Valentines Day 2011

Yes, Yes, I am still here.  I have just been busy sewing panel Kozys in whatever spare time I have (where I have energy to do anything ;0)  SO much I want to blog about and like NO extra time!  There are a million things I want to do and I am almost 38 wks YIKES!!

Anyway, I made a bunch of stuff for Christmas (necklaces for the neices, and silk/velvet purses) but I forgot to get pictures.  I did get pictures of the soap we made, I'll post those soon.  

I did manage to take some pictures of some of our Valentines creations (and we made Valentine lighted Jars, but no pictures).

I was hoping to post these before V-day but, well a week late will have to do.  We had a Valentines gathering with our local families for natural living group so we made cards and treats to share.

First my favorite of all . . . . . dipped pretzels

I thank my friend Barbara for these.  She gave us some for Christmas.  I was like eeeh, pretzels are not my favorite . . . that is until I took a bite!!  They have a layer of CARAMEL and then chocolate!  They are like a candy bar . . . SOOOOO good!!  So of course I had to make some.   Yes, I used icky food coloring to make them more festive.  I'll do another post about how to make them (super easy).

Then the kids got to making Valentines for their friends and Piper and Ever wanted to make bags to hold their Valentines.

Piper and Ever love doing crafts the most

We made butterfly valentines, another idea I got from Family Fun.  We made them differently though.  I cut out butterfly shapes from construction paper and the kids decorated them with markers, glitter, stickers, etc.  Then I taped a roll of smarties in the middle.  Fairly easy and quick and they really enjoyed it.

Here are some Valentines with the bags that Piper and Ever made (just took gift bags, covered with construction paper and made faces etc.).  Pipers is of course Pikachu (pokemon for those of you who don't know, but I am sure most of you do ;0)  She did the whole thing herself, and she helped Ever with his heart man.

Hope all of y'all had a wonderful Love Day!!

We have gone jar crazy! Check out our Autumn jars!

I love, love, love these lighted jars.  I love the ambiance they give the room and the house.  They are a perfect accent!  So when I took down our Halloween Jars everything looked blah, and I didn't want to wait till after Thanksgiving to pull out the Christmas Jars (and we need to make more anyway because we gave some as gifts).  So I said . . . hey, lets do autumn jars!! 

I figured we could just do autumn colors and to make things simple, we would just collect leaves from the yard and decoupage them on.  Much easier for me because the kids weren't cutting, making a mess with paper etc. 

I am not going to get into the process again, but if you want to know how to make them check out my 2 previous blog posts HERE and HERE.

Finally I got a picture of all 5of them gluing their leaves on (well Thrace is just watching)

 I had them choose which color or colors they wanted for their jar out of what I had.  I only had orange and rad tissue paper so I improvised and used napkins to get yellow.  I wish I had some brown because I was curious how it would turn out, but alas, none to be found (and I was not going to the store).  They really did most of the work again, with me helping mostly the little ones.  The napkins were a bit tricky so I did do most of the mod podge on those.

Then we went out and each kid collected their own leaves! We live on a mountain in the woods so we have plenty of trees and leaves.  The leaves on the ground were too hard so we picked smaller leaves that were left on trees.  The cool thing is that they could learn about the types of leaves and trees while we were at it (Charlie knows all that stuff, I am clueless.)

 I had them just glue the leaves on with glue (some were tricky and I had to work with them to get them to curve around the jars and stick) and then we did the mod podge once they were stuck well.  I know they will turn brown (though some were brown already) but it doesn't matter, they are for the silhouette against the colored tissue paper when the jar is lit.

 I used the multicolored lights again because I couldn't get to the white lights, but I think ideally white lights would provide the best light . . . though the colored lights are softer.

You could really do anything you want that is autumn theamed, but these were easy for us!  We actually did these start to finish in 1 day (had them lit by evening) which is a record for us (usually I have a table full of scrap paper and partially decorated jars for days before we are finished).

I love these jars so much that I am thinking of how I can have them year round . . . Valentine jars, Easter jars, July 4th or summer themed . . . so many possibilities!!

Now, for an added photo . . . because hey, pumpkins are autumn themed and I didn't want to do a separate blog post with just a picture of me . . . but I did want to show y'all how I dressed up for Halloween . . . . 

