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/

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.

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:

 

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.

Having Fun with Suds!

It can be challenging to keep coming up with new ideas to keep your toddler entertained and engaged. After all, as we all know, toddlers have very short attention spans. Recently, when my son was 10 months old, we were:

This activity was especially nice because it was cheap AND easy to clean up! Isn't it nice when things work out like that? It was cheap because we had everything had: a plastic shoebox-sized bin, dish soap (AKA washing up liquid), water and toys that float.

Right before we started Little J on solids, my mom recommended getting an oil cloth to keep under his high chair (I always want to call it a "height-chair"). Well, we don't really use the oil cloth in the kitchen very much. Somehow it's just as tedious to clean. But it's perfect for activities like this. I set our polka-dot oil cloth on the floor of Little J's room. Then, I filled my plastic shoebox with soapy water, put in a few floaty bath toys and set it down for him to explore.

One thing I really like about this activity is that it counts as "sensory play." I keep seeing those buzz words, which I think it kind of funny because isn't everything experienced through the senses?

In this case, it was also a nice way to use some of his chunky and load bath toys that he doesn't play with much. We actually keep them in the kitchen as kitchen toys. And, did I mention that it was easy to clean up? (Much easier to clean up than Dad's idea to play with shaving cream, but that's another story!)

Even though Little J had played with these toys and suds--and even had had bubble baths--this activity still kept him occupied for quite a while. We did this in late May when the weather was starting to get warmer.

If he had been older, I think we could have made it even more exciting by playing peek-a-boo with this bath toys (hiding them under the suds).

I think the whole family enjoyed this "good, clean fun!" ;-)