My kitchen smells wonderful..

but you wouldn't want to eat what I've been cooking!

I've been wanting to try making these beeswax lanterns for well over a year- 

I had the wax ready & everything! So when another tutorial popped up on Pinterest, I finally gave it a go!!

The beeswax takes quite a while to melt, but apart from that it was quite simple! Once the wax was melted they only took a couple of minutes to make.

Now I have a couple of drops of sunshine on my kitchen bench, pooling & radiating the light, but I bet they'll look fantastic with a couple of tiny candles in them!

Instant organisation

Pillowcase + large embroidery hoop + small hook = laundry bag!!

Our laundry is in a smallish cupboard in the kitchen, which doesn't have room for a big laundry hamper/basket/thingy (ok, so if the thing that you carry your clean washing around in is the basket, what is the thing you toss your dirty washing in called in your house??), and I'm trying to curb my delightful children's habit of tossing their used clothes all over the floor, so this now hangs on the back of their bedroom door for them to pop their washing into!!

Because it isn't sewn into the hoop you can just drop it into the machine at the same time if it is getting musty, and you can replace it with any pillowcase!

And the best bit is that it took all of one minute to make, awesome.

(from this Pin)

The 3 Musketeers..

The walls of our house are a very neutral pale sand/mushroom/chai latte kind of colour, and when they are empty they look EMPTY.

So I made something to put on one of them :-)

Based on this (pinned, of course) tutorial, they're 20x20cm canvases with photographic prints modpodged on. My kids pics didn't really work with the high-contrast treatment in the tutorial though. I chose a green ribbon because since we have those neutral walls (more like the pic below than the photo above) + a heap of timber + charcoaly black furnishings, we decided to use bright blues & greens to brighten the place up a bit, inspired by this palette from Design Seeds!

Lexi was doing her best to be almost ludicrously adorable & endearing in her photo, her little hands clasped together under her chin ever-so-sweetly, until I cropped them off the picture!!

Just Pin it! Pin it good.

I've been rather distracted of late, in no small measure by Pinterest.

If you're not familiar with this new-ish procrastination phenomenon, it's a site where you can make your own virtual pinboards, then whenever you see something on the internet that you like, be it links or images, you can "Pin It" onto one of your boards. It's a bit like visual bookmarks/favourites.

People use it for collecting tutorials, patterns, recipes, party/wedding ideas, blogs/websites they like, or just images of funny things, ideas for their house, hairstyles & make-up, beautiful people, whatever you like!! (as long as it is reasonably polite).

BUT, this is where the dangerous part comes in, you can also check out what your friends have been pinning... and then you can browse what everyone has been pinning!!! So basically you can while away hours looking at all the weird & wonderful things that other people find interesting.

I love Pinterest.

Why? For a start, I love being able to see at a glance what I've bookmarked. When you have 20 "Girl's Dress Tutorial" bookmarks, it all gets little meaningless! But by pinning it, you can see which one it is! And, if you "follow" people with similar interests & aesthetic to you, it's like having your own little squad of personal net browsers, providing you with a heady diet of things you might like. Mmmm... megalomania...

AND I have actually been making things based on things pinned on Pinterest!!! So it is NOT a waste of time!! Thus my "Pinspiration" tag is born lol...

Here's something that I made this morning, for a little gift, based on this Pin -

My friend has been working SO hard on an event we're organising, the tickets & posters of which have a pinky-purple 5 petal flower on them.. so i made this on a whim, using scrapbooking paper, so it has a radius of roughly 15cm. It was really fun to make!!