21 wks

I did the same thing the only other time I had a belly on Halloween, when I was 29 wks pg with Ever . . . LOTS of fun (and lots of comments from people).

Lighted Halloween Jars . . . and other spooky stuf!!

We made these a few wks ago and I have been trying to get them up here to show y'all but I am still having a hard time finding time to blog.

I got this idea last year when I saw the lighted jars at the Not So Idle Hands blog HERE  SO CUTE!!  But alas, I was too late for Halloween, so instead I made Christmas Jars.  Some of you may remember them, I blogged about them HERE.  They turned out great and the kids had a ball making them.  In fact we are going to have to make more this year because we gave a bunch of them away as gifts last year.

I was very excited though as Halloween came around again so we could do some Halloween jars.  We made them the same way we did the Christmas jars.  They are pretty easy to make, but beware they are a tad time consuming and can be messy.  Though I was doing them with 4 kids so that will take longer.  My oldest two (10 and 8) could do much of it themselves, I helped with cutting and stuff, but the younger 2 needed some help with the Mod Podge. And since you have to do multiple layers it does take some time.  But it is worth it!!

I'll go over the instructions again for those interested.

Materials

• Glass Jars (I save all our peanut butter, pickle, pasta jars etc. so we never have a shortage of these)
• Tissue Paper (I chose white, orange, black, and green for Halloween, but you can also find holiday paper that you can use as well, then yo don't even really have to decorate it, just decoupage it on)
• Mod Podge or some other type of decoupage 'glue'
• A brush to brush the glue on
• Construction Paper or anything else the kids may want to decorate it with (we have used glitter, stamped paper shapes etc.)

Decorating

First you want to cut your tissue paper in strips, then cover your jar with a layer of Mod Podge.   We usually cover just a small section at a time, applying the Mod Podge then the tissue paper till the whole jar is covered.
To make the pumpkins more 'pumpkin like' we did the strips vertically but in the past we have done them horizontally too.  For some of the other jars, I just let the kids put the strips on however they wanted.

 Piper, Arah and Ever adding tissue paper to their pumpkin jars

(notice the dummy hanging from the rafters of the porch in the window behind Piper . . . 

Charlie made this with the kids just a few days before . . . he is creepy!!)

 Once you have the whole jar covered with the paper (and have trimmed off the excess on top and bottom) do another generous layer of Mod Podge over the whole thing, making sure to cover all the tissue paper with a protective layer.  It is delicate so take care (and tell your kids to be extra gentle).

Once you have done that, then decorate as you wish.  Each of the kids designed their own pumpkin face, then they got to do another jar however they  liked.

Piper and Ever putting tissue paper on their 2nd jars.

Piper (8) drew and colored some black cats (one she colored very dark black, the other she drew on black construction paper and cut out) and we put them on top of her purple jar (with black construction paper stripes on top and bottom) for a silhouette.  Xian (10) did a green Frankenstein.  He used black construction paper for the face and hair.  Arah (6) drew a lot of ghosts and things that he thought were 'scary' out of plain white paper, and then cut them out and put them on his purple/black striped jar.  And Ever (3) made a purple jar too, but he added squares of other colors of tissue paper over that along with a few cut outs.  I made the white ghost.
Make sure you do a coat of mod podge over any additions to your jars.

You can use anything to light them.  Being glass, candles will work.  You can also use battery operated tea lights (I have heard that you can get them at the dollar store 2 in a pack).  I have them all lined up so using a string of lights is easiest.  Usually I will use white but apparently those were like in the bottom of the Christmas box and not so easy for Charlie to get, so we used multicolored instead and they worked fine.

For some reason my pictures of these jars didn't turn out as good as the ones I took of the Christmas jars last year, but you get the general idea.

We had a Halloween party with our local natural families group (love those guys!!).  The kids always have a ball!  We had pinatas, crafts, games, lots of goodies (we made halloween shaped sugar cookies).  Thank goodness we have friends with large houses and generous hearts who are willing to host our bi-weekly gatherings and potlucks (which can sometimes get VERY large).

 Xian (monster) Arah (ninja) Ever (lake monster) Piper (witch) and Thrace (giraffe) 

and our homemade skeleton man (made with PVC pipes, we got info from the Family Fun website)

Hope YOU have a great Fall season!!

