The Painted Egg

I'm alive! I can hardly believe it's been a month since I last posted. I've been on vacation! I have lots to share with you, but I wanted to start with this since Easter is this week.



These painted wooden eggs are becoming a little Easter tradition for our family. They are nice because they won't rot or break! The wooden eggs came from the craft store (Michael's, I think) and are painted with acrylic craft paint. Be sure to buy enough eggs for your kids to paint with you!



Silhouette Eggs

I love the old fashion silhouette look. I recently got my younger son's silhouette cut at Disneyland. But honestly, I always think afterwards that I could have done it just as well myself. That was what inspired these eggs.

How I made the silhouettes:
1. I freehand-outlined my kids'profiles onto the background paint with a pencil. (You could also cut out a side-view picture of your kids and trace around the edges).
2. Next I traced over the pencil lines with a black pen. I suggest using a Sharpie or something that won't bleed when you put the varnish on.
3. Then I filled in the outlines with black paint.
4. I wrote the name on the egg with a pencil, and traced over it with a fine paintbrush. This could also be done with a non-bleeding pen. Be sure to mark the year on the bottom as well!
5. The last step is to put a varnish on it. I prefer a satin finish, and I suggest taking pictures before you do it so the shine doesn't get in the way. But I only had a glossy varnish on hand and my husband had our camera for the day. That's okay, too.

Family Egg

This is one I painted in 2007 when we only had one child. As you can see, the details are not perfect, but the egg is still whimsical and special. The back says, "The Henage Family"

Spring Chick and Bunny Egg

Another old fashioned-inspired egg I made this year. The bunny is Tony, who was my pet rabbit when I was little.

Monkey One's Mouse Egg

This one has a gray mouse with black whiskers and gray rainclouds in the sky.

Monkey One's Family Egg

This one has our family in it (the little black figures) and Winnie the Pooh. The pictures would have turned out clearer if I had given him a non-bleeding pen to use instead of paint, but I like that he has exposure to using different media. I tried not to tell him how and what to paint, but let him exercise his own creativity. Sometimes that's hard for me!

Monkey Two's Egg

Even my almost-two-year-old got in on the fun. Though he was mostly painting his own hands!

I love that I can keep these eggs and decorate our house with them year after year. And now I want to see your eggs!

Busy

I want to show you a sneak peek of some crafty things I've been meaning to blog: Valentines, flowers, a dress from a vintage pattern... There's more, too! I'm a little bit busy right now, but I'll get back to blogging in a week or two. See you then!

Cowboy Quilt in the Works

Let me introduce you to an unfinished project that's been hanging around my house for almost a year. It's a cowboy quilt that my oldest son and I have been making. It has large squares embroidered with my his cowboy drawings (that he did last year) that will be sprinkled amongst the smaller squares. I do love all the various cowboy fabric.



Here's Monkey One laying out the triangle pieces that will eventually go around the edge of the diamonds.



The embroidered muslin squares are my favorite part of the quilt. I love the drawings my little artist made. (I still need to clean and iron these, in case you were wondering)



I did most of the embroidery, but as you can see I had some help! The areas he did are so sweet and special to me. I'm glad his stitches are not as uniform as mine because they will always be recognizable as his.



Here are the embroidery portraits of my little cowboys. There will be another one of my husband and me, but it's still in the embroidery hoop right now.



I originally intended the quilt to be queen size, but I'm considering splitting it into two smaller quilts. That way there will be one for each of my boys and I won't have to try to quilt such a large area. How on earth do people quilt a queen size blanket, anyway?

(Scroll down or click here for CELEBRATE THE BOY collar tutorial)

Xmas Gifts 7: Felt Pizza

Ahhhh... pizza. Our family loves homemade pizza. Monkey One loves playing "imaginary pizza party" where we send out invitations to our imaginary friends, make pizza together, play games while the pizza is baking, then eat the pizza. I thought I'd make my kids a felt food pizza set to make these pizza parties even better. I actually had been planning on it for quite some time, but I had a difficult time deciding exactly how to do it until this Christmas. I didn't want a ready-made pizza for play eating only. Most of the fun is in putting on the toppings! But if the pizza is whole — better for the making aspect of the pizza — then I sacrifice some of the eating aspect of the pizza, which would be better with slices. I finally decided to compromise on whole mini pan pizzas. They're small enough to just eat, or they can be pretend sliced. I think of it as encouraging imaginative play.



