Dying Easter Eggs

This is the first year I have dyed Easter eggs with Katherine. It was a fun little craft to do after Caroline went to bed tonight. The Paas kit that I bought at the grocery store had 6 colors but since I boiled 12 eggs and 2 cracked I thought we would just stick with 3 colors. We used red, yellow and green. Being our first go at dying Easter eggs I bought the basic kit that just had dye and stickers. I did not want to mess with doing a wax resist, glitter or tie-dye. I also avoided any characters. She enjoyed it and tomorrow we will put the stickers on.Now I have 3 cups of very potent dye. It is probably enough to dye at least 3 dozen more eggs if I wanted to. I thought there must be something cool to do with Easter egg dye so I went to google. "Leftover Easter egg dye" produced few usable results. I found out what to do with the leftover dyed Easter eggs and how to save them. I found lists of egg salad and other egg recipes. I found a few crafts with the cracked, dyed shells. There were a number of links on how to dye Easter eggs using natural dye. (I am granola in some things but would not go to the effort). The only thing I really found to do with the dye was to dye wool yarn. If I had wool yarn or knew how to knit or crochet that might be tempting. Apparently egg dye only will dye animal fiber so it would not work to tie dye t-shirts made of cotton. Too bad, that would have been fun. I may still try it and see what happens.So, I am curious if any of my friends have found other uses for leftover Easter egg dye. There must be something to do with the vibrant paint but since it is dye and not washable we may not be willing to take a chance.

She's Crafty!

I have been doing a lot of crafty projects lately. I am not sure what has gotten into me. I have specifically been figuring out my sewing machine. I have no idea what I am doing but read tutorials on blogs and figure it out. It has been a lot of fun. I especially made a lot of things for Katherine's birthday.

My favorite thing that I made was her "twirl skirt" and shirt with a "3" on it for her to wear to her family party. I think it turned out really cute. I admit I was really impressed with myself as this skirt had an elastic waistband and 2 rows of ruffles. I used this tutorial. It took me not much over an hour to make so I know I will be making more of these. It is a lot of fun to go pick out fabric and Hobby Lobby has some really cute ones right now.

I made her a reversible superhero cape. Of course it is all girly. I used this tutorial and used the capes I saw here for inspiration.

For party favors I made felt crowns for each of the kids. I had seen a lot of "Waldorf style" felt crowns on etsy and found a tutorial. Really though it was so simple. The hardest part was finding pastel felt colors and cutting it all out. I just used cheap craft felt and not the wool felt.

I then made a banner. I had seen several cute ones online. I used the fabric that I have used in several places in her room thinking that I would hand it over her window. I think it is really cute but if I were to make another one I would use bolder colors as the letters really don't stand out too much. Of course where it is hanging in the kitchen you barely notice the banner at all because of the artwork hanging behind it.

After the birthday festivities, I decided that I wanted to make the girls coordinating outfits for our family picture. Luckily it was cold the day we were supposed to take our pictures and we post-poned them because I was not finished and would have been up pretty late. Now I have finished them. Katherine's is the pink pillow case dress. It was so easy to make and I learned how to use binding for the arm holes.

Caroline's outfit is a jumper with coordinating pants with a ruffle on them. This was the first time I have actually used a pattern. It was supposed to have buttons but I did not know how to use the button hole maker on my sewing machine. So, I sewed snaps to keep the jumper closed and then put buttons on for show. The pants are cute but they were a pain to sew. I sewed the ruffle onto a pair of pants that she already had and they were so small. They turned out cute though. I can't wait to have them try on the dresses to see how they look. It is fun to make them clothes and I have fabric for a few more things ready to go. Then I got off the sewing kick and finally painted Katherine a "You are special" plate. I have seen these but thought I would have one for each child and make it a little more unique. I have not made Caroline's yet. They will be brought out for all kinds of special occasions such as birthdays, 1st day of school, dance recital, good grades, really anything that we want to encourage our kids for.

Crafts

Katherine has really gotten into crafts lately. She requests it pretty much every day so at the least we will get out the markers or paints. If I get my act together I will try to have something a little more creative.

I love the Internet because there are so many websites and blogs with cute ideas of activities and crafts to do with kids. Awhile I saw this cute activity on flipflops and applesauce blog. You take a used dryer sheet (good chance to reuse and be "green") and cut it in half. You then paint it. The only paints we have are washable finger paints and it worked fine. I am sure you could use any kind of paint.

Then you cut some antennae and clip it all together with a clothespin. They are cute little butterflies. Ours are hanging by our light in the breakfast room and Katherine talks about them all the time.
You can see behind the butterflies how we display a lot of her artwork. We have a ribbon across the window with clothespins. We never put curtains over this window so it works perfectly. I had great intentions of doing a weekly lesson with Katherine from the letter of the week. I even went so far as to find an unused lesson plan book. I made the learning poster with a section for the theme, vocabulary word, letter, nursery rhyme, number, shape, color, memory verse and bible story of the week. I was gung ho and filled out "lesson plans", really just ideas for the week. I was amazed at how hard it was to fit in simple activities and am ashamed to say that the learning poster still pretty much looks like this with week one on display for the last 12 weeks. We love to paint and every time Katherine paints she decides that she needs to not only use the brushes but finger paint as well. I like seeing her concentration. Sometimes we color using coloring book pages and sometimes I give her a blank sheet. I think both methods allow for creativity and working on certain skills. When she has a coloring page she intentionally colors different sections different colors. It is funny to see what colors she picks sometimes. She has no desire to make them realistic and that is OK.

Katherine loves it when our craft involves scissors and "blue" (her version of glue). She is pretty good at cutting as long as it does not matter the shape that she cuts. So, if we are trying to find animals or something in her magazine I have to help her with the cutting.
I try as best I can to follow up with the lessons at church so we spent a lot of time on the Creation story. You can see her working on the plants. She loves using glue and sand to make a picture.
In fact, every time we go outside she requests that we bring the "blue" so we can make a picture. Luckily we have a sandbox right there on the patio and it is an easy craft.
Over Thanksgiving Grammy had a turkey sticker craft for the kids.

Robots

Katherine likes robots and enjoys watching videos of them on youtube with her daddy. I searched the library for kids books on robots and had one on request. We picked it up this week.

The book was called Sammy and the Robots. I read it to Katherine after dinner while still at the table. I made the mistake of not reading through the book on my own first. The little boy has a robot that stops working. He has his grandmother help him to send it to the robot hospital. Then his grandmother gets a cough and has to go to the hospital.

Sam and I start looking at each other across the table. Surely the grandmother will not die. She does not thanks to the new robots that Sammy makes that "blast the cough". We thought the book was pretty stupid and it did not teach anything about robots.

We decided though to build a robot using "recycled" materials from around the house. So, Sam and Katherine worked for about 30 minutes to make the "trisket box robot". Katherine's main contribution was coloring the robot. She really wanted to help with the tape but her skills with the tape include pulling it out as far as possible and getting it all tangled up.


Here is Katherine telling you what she made and then she even talks like a robot.