Homemade Natural Playdough

OK if you are brave (like me) then you give in and let your kids play with playdough despite the huge mess it makes!  And there is no denying that it makes a mess . . . pretty much every time!  But they just love it so much!  My kids have always loved it and lately they have been loving playing with their pokemon figurines in the playdough.

 
If you are thrifty (like me) then you like to make your own playdough.  I started making playdough like 15 yrs ago when I worked at an Early Learning Center (long before having my own kids).  I have seen many, many recipes on the web and I have tried many.  I like to stay away from Alum which many recipes use.  But the ones that use Cream of Tartar call for SO much of it that it seems almost wasteful.  And the natural recipes I came across talked about using natural food colorings or making your own natural food coloring to add to the playdough after it was finished and that seemed too complicated.  

So I decided to kind of wing it and take some ideas from several recipes and come up with something easy and still natural . . . and to my surprise . . . it worked!! 

What I did was start with a good recipe I knew worked.  They all call for water, so instead of water in the recipe I replaced it with some type of natural liquid that was colored. 
Then I used less cream of tarter than what is usually called for (trying to conserve it) and it turned out great!!
Here is the final recipe I came up with.  I am giving you the full recipe but after my first batch I ended up cutting it in 1/2 because I had a lot of different colors I wanted to try.  Most of the pictures you see here are of this recipe cut in 1/2 and it still makes a nice sized ball of dough.

The Recipe

• 1 cup of flour
• 1/2 cup of salt
• 1 cup of liquid*
• 2 Tbsp Oil
• 1 Tbsp Cream of Tartar

* For liquid I used what I happened to have on hand that would make color.  I used raspberry juice concentrate, grape juice (either full strength or diluted if I thought it was needed) blueberry juice (from boiling blueberries) strong tea (coffee would have worked too).  I also used paprika and cocoa, which I just mixed in with some water.  If I would have had some liquid chlorophyll (or even spinach that I could have boiled to make green water) it would have rocked the green!!  Next time.  Not sure what I would use for blue but really, you can use anything.   Some more ideas, carrot juice, beet juice, shoot any juice you have on hand or any liquid left after boiling veggies or whatever can be used in place of water, and any powder (herb, spice etc) as well.  The raspberry, grape and blueberry turned out very similar in color, just slightly different shades. 

In a pot, mix the flour, salt, cream of tartar, and oil . . . slowly add your liquid

Put your pot over med heat and stir.  As it warms up it will start to thicken.

Continue to stir until the dough gets thick, forms a ball and separates from the sides and bottom of the pan.

Turn onto something like wax paper or floured surface.  Keep in mind that it is hot!!

As it cools you can kneed it to a nice smooth consistency (the kids are usually anxious to help with this part)

For these I added cocoa (left) and paprika (right) to the mix

I was concerned that using juices and stuff would make it go bad quicker, and you can always store it in the fridge if needed.  But I made this stuff over a month ago and it is still good.  I keep it in ziplock sandwich bags and make sure that I squeeze all the air out.  It still works great after a month (homemade playdough usually lasts several months for me).  If it starts to get a bit dry just put some oil on your hands before playing with it.

Paprika

Grape Juice

Cocoa

Blueberry Juice

Tea

Raspberry Juice

ENJOY!!

Decorative Tissue Boxes

 

So we decorated these tissue boxes for Valentines day, for the kids to put their valentines in.  I got the idea from the Family Fun magazine/website.  So afterwords I was left with a dilemma.  I don't typically buy tissues in boxes like this so I bought 4 boxes for the kids to decorate and I was left with a pile of tissues.  So here I am looking at the tissues trying to figure out what to do with them when I was struck . . . duh, the kids are finished with their party, why not stick the tissues back in the boxes!!

They are SO cute!!  I thought . . . what a fun idea!!  You can buy tissue boxes, take the tissues out, let the kids decorate them then pop the tissues back in!!  We have one in the kitchen, one in the bathroom and one in the office (Xian wanted to keep his in his room for all of his stuff).

 Ever painting is monster

Ever and Arah made monsters out of their boxes, and Piper made a cat!  But you could really do anything.  You could make any animal or design!  I let the kids paint them and then decorate with stickers etc. but you could use glitter, or decoupage pictures, paper, or designs, hot glue twine or sticks, leaves.  You can let the kids go wild and do whatever they want or you could do a theme to match a particular room.  The options are endless!!