The play pizza is a huge hit pizza! But which is real and which is pretend? Both can be rolled...



Both have sauce, sliced fresh mozzarella and a variety of yummy toppings...



Both are so much fun to make that even a kid can do it...



Well... maybe this kid should only make the play pizza...



And now both are ready for the oven, decked out in our favorite toppings!


(Why is Monkey Two sad? I stopped giving him olives and pineapples to snack on. I almost cut him out of the picture entirely, but he was too cute, even when he was crying.)

One thing is for sure. Your real pizza doesn't keep well. The pretend pizza keeps very well in this handy drawstring bag with individual pockets for every topping you could want and more.



Future additions to our play pizza set:

• Whole green olives (they are cut out, just not sewn)
• A 1"-ish wood dowel rolling pin and a pizza slicer made from the dowel and a wood 2-3" disk
• Canadian bacon with some felt I purchased after Christmas
• Maybe new pineapple pieces from the lighter yellow felt I also found after Christmas
• Perhaps some felt pizza party invitations?

Everything was made from wool-blend felt (all except the black olives, for which I only had acrylic craft felt and the white bag, which I didn't want to spend that much money on). I realized a few weeks later when slicing real bell peppers for dinner that the red ones have three sections, but the green ones have four. Shhhhh, don't tell my kids!

P.S. This finishes off my 2009 Christmas Gift posts.

Celebrate The Boy Collar Tutorial

Hello! I'd like to shout a special welcome out to those of you who are clicking over from MADE to Celebrate the Boy. I'm so honored that Dana asked me to be a guest blogger.

As you can tell, I love my boys and I love them wearing these button-up shirts. Likewise, I'm excited to share this tutorial with you today.

Click here to enter the Boy's Collar Tutorial

Boys' Dress Pants

February is Celebrate the Boy month over at MADE and Made by Rae! And I have a little surprise... You just might see me hanging around at MADE in a few days... Something involving a little tutorial I'm doing. In the meantime I thought I'd blog this pair of pants I made last month. They fit with the Boy theme, don't you think?



I call this kid Monkey, but I think he might be part giraffe. Monkey One recently went through another growth spurt. I had been meaning to sew him a new pair of dress pants for quite some time, as the hem of his old pants was creeping higher and higher up his ankles. I was making him wear his cowboy boots to church every week to hide the problem. One Saturday night I decided I couldn't take him to church one more time in those high-water pants. So at 9:45pm I dug into my fabric stash and started cutting. A few hours later I had these.



To keep things simple I left off the pockets. For the waistband I wanted a smooth front and an elastic back. But, as I always do, I started to complicate things: "Oh, it won't be too hard to add some pleats in the front" "I should just stitch around the front here to make it look like it has a fly" "I'll add this button on real quick just for looks" and so on. But in the end I was glad I added those complications and left off the pockets. The waistband took me longer than I thought it would. One of these days I'll keep that in mind while I'm budgeting my time.



As a pattern I used an old pair of dress pants I had made him for a wedding almost two years ago. Was it really that long ago? I can't remember what pants I used as a pattern for those. Since Monkey One only grows up and not out I kept the width almost the same, but made them six inches longer. Yes, you read that right. Six inches. (Please note that he has had other dress pants since that wedding. One pair he'd already outgrown. Another pair had been ruined in an incident with his female cousin involving pink nail polish, but he would have outgrown those, regardless. His other pair, which were almost too casual to wear to church in the first place--and were also seemingly shrinking--were in the laundry.)



The pants are just a tad too long. Can you see him stepping on the hem as he knocks on the door? But don't worry. I won't be surprised if he grows more and I have to let the hem down by July!

