Birthday prep

I've been getting things together for K's birthday. He picked the theme, pink teaparty. Since its impossible to find boy's pink shirts I dyed this shirt and sewed a pink three on it. I also made these little garden banners for the kids to decorate and take home.

The problem with pink

Stirring the dye pot.

K's four new pink shirts
See how happy he is?

My son's favorite color is pink. He insists on wearing pink everyday. Anytime we pull out a plate, a cup, play with a shovel, a bucket, a car... he wants it to be pink. Here is where the problem comes in. They do not make little boys clothes in pink. I have searched and searched for pink shirts that don't have ruffles, hearts, or sayings such as, "girls rule."

To keep K happy I've been buying lots of pink socks but now that summer has come I thought it was finally time to make him some pink shirts for boys. I bought a pack of white shirts, some pink dye and made him four shirts. Guess what the only color shirt he'll wear is now?

I'm thinking of embellishing some of them. He's really into dump trucks, animals, and trains so perhaps I'll have some pimped up pink shirts on here soon.

Outdoor Silk Play

The Weather has been so nice. We are so happy to be able to get outside and play again. Now that K received new silks in his basket we have enough to tie them across the yard. K had a great time running in and out of them. We also spent some time building roofs and houses out of them. I wish I would have taken a picture of that as K was so cute sitting in his house saying, "house! house!" I'm thinking we might need to make a park play date with friends and tie our silks around trees. :)

Dying our Eggs Naturally

We decided to jump on the bandwagon and try to dye our eggs naturally this year. We used beat juice for pink, turmeric for yellow, red cabbage for blue, and paprika for red. The turmeric and beats turned out wonderful. The paprika really just turned the eggs brown. At first we thought the cabbage didn't work, but after sitting out of the water for about 30 mins they turned blue.

Anyway the way we did it was just to boil each of these herbs/veggies in about two cups of water with a splash if vinegar. Then we soaked the eggs in the pan for about 20 mins. It was definitely fun to do. I'm sure we'll try it again next year with a few more colors.

New Silks

These pictures do not do these silks justice. A few moms from my natural parenting group and I put together a big play silk order. We spent one evening dying them ourselves. Its a lot of work but totally worth it. I had done this on a much larger scale about 6 months ago and it took us 9 hours! There were around 15 moms and over 150 silks to dye. This time though with 4 ladies, 4 dye colors, and only around 30 silks we were done in just a couple of hours. I really wanted brown, green and white (not dyed), for our nature table. Then of course I could not resist that royal blue and the yellow.

I'm using these to line K's easter basket, so I'm sure after sunday I'll have some great photos of him playing in the silks.

Water color

Here is take two of attempting to color my wood stash. The natural dying worked with some of the colors, but I still really needed blue, green, black, and a few others. Today K and I water colored the wood. It turned out really cool! I didn't get it all done as it didn't take K long before he was sucking on paintbrushes and trying to dump the water. Oh and I also bought beeswax today so I can polish everything when it is done drying. At the rate its going I think it might be a good week before I can post pics of that. Here is a sample of what we did.
The snowmen and trees sit on our nature table (I should take an update picture).
I'm not entierly sure what I'm going to do with all the balls yet (but K loves them).
The handle, stick, and top are going to become a wand for K's stocking. I'm excited to get this project underway.