 Arah painting his monster

The kids did these mostly by themselves, I only helped a little.  They loved it and they really love seeing their boxes on display and being used by the whole family!  Not only that, but I think it encourages them to actually use the tissues instead of their fingers or shirt (which really comes in handy when everyone has mild colds and snotty noses, like we do now, LOL)

Valentines Day Stuff

Our local natural families group had a valentines party last week.  I have been in a crafty mood for the last few months so of course I was wanting to do some cool crafts with the kids.  I really like the Family Fun website because they have cool recipes and crafts for each season and holiday.  It is a great place to get ideas and that is where I got all of these.  I also get the family fun magazine (it was a super cheap subscription deal) and that helps to spark my creativity too  . . . and believe me, I need it as I feel my brain doesn't function well most days!!

So we decided to make some valentines, some boxes to hold them and then some treats.  We don't eat a ton of junk or additives and food colorings etc. but on holidays and special occasions we go all out and I try not to feel too bad about all the crap we are eating (note, I said TRY, I always feel guilty as I would love to be sugar free . . . I just like it too durn much).

I got some sucker sticks and we made chocolate suckers.  I used milk chocolate and white chocolate chips.  I died like 1/2 of the white chips with (that icky) red food coloring to make pink.  All I did was take chocolate chips, melt them, put them in a sandwich bag, snip off the end and make heart shapes on top of the sticks.  OK it seems easy but try making free form heart shapes out of melted chocolate in a sandwich bag with a wiggly baby on your back and you can imagine that my hearts looked more like blobs, LOL!!  Doesn't' matter though, they all taste the same!

 

Ever in the picture at top, and Piper and Ever here decorating the suckers.

I did pop them in the fridge to harden, but after that they held up really well at room temp.  I did not add anything to them, just used the regular melted chips.

  

We then made some valentine boxes to hold the kids valentines they would get at the party.  We used tissue boxes.  The kids painted them first, then I sprayed them with a clear coat of poly (water based).  I was concerrned about the paint rubbing off since the cardboard of the boxes was kind of shiny.  Then they decorated them with stickers and stuff.  We used felt for the teeth and googly eyes.  I used a glue gun to glue on the teeth and pipe cleaners. 

  

Xian made his box all himself (left).  He made that plant thing from the Super Mario Brothers Nintendo games . . . shoot I forget what they are called.  He covered it with construction paper.  The only thing I did was the teeth. 

Ever's is in the middle.  It is a monster.  He did all the painting and decorating himself, I only did the eyes and teeth.  I thought it was great considering he just turned 3!  But he loves to paint.

  

Of course Pipers is the cat (she loves cats).  I had to help more with this, cutting out the ears/tail and teeth.  But she painted the whole box orange (had to do like 4 coates) and even gave him stripes.  She modeled him after Starlight, our orange kitty who disappeared a few months ago :0(  

And then Arah's monster on the right below.  Again, he did it all himself except the antenna and teeth.  

They were all very particular about how they wanted them to look. 

  

They worked perfectly for holding their valentines!!

For our valentines to give away I cut out several dozen hearts in a few different colors (red, pink, and purple).  I gave each kid like a dozen hearts and crayons and let them color/decorate them, then I threaded them over a lollipop stick to make flowers.

You can see them in the kids hands below.

Kozy Kitties

More gifts I made for Christmas.  This time 2 pointy kitties from the awesome free pattern from Wee Wonderfuls 

I saw these online and I fell in love with them!!  Too cute!  I call them Kozy Kitties because they were made with scrap Kozy fabric and, well, the pictures of them were taken at Kozy!  I think I am going to make a Kozy mascot out of our most popular Windy Day print (we have some scraps here I can use).

The one on the left was for my niece Elise (Charlies brothers baby girl who is 6 wks younger than Thrace) and the one on the right was for Piper because she loves kitties.  Of course now all the kids want one and I am sure to make a bunch (without complaining) because they are just too durn cute!

Crayon Cozies

Getting around to posting more Christmas gifts.
I got the idea for these cute little things from the blog Skip to my Lou.  She has a really easy to follow tutorial there so check it out!!  I made them as Christmas gifts for the nieces and Piper.  They thought they were so cool!