Xmas Gifts 6: Bean Bag Cubes

My husband enjoys laying on our family room floor. From there he reads, uses his laptop, and watches TV. He's always grabbing for something to prop up his head. But he doesn't use soft objects like a normal person would (no offense, Amore). I've seen him use books, VHS tapes, and remote controls (all standing on their ends) as pillow substitutes. I don't know, maybe it's a macho thing that he can't use anything fluffy? So for Christmas I made him some bean bag pillows to do the trick. The beans make them sturdy yet pliable, so he can shape them the way he wants. I made them in different sizes as well.



Actually, I didn't mean for them to turn out so big. I used up most of a 5-gallon bucket of pinto beans from our food storage, and still didn't have quite enough! I'm considering picking the bean bags apart to make them smaller because they are also quite heavy.



I made each bean bag out of fabric I already had on hand, fabric that I like, so that I wouldn't mind seeing them strewn all over the family room floor. I also put some appliquéd messages on them, though I suppose that's not very manly. The appliqués are already coming apart, so I obviously need more practice in that department.



The inspiration for these came from Paper and String's fun doorstops. And, although I only saw these after I had finished the bean bags, they also remind me of Dana's giant Rollie Pollie pillow, but only because (1) we both made some sort of pillows, (2) IKEA fabric was involved, and, (3) let's face it, I just adore her and want to be as cool as she is.

I still have one more Christmas gift to post, then on to some more fun (and more current) stuff.

Family Mailbox

When I was little my mom made us an indoor family mailbox. It looked like a little cottage home with slots on the back for each family member. We sent each other notes and items we had ordered from each other's mail order catalogs throughout the year, but the busiest time for our family mailbox was Valentines Day. A few years ago I bought a paper mache house to make my own family mailbox. Since Valentines Day is right around the corner I thought now would be the perfect time to paint it.



I tried to make the coloring and style look a little like our own house. Wouldn't it also make a fun toy house to play with a little wooden peg family?


What's inside? Two Valentine cards!


I thought the house would be so cute photographed on our front lawn. Then I remembered that it's January and all we have is footprint-covered snow. I tried it on the snow, but the white washed all the color out of the pictures, and my little monkey wouldn't stop throwing snowballs at it. So the Christmas tree skirt and my front porch steps will have to suffice.




I was having a lot of fun painting the jasmine plant climbing up the side of the house. Then it suddenly reminded me of a Thomas Kinkade painting so I immediately had to stop. The other side has a birdhouse and agapanthus plants. Hmmmm... I wonder if it would work to paint flowers on the side of my real house to make it look like I have a garden. Do you think my neighbors would notice?


Here's the before picture. House purchased from Hobby Lobby.


My oldest little monkey and I have already exchanged several letters with each other using our new mailbox. A new (old) family tradition!

Xmas Gifts 5: Ashley Purse

My second vinyl purse attempt. This one is a little bigger. It's more like a slim diaper bag. In fact, I tried to make it the same dimensions as my Similac diaper bag from the hospital. I'm embarrassed to admit that. You know the one I'm talking about. It's really the perfect size bag. Ashley's bag is much cuter, though. I love the little bird on it.


I stitched along all the seams to help the purse keep its shape. I was a little disappointed at first because right up until the very last step it looked more like a messenger bag with its flap missing. Then I stitched those final outer seams along the top section and--voila!--the whole thing came together. I was pleased.




Isn't this the cutest little guy? I just want to toss him some bread crumbs.




Here's the lining. Recognize it? It's from IKEA. The little bird on the front of the purse is from this fabric. I love the little inner side pockets. They are perfect for keeping keys and chapstick handy.


Just as I was about to send this home with my brother to give to Ashley in California I realized I didn't have any pictures of the purse on a human. So here I am, modelling the purse at 11 o'clock at night while my brother snapped the picture for me. He actually paid me a huge complement: When he saw the purse he looked a little surprised, maybe even dumbfounded, and told me it looked like the kind of bag his friends would buy from some hip store. He's in with the cool, film student, artsy crowd, and I know nothing about cool, so I was very pleased to get the complement.
(In case you were wondering: The bracelet I'm wearing is one of the gifts my sister Ashley gave me for Christmas. My sister Bridey made me the knit hat for Christmas last year).