that was fine because my son's favorite color is orange). Then, I found random little stuff: mainly novelty buttons from my mother-in-law. I also used:

a spare non-TSA approved luggage lock
a grey pom-pom
a broken Christmas ornament (blue angel in the bottom right)
a foam hand and foot
bead-letters I sewed together to spell GREAT
a little Scotland flag charm from a key chain my mom de-cluttered
a little saw brad for scrap booking/card making

Talk about random! I did try to balance the colors though. For example, I had a yellow mitten button and a yellow trick-or-treat bag button, so I used an orange trick-or-treat bag button instead so there would be more variety.

I also used couscous as my filler. It's what we had. It works fine, actually it makes a nice sound!

And I didn't take a picture of the contents for Little J. After all, he was only about 6 months old when I made this. Far too young to actually hunt for objects.

I did follow Jill's advice about filling the bottle a little, dropping in a few pieces and filling some more. That really did seem to work well. I also only filled it about 80% full. If it is all the way full there is no room for the couscous to go and it doesn't make the cool shaker sound.

This is my finished bottle. I also sealed it so it won't open on my son. But, as I mentioned, it isn't quite as beautiful as Jill's. I don't think it's a pinstrosity, though. I think the differences are that rice is prettier than couscous, this bottle has ridges so it isn't as smooth and sleek and the cap isn't as nice. But, you know what? It's a lot better than the non-existent I-spy bottle my son had before! ;)

After I made this bottle for next to nothing, my mother-in-law has told me that they sell these in stores for something like $30. Seriously? Also, my father-in-law received one as a gift one year but a visiting child opened it, somehow and there was birdseed everywhere. So, thus far Little J has only played with his when we are there too.

Some Things I Learned:

1. The key, the saw, the little metal flower button and the flag were bad choices. There seems to be something about the density of the objects that makes those light and thin items hardly ever, ever appear. The light-weight bigger items, like the pom-pom, appear fairly easily.
2. This did entertain a 6-month-old as something that rolls, makes noise, and is interesting to look at.
3. There is a special way to shake it to make the items faster to find. You sort of shake it gently like your panning for gold.

In the future, I think it would be fun to make a themed one, maybe for a holiday or road trip.

Or maybe it would be fun to dye rice and make a camouflage one. Maybe... if only there were enough hours in the day!