I changed things up a bit.  I was using scraps of fabric that I had lying around (many old Kozy scraps that were too small to use for Kozy stuff).  I made mine taller because I wanted it to work for my favorite crayons. . . those twistable ones (they rock!!).  Plus I wanted it to be able to be used with colored pencils etc.  So mine is about 7-8" tall and the pockets are like 3-4" tall (so they would fit regular crayons too).

I also figured that the kids wouldn't be able to tie a ribbon to close it.  So I used elastic instead and the kids can easily wrap it around after it is rolled up.  I made the elastic 3" on each side, so I cut 7" and have about 6" of it sticking out.

I also didn't add any interfacing because I was using heavier bottom weight fabrics . . . mostly canvas.  You may want to use interfacing if you are using quilting cottons, but with heavier fabrics it isn't needed.

Here they are all opened up so you can see the contrasting fabric, how I am using my elastic and how they hold the crayons!

They were pretty easy to sew, and since I used all fabric scraps, they were free!!  Not too bad!

Homemade Felt Coasters

The kids made cute lighted jars as Christmas gifts this year, but I saw this idea for making felt coasters in the Family Fun magazine and I really wanted to try those too.

The article called for a roll of cork and self stick felt.  Well I didn't find either.  So I used these cork tiles that I found at Walmart in the office section and we used regular felt squares (super cheap at JoAnns or Walmart) and I used a hot glue gun to glue them on.  Though they weren't hard to make, it would have definitely been easier to use self stick felt.

I did most of the gluing (hot glue is called HOT glue for a reason) but I did let Xian glue some.  I also did most of the cutting of the felt because you kind of have to be precise.  I let Piper put the pieces of felt on the cork but for Arah and Ever mostly I just let them pick out the colors (we tried to use colors to match the decor of the family we were giving them to) and the order of the felt pieces as I placed them on the hot glue and then they patted them down.

 We did 4, 4x4" coasters per family, and to make the wavy lines you have to cut 4 pieces of felt (I made the pieces a little larger than 4x4" each) stacked on top of each other . . . then you can mix and match the colors on each piece of cork and the lines match up because they were all cut the same.  I did wavy lines on the first few but then got tired of them and just did straight lines (of varying lengths) on the others (it was just easier).   Then some I cut into circles using the top of a cup as a guide.

I really liked how they turned out!

Lighted Christmas Jars

OK now that our family Christmas party is over I can post about some of these!

I saw these really cute decorated Halloween jars after Halloween.

I was so bummed that I had missed my chance to make them, but I figured that hey, we could just do Christmas jars instead!! 

I really thought the kids would enjoy making them, so we made some for us and then we decided to give them as gifts to family.

I keep most of my glass jars, and it works best with jars that don't have raised writing on the sides (like Mason jars do).  The natural peanut butter jars, pickle jars etc work great.  Different sizes are cool too so even smaller jars like jars you can get mushrooms in or stuff like that are cool, even baby food jars may work if you put little tea lights inside. 

I used tissue paper like in the link above, well, except for the black, that was a streamer (note, the streamers are NOT as sturdy as the tissue paper and rip VERY easily).  And you can get some cool printed Christmas type tissue paper too. 

So as in the link above.  I used Mod Podge (which you can get at any craft store, or even Walmart) painted it on the jars and then laid the tissue paper on in strips (some we did horizontal, some verticle).  Then we went back over it with another coat of modge podge and while it was wet the kids added their own decorations.

The older kids could do the whole thing themselves, for the younger 2 I helped with the glue and/or the strips.  With some I just cut a bunch of squares of paper and let them just stick them where they wanted.   They even added glitter to one.  We used those little shaped hole punches to make shapes to add, and they drew pictures that we cut out and glued on there. They turned out REALLY cute and the kids enjoyed making them (though it was a bit messy and time consuming).

After you are finished, don't forget to do a final layer of Modge Podge

In the end we had a reindeer and snowman jar, a pokemon and Kirby jar and a fish jar.  Then some other random christmas themed jars to give away as gifts.  I decoupaged their name and age and date on a piece of paper on the bottom.

You can put Christmas lights inside them like I did, or they also look really nice with a candle inside too.  A friend says they have little battery operated tea lights at the dollar store, those would work really well.

They are perfect for a window sill and make great handmade gifts!!