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bunny love

I love love holidays – a reason to celebrate.  More than the actual holiday, I love the lead up to the day.  The prep.  The crafts and baking. The planning. The excitement making.  The dreaming of what might be and what could be.  Christmas is by far my fav, but birthdays, Easter, Valentines day and summer parties are all very special as well.  This year the kids know that Easter is coming, we even have a bunny living in our yard that contributes to the excitement (he is clearly scouting locations for an egg hunt …).

Our girls love dinosaurs and trucks, getting muddy and playing with worms.  They also love purses and skirts that swirl when they twirl, their ‘babies’ and putting on ‘make ups’ (clear lip balm – don’t worry no toddlers in tiaras here).  This weekend to keep the Easter theme going I pushed my remedial sewing abilities a little further and entered the foray of children’s accessories. bunny purses to be exact.

I haven’t seen these done before on pinterest or any other blogs – so i posted a bit of a how to here for my fumbling steps to bunny bags but please let me know if you know of or have seen a better way!  Also a caveat – I don’t make patterns or measure (think very remedial) so all measurements below are estimates.  They are super fun little bags though, so if you have a little girl who might enjoy – you can put this together in about 30 minutes or less:

front

back

Here’s what you need:

about 1/2 M of two complimenting fun spring olours of cotton fabric, pre-washed and ironed, 1/2M of corresponding ribbon and some elastic

Here’s what you do:

1. cut out three identical bunny heads.  Two in one colour, and a third matching colour.  Ours are about 15 cm wide and 10 cm high, the ears are another 10 cm.

2. sew together two of the bunny heads in different patterns – fronts facing in – leave a small gap at bottom – flip them inside out, finish the stitching and iron flat.

3. cut off the ears of the third bunny, and fold over the flap about 1.5 cm sewing a straight line across so that you create a flap that you can thread the elastic through it later to make a pouch.

4. sew the third bunny onto the other, starting just below the left ear and going all the way to just below the right ear. do not stick over the openings in the flap you’ve made on either end, don’t stitch the top.

5. thread your elastic and a ribbon through the flap and pull the fabric so that it ‘scrunches’ up.  make sure your ribbon is not taught.  stitch over the ends and cut off any excess elastic.  It should look like this:

6. flip it back right side out and iron again. You can tie the ribbon around the ears to bring it all together.  You could also add a face to the bunny – though i like it plain.  The elastic along the back allows for precious things to be easily stowed and little hands to easily stretch into the bag to pull out any gems along the way.  I took a longer scrap of material in the corresponding pattern and flipped both sides in – laying a straight stitch down the middle in order to made a shoulder strap for the purse.  Attached on the inside and away we go.

This is the final look:

And this is one of our little babes – off to find dinosaurs to fill it with 🙂

Matthew is starting to understand a little bit about the real reason behind Easter, which I think is important, but the girls are still all about the bunnies and chocolate.  Regardless, we have a great two weeks of crafts and baking ahead of us as we prep for the weekend.  You might see a few more of these Easter posts as we bake and create our way to mid-April … hope I don’t bore you too much!

after dinner art

Do you have young children? What is the toughest time of day for your kiddos?  For us it’s that time between dinner and bath-time.  They are tired, a little crazy from the dessert they got as bribery for finishing dinner, and a little done with one another.  This is potentially a recipe for face making, name calling, toy grabbing, bum chasing chaos… so my husband and i try really hard (really really hard) to put our game faces on and do some fun activities apres dinner.  It might be soccer, or a walk, or a mini bike ride, or lego or dinosaur-baby-family-knightandprincess-school (yes we merge the ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ games to sandwich utterly ridiculous awesome make-believe messes)…or on really fun nights we do artwork.

Generally our after dinner art is messy, fun, and potentially dangerous with paintbrush wielding artistes who each have a vision as unique and they are.  This week we made salt-dough eggs one night, then we painted them with base coats another night.  Finishing touches (swirls and circles, lines and zig zags) will be tomorrow evening.

I found the salt dough recipe in an old post on the design mom blog .  Essentially you mix 2 parts flour to one part salt and one part water (ie 1 C flour, 1/2 C salt, 1/2C water) – roll it out to 1/4 inch thick, cut with cookie cutters, poke a hole in the tops with a straw and place on a parchment lined pan – baking at 250 degrees for 2-3 hours.

The following night we put down some newspaper, popped on aprons and painted with acrilic paints so that we could hang our eggs outside and the paint wouldn’t wash off … but it was far more messy and dangerous than using watercolor  paints. Living on the edge…

In reality, this project involved my amazing husband hovering with warm wet clothes to grab the painted fingers and flying brushes before stray paint landed on our chairs, clothes and floor. Bothersome hair, itchy faces and drippy drips on arms were sacrificed and washed thoroughly in the bath-time that ensued.

Tomorrow we’ll paint our designs and then up they go – on the branches of our trees outside … a little bit of Easter festive fun to add to the spring feeling in the air.  A three part-er art project that has been super fun for our crew of three under five.

Hope this maybe inspires you to do a fun Easter project too… or at least gives you an idea to get through the toughest part of your day.  Would love to hear your ideas to get through as well!

stowe your wallet

Terrible play on words.  Totally guilty.  But I’m officially a huge fan of Lesley Stowe crackers.  Do you know the ones I’m talking about? Love them, but our budget doesn’t.  A few weeks ago my sister let me borrow an old cookbook I had been trolling at her house.  I love cook books.  In that book (Grazing by Jule Van Rosendaal) was an awesome cracker recipe.  With a tweak of a few ingredients those crackers became my own version of that amazing crispy delight best accompanied by wine and expensive cheese and only found in the deli section of your favorite grocer.  The best part is that one recipe yields three ‘loaves’ of crackers – which means you can freeze some for later… So first go buy some mini loaf pans (so cute – and they make great little banana breads too!) and then stowe your wallet and bake up a storm …

recipe – adapted from Grazing (thank you Kels!)

2 cups of flour, 2 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt, 2 cups low fat buttermilk, 1/4 C brown sugar, 1/2 C honey, 1 C dried cranberries or raisins, 1/2 C chopped pecans or slivered almonds, 1/4 C flax seeds, 2 Tbsp chopped rosemary

preheat oven to 350. stir together first 6 ingredients until mixed (by hand) add in additional optional items – just until blended.  Pour into 2 prepared 8×4 inch loaf pans or 3 mini loaf pans and bake for 45 min.  Allow to cool completely (refrigerate or freeze once cooled) and slice loaves as thinly as you can.  Reduce oven heat to 300 degrees and lay out slices on cookie sheet (ungreased). Bake for 15 min and flip – then bake for 10 more min.  Makes about 8 doz crackers.