Somewhere....

i get accused around here of everything being a song cue, but really, who can help it with this one?!

this is a "Little Sister's Dress" (seemed appropriate!) that i made for maia!

i used the embroidery charts from the very cool Watermellish website-

since i had a great big blank canvas & a yarn colour called Sky...

it was kind of asking for it really!

unfortunately because i'm not as smart as i think i am, instead of following the pattern & using 4ply (ugh!), i decided to use 8ply + the 3 month size pattern, with the hopes of getting a 6-12 month size....

umm...

oops.

it's more like an 18 month size as a dress, but on the upside i've got a headstart on next winter's knitting, and i know it will work as a tunic top until she's almost 3!!

crafty women

i'm lucky with our playgroup to be surrounded by a group of very crafty women :-)

last year we embarked on a fundraising mission, using the power of crochet!

so far we've made a cot blanket-

a bassinet blanket-

a super cute doll's blanket (which i think has actually been claimed by the playgroup babies ;-) ) -

and we've almost finished a single bed blanket using hand-dyed rainbow colours! -

there are also these lovely squares, which i don't know what they are destined to be!

they all need blocking before we can sell them, but they're already filled with a whole lot of care & attention!

it's an integral part of our playgroup philosophy that parents/carers be productively occupied, be it cleaning, crafting, mending, gardening etc, so crochet is a perfect way to spend our morning!

secret.

i have to keep a secret.

i made something last week that took an outrageous amount of time, with copious amounts of hand sewing, for a present....

the present has been handed over to it's birthday girl, BUT one of my friends is planning to make a bunch of similar style things for sale at xmas, so i'm not going to publicize the idea just in case someone else beats her to it!
but this is the little wooden finger puppet doll that went with it lol..

paul painted her face & hair, and i dressed her in a cute scrapbook paper dress, coated lovingly in layers of Mod Podge, just recently available round here!!

but it's gonna be a while before i can share pics of the background ;-)

the spirit of winter

to me winter is all about hibernating - it doesn't get that cold here, but it does get wet, so i like to stay inside - and staying inside, with kids = simple crafts!

inspired by MamaMoontime's Winter Wattle Fairy, i decided to make us a winter fairy too!
i used colours very prevalent at the moment - pale blue skies littered by clouds, and dark, early evenings, and she has lovely shiny silk hair, and barely visible opalescent blue wings :-)
(they're made from bondable Angelina fibre, just to give away the secret - when they catch the light they are amazing!)

and of course a little doll was commisioned by alexis-
and a wee fairy girl for eli too-
(cos he has to be just like his big sis!)

fun, cheap & and very very quick!!

Rollin' rollin' rollin'...

On a whim i decided to hunt out some beeswax... and (despite there being no mention on their website) on one of our journeys we popped into a lovely honey shop (with live bee display that our kids love, and all sorts of delicious honey related products - i want to try the honey icecreams!), and whaddaya know, beeswax! i ended up with a huge 600g blob of golden sweet-smelling stuff, but also grabbed some of the wax sheets to have a play with first :-)

it's very easy really to make rolled candles - i softened one end of the sheets first & sealed the wick in to make it easier for the kids to roll, and then it was just a matter of warming them over the heater (or you can use a hairdryer)-
then when it is quite floppy & turns dark and translucent you start to roll!
just slowly, gently, and remembering to try to keep it straight-
then when you get to the end of the sheet, you warm it again & roll it to seal the end!
i then held the end of the candle over the heater, then gently squished it onto a flat surface, to meld the layers together & make it stand up nicely.

ta da!!
and of course you can decorate them using left over scraps, or modeling/decorating wax :-)

so far ours have been used for making 2D shapes & patterns, and as strawberries, oranges, broccoli, water & cake (obviously struggling a bit to think of something purple & edible!), and perhaps eventually they'll be used as candles too!

A place to call one's own

one from the archives of forgotten blog content.... at the beginning of the year lexi finally moved into her own room!
(we pretty much follow classic attachment parenting theory, and hey, if you've got a bad sleeper it's much easier to resettle them if they are in a bed next to yours!)

so i decided to make her a sign for the door, using some craft jigsaw pieces (cos she loves jigsaws!) and various scrapbooking bits & pieces!
they're rather *eclectic* for my taste (i'm not a natural scrapbooker - i struggle to put anything much on the page lol) but suffice to say it was very well received by its recipient!

and unrelatedly, apart from the paper bit, check out the basket of window stars that we made at playgroup so each of the children could take one home for the winter holidays! there are at least 40-50 in there i reckon!

a simple question

after telling the kids a thousand times not to draw on the walls/furniture/clothes/themselves please, lexi replied "what can i draw on that isn't paper?!"

the i remembered that for some mysterious reason, we have some fabric pens!!

