Spring Flowers Arrangement

Spring flowers are blooming in our courtyard and garden. This morning, Eiya picked some blossoms and brought them in for arrangement to welcome her grandma who is visiting this weekend. In the past, I usually cut the stems and let her put them in the vase. Lately, she has been cutting with scissor, so I decided to let her cut them. I set out the picked flowers on a plate, place her scissor there and set up the vases with water for her to do the arrangement. 

We also talked about the flowers she picked and their names in English and Mandarin.

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Christmas Stockings with Wool Felt Appliqué

Made some plain brown and white trim wool stockings a few years back. After Christmas last year, I added some wool felt appliqué to them. The red leaves one is Ethan and the blue tree one is mine. It was a fun quick project. In preparation for next Christmas, I also made a Christmas stocking for our new baby boy, who will arrive in about 5 weeks from now. I have a wool knitted hat that I loved, but never really got around to wear it. Seems like a good fit for a stocking. Phew, stockings are done for Christmas 2012. 

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Some fun projects I like to try.

Embroidery On Recycled Styrofoam Trays
Spring Gift Baskets From Embroidered Styrofoam Bowls

 

 

 

 

 

Last Minute Stocking Stuffer

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Happy Winter Solstice!

A couple of quick and easy felt hair clips/pins for stocking stuffer. They are relatively simple to make. For the sunflower, we used cut felt circle instead of needle felting the brown center. For sock monkey, we drew out the shapes and stitched them together and then embroidery the eyes and mouth.

Tutorials:
Felt Sunflower Tutorial at Living Crafts
Felt Round Flower Tutorial at Ordinary Mommy Design

A Roll and A Cake

Finishing up with Christmas gift making. Have been wanting to make a crayon/color pencil roll for a while. Next time I will use thinner felt for better rolling. This one is more a fold than and roll. I used elastic band covered in cotton fabric for closure. Hopefully, it will be easy for Eiya to put on and take off. Happy with the front design. I wonder if it will remind Eiya of Peep. Useful tutorial if you want to make one.

The felt cake is a mini cake. I was going to make her a cupcake, but could not find a good template or tutorial. I just traced two circles from a jar we have and used a yarn to measure out the side. For the icing on top, I cut out several circles and stitched on top of each other then glued the final brown circle on top. For the icing on the side, I glued on after I finished the stitching and stuffing. The holes were made with hold punch.

Also made a lollipop with the same technique as the tomatoes from her sandwich set.

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Have a Sandwich

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It is Santa workshop time. 

Have been working on some felt play food for Christmas. Myrtle & Eunice has a great tutorial for sandwich. It is all done with hand sewing and a good one to practice blanket stitch. For the tomatoes, I used this tutorial from Helping Little Hands, but instead of machine stitch I blanket stitch the edges and used a little bit of felt glue to connect the three pieces together. 

Hand sewing is a slower process. I find it relaxing though. It took about five evenings from start to finish, with help from a kind little elf who did some of the cutting and drawing of the pieces. 

Next will attempt to make some orange slices and strawberries to add to the sandwich set.

 

Advent Calendar

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We made an advent calendar this year for Eiya. We used handmade papers that were made about 7 years ago. The landscape is inspired by Eiya's dream of an elephant who came to the house to play with her and carried a lantern. The white shapes are sky lanterns that Eiya really loves. We did that in Malaysia and made some with friends recently. The flap format is inspired by children books she enjoys. She loves flipping those flaps. 

We did some research about Advent activities and found some fun ones. Today we decorated our Christmas tree as the kick off for the first day.

Below are some activities we will do with Eiya. Do you have an Advent calendar? Even if you don't, what kind of activities you plan to do? Please share.

Art & Crafts:

Local Christmas Displays:

Local Treats:

Kitchen Fun:

Felty Christmas

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For Christmas, we made some felt brooches and a Winnie the Pooh toy for Eiya. We redrawn the templates by hand (thanks to Ethan). The apple pin is modified from a coaster template. We used 100% wool felt. You can get them from Michael's. They come in beautiful colors and are much thicker than regular felt. 

The Winnie the Pooh turned out to have a funny expression. Seem a bit worried, isn't it?

Here are the tutorials:
Butterfly
Gromit

For the wings, it is a belated Halloween costume. The tutorial is here. It is made with regular felt.

 

A little bit of Fall

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We have been trying out some afternoon art activities with Eiya lately. We cut out leaf shapes with handmade paper we got from thrift store. You can also get pre-cut ones from Discount School Supplies (see photo, bottom row leaves in the picture are pre-cut, and the rest we drew and cut ourselves). Then set out some bingo bottles and spray bottles with liquid water colors. Eiya enjoys the spraying the most. She is not too into the bingo bottles after she tried the spray bottles. 

At first, I thought it would be a good activity for her to do it alone, but she was going through the leaves very fast and we became her studio assistance to remove and put new leaves for her. After the leaves dried, we put tape on the back of the leaves and decorated our dining room windows with the leaves (inspired by The Artful Parent). Eiya has been collecting fallen leaves on our walks, so our home is filled with art leaves and real Autumn leaves! 

There are some great art activities on Sew Liberated, if you are hungry for some art to do with your little ones.

Feet Painting

Our friend gave us some Crayola fingerpaint a while back and we haven't been using them as much. Yesterday, we tried feet painting with Eiya. We put some brown paper that came with a shipment on our lawn, set up three plates of Crayola fingerpaint (purple, green and orange) and let Eiya explored painting with her feet. At first, she was hanging on to us for balance when she stood on the plates, after a while, she squeezed the paint out on the paper and stepped around on the paper. Then, she squeezed some more out onto the plate and stood on it herself, twisting left and right. She fell a few times, but stood up right away and did more twisting around. We painted a smooth layer of paint onto the back of the plate and let her draw on it with her finger. Toward the end, she painted her arms with paint and made some palm prints on the paper as well. It was a lot of messy art fun. 


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