Felted Ball

I've been racking my brain on what to make for my cousin's baby shower. I decided to try my hand at a needle felted ball. The inside has an easter egg with a bell in it so it rattles. I'm pretty happy about how it turned out. I got the idea for a felted ball from Living Craft Magazine. My husband just bought me all the back issues for my birthday and I am loving them! Its actually pretty overwhelming because I want to make everything.

Anyway I loved making this ball so much I'm thinking I need to make K one and then perhaps make a couple for Etsy. We'll see.

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. :)

A Homemade Easter

Here are a few pictures from easter morning. I loved using K's new silks as the basket stuffing. I think I'll keep that up every year. It was fun to fill his basket with lots of homemade goodies. As you can see from the pictures the little blue bag made by a swapper was his favorite. In another picture he is playing with a tiny bunny I felted.

Springster Holiday

Every year I host a spring/easter party for my family on the day before Easter. We always have a big picnic potluck (which usually ends up indoors as it did this year) and do a craft or two. This year we made yarn nests by dipping yarn in glue and draping it over a bowl. When it dries we can pop the nests out of their bowls. I'll have to post more pictures after the nests are dry and out of their bowls. We also filled egg shells with dirt and grass seed. I'm excited to see how they look when they have begun to grow.

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.

Mushrooms

I think it is time to take a swap break! I've completed 5 mushrooms for spring themed swap in my local natural parenting group. This is their first swap so it will be interesting to see how it goes. I've really been loving the patterns in my crocheted food book (I think I posted the title earlier... if not I'll be back with the title).

Tonight I'm hosting my family's Easter/spring dinner. We're going to have a big potluck picnic and do a spring themed craft. I'll have pictures up soon. Now I have to run off and start cleaning, cooking, and preparing...

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.