so we cut out some cardboard squares, then a little piece of t-shirt fabric slightly bigger-
folded the excess over & sellotaped it down-
then let them loose!
both kids did a couple of 'abstract' pieces, and then lexi did a couple of mini ones too-
and ironed them to set!

quite honestly the pens were pretty horrid, but since they're such a rarity here (the kids have good quality crayons & pencils instead) the kids loved them!

i'm not entirely sure what to do with these little masterpieces, but it was a fun activity for the kids, and any ideas of what to do use them for would be much appreciated!!

the same, but different.

one long dark evening i let the kids loose with some wet-on-wet watercolour painting-
(soak proper watercolour paper in a bit of water for 5-10min until it's a bit soft, then paint with big brushes & watercolour paints - biscuit trays are perfect for containing everything, if not very pretty!)

the finished paintings-
i then cut circles out of the paintings - a stockpot lid for the big one, cake tin for the smaller - and painted them with cheap canola oil. yes you read that right.
the aim is to make the paper somewhat translucent... Dr Nick's Window To Weight Gain for the uber-geeks out there ;-)
once dry i folded the paintings into star lanterns!
and cos i was in that sort of mood, i made the little scraps left over from turning the circles into octagons into a mobile for lexi's window.
(the sun was too bright this morning to get a decent pic of all the delicate shades, but i'm not complaining!!)

Stars, in their multitudes...

(of course the awesome skatey-beachbabe-katie breaks out movie quotes, and i reach for Broadway. i never claimed to be cool! ;-) )

anyhoo... around these parts it is a time of year known as Matariki (maataareekee), also known as the Maori new year, also known as the time when the Pleiades become visible in the night sky, and in part due to that we've had an abundance of stars cropping up around the place!
Par exemple- our playgroup is undergoing HUGE renovations, and in the long term plan is a beautiful stained glass windows for the tiny babes to stare up at, but in the meantime i decided to make us a biggish window star (each point is half a sheet of kite paper, so the whole thing is approx 25-30cm tall). We then decided that making these was a nice craft for the parents to be engaged in, so we've started a mass campaign of star making, in part so each child can take one home at the end of the term for the mid-winter break (cos who doesn't like a bit of colour injected into grey days?!), and also potentially to sell at our advent fair.... i must get a photo of the big basketful next week!

anyway, there is a good tutorial for these waldorf window stars over at Gardenmama, and i get my kite paper from Forest Folk, which is the little shop run by our playgroup's school :-) (they're a perfect little gift for a new baby or wee kiddo's birthday when you don't know what they've already got!!)

annndd....

after seeing a tutorial somewhere (might have been this one at Childhood Magic) i decided to have a go at making a little star lantern!(this one was too small to fit a candle inside it, but they're still cute as holders for taller candles too)

and then taught a few of the mums at playgroup to make them, using the kids watercolour paintings, which then became little baskets to hold a biscuit for each of the kids at our matariki celebration morning!this is a few of them *just* catching the morning sunlight up on the windowsill....there were all sorts of delicious star-themed treats for the kids to eat- and lexi did a story for eli & one of the little girls (who was singing "twinkle, twinkle" as accompaniment!)and the kids sung star songs and listened to a special story :-)

annnndd...

completely unrelatedly, i saw these on The Magic Onions a while ago, so had to try it out!it's nice to add a little sparkle into these wintery days!!

february isn't too late...

for xmas stuff, surely?

just a couple of things that had slipped through the blogging net... first, an Elefante-
pics taken on xmas eve, hence the shocking lighting!

seriously fiddly, but pretty cute, and all from stash!

and a funny little activity i did with the kids, making xmas felt wreaths!
i simply cut some holly, or xmas trees depending on who you ask, out of green felt and marked two holes on each leaf... then the kids threaded some thin elastic through the holes in each leaf once, in from the front then from the back, then through again, forming a loop, this time going from the back first, then in through the front, threading red buttons or felt circles occasionally as they went. if that makes any sense.

some peoples looked slightly more haphazard when worn...
but it was a fun & easy way to keep them happy for a while, and have been a welcome xmassy addition to the dress-up stash!