paint cut paste

i hope all the mommas and grandmommas out there had a lovely mothers’ day weekend! just wanted to share a little handmade mom’s day treat with you all – these cute felt flower pins that N created for her grandmothers, her great-grandmother, and a couple barrettes for herself and friends, too!

first, i cut out a bunch of various flower shapes from our felt scraps. (do they make kid-friendly fabric scissors? N’s kid scissors just would not do the trick on felt, so i had to do this part for her even though she wanted to, unfortunately.)

N selected groupings of small, medium, and large flowers she liked together. (she commented that it’s just like choosing skirts for her flower fairies she loves to make!) she chose embroidery thread from our cutely-stored stash to adorn the background circles for each pin.

she began to whip up some added cuteness with the blanket stitch she learned at school. impressive! of course, she asked while doing it, “um, why am i sewing one piece of felt to itself, mommy? just to be fancy?” why yes, sweetie. fanciness is important on mothers’ day.

next up – choosing buttons for flower centers. buttons are always a hit over here.

N learned to sew on a button with this project, and she basked in the glow of accomplishing this.

we found some adhesive pins at michael’s to affix to the back of each flower.

here’s a happy recipient (N’s gwee!) sporting hers on mom’s day sent via pix messaging.

i hot glued the few extra flowers to barrettes that N has been happily sporting for a week… and she saved a few barrettes for gifts for her girlfriends.

over spring break in april, it was time for me to plant some potted herbs for the season. with all of the fairy house excitement as of late, N wanted to make them into “fairy herb gardens,” naturally.

even without her own pinterest account, this trend seemed to seep into the consciousness of my 5-year-old. go figure. first we potted the herbs into two large pots. N said that she would decorate the basil and rosemary pot, and the other (sage, cilantro, and parsley) was for me to adorn. i felt honored to get to do one, as i assumed she’d do both. yay!

she decided we needed our shrinky dink herb tags here, but the ones we made a couple years ago weren’t the same types of herbs, so we spent an afternoon making new shrinky dink tags. (easy steps: scribble with colored pencil on rough side, cut shape, write herb name with sharpie on smooth side, heat shrink, stick in soil.)

then it was time for the houses. i gave her a choice of using natural materials (like she does in the yard) or painting some wooden birdhouses we have ($1 bin at michael’s.) she chose the painted route, and we got to work on our fairy houses.

next we gathered up some items for landscaping… like colorful marbles, stones, shells, sea glass, and even a few of the lovely painted sticks we made a couple years ago. N excitedly designed her fairy herb pot.

she spent a lot of time getting everything just right for the fairies. what a hostess!

the herb pots are so darn sweet… and we’ve spent some time over the past month (has it been that long!!!??!) clipping sprigs of herbs for our dinners and sprucing up the fairy neighborhoods.

my little fairy-lover has been making fairy houses out of natural materials for months. she loves to create them, and then check back in on them the following day to see if she sees signs of fairy activity. (sometimes the “fairies” leave colorful marbles or sparkly treasures for her overnight. *wink*) i just love these spontaneous nature creations that can happen without purchasing any materials or having any agenda. open-ended, outdoor art supreme!

on a recent family picnic in the park sort of sunday, she worked hard to create a fairy house at the base of a redwood tree.

she also loves making them in our backyard…

and adding to this one in her school yard during outside playtime…

do your little ones like to create little homes in nature? i’d love to hear about what you’re making. for some really sweet inspiration, we love this book on fairy houses. it’s one of our go-to bedtime reads at the moment. stay tuned for our fairy herb garden, coming up on the blog in a coupla days…

this rainbow carnation experiment is one i remember from my own childhood. not only is it a visually appealing activity, it’s also a great way for kids to learn the science behind water is absorbed by plants and how it travels through the different part of a flower.

the inspiration for this post was an old spice rack i had sitting in the garage. what wonderful little vials these are for this experiment! we grabbed some food coloring and white carnations (we had some in the bouquet we bought for our butterfly habitat – all of this happened a few weeks ago, i’m just late bringing it to the blogging world.)

N had fun dropping food coloring into the water, and creating her favorite color, since it was not in the cheapo food coloring pack we had – purple!

she placed a white carnation into each tiny vase, and we put them out of the way of our flower-chomping cat…

and waited. i asked N, “what do you think will happen next?” she said that maybe the flowers would grow, and that they might drink the colored water. let’s see if her hypothesis is correct…

even within a day and a half, we saw the petals taking on the colors of the water they were drinking.

ten days later, the colors were distributed throughout the different parts of the flower. we noticed that the purple color was not as saturated in the carnation as the other colors, and the darker colored waters in general seemed to be more full in the end.

there are some explanations of this experiment online that we checked out, like this one from ehow. i didn’t find any scientific reason the darker waters would not be absorbed as much. in fact, most of the write-ups i saw recommend using darker colors for more dramatic results. all in all, we had a rainbowy flowery good time with this one!

have you tried making rainbow carnations? if so, what did you notice?

“Did you hear that winter’s over?
The basil and the carnations cannot control their laughter.”

-Rumi

hooray for spring!

earth day is coming up this weekend, and what better way to celebrate than to experience some of mother nature’s magic?! we’ve just witness a slice of this in our house — following a butterfly from the larva stage through to the butterfly stage before our widened eyes…

N has always been interested in the stages of a butterfly, from her favorite book as a 1 year old (the very hungry caterpillar, of course) to the awesome butterfly storybox she created last spring! (have you seen this thing?) N received this groovy butterfly kit from insect lore for her birthday, and while i’m not getting paid at all for this review, i’d recommend it to anyone. (great birthday gift!)

we waited until temperatures were seasonably warm, and sent away for butterfly larvae in the mail. when the container arrived, there were six larvae inside, which looked like super-small caterpillars. see:

about five days later, the caterpillars had grown much larger…

four days after that, the caterpillars had munched their way to their maximum size. (that tan stuff in the jar with them is their food.)

the had entered chrysalis stage only two days after that. it’s hard to see here, but five of them attached to the lid of the jar (as expected) but the sixth formed its cocoon on the bottom of the jar. we weren’t sure if that dude would make it, and ultimately and sadly, he did not.

now it was time to transfer the chrysalids to their new netted habitat provided in the kit. the instructions said to pin the paper to which they’d attached to the net a few inches above the bottom. my husband (the less skeeved-out one) did the deed with the little one lending support.

in their new home!

we watched and watched. and waited and waited.

and on the eighth day, our first painted lady butterfly pushed her way out, unfurled her wet wings, and was a beautiful butterfly!

over the next four days, all five butterflies were born! each day, we read one of N’s favorite books, butterfly birthday, and sang happy birthday to the butterflies as they came into the world in their new form. we put carnations drizzled with sugar water and tangerine slices in their habitat, which N prepared.

we hung out with them until the youngest butterfly was one day old.

on easter sunday, we brought the habitat into our backyard and unzipped it… one by one, we watched each butterfly take flight! it was so exciting for N …and for me and my husband, too!

what an a beautifully educational and magical spring activity to do with children! i think we might have to get the ladybug kit next…

how are you celebrating earth day on sunday?

for N’s fifth birthday, we gave her a small aquarium, and she was able to pick out two goldfish and a snail as new pets. well, sadly her sweet snail, marigold, didn’t last more than a month. (something about nitrates in the water, for which we have since gotten new water purification drops.) with this gift, we realized that the difficult lessons of mortality would soon be upon us, and here they are, sooner than we expected.

r.i.p. marigold

in its inherent transcendent nature, art is able to make the invisible visible, to make the unseen seen. according to carl jung, the processes involved in art making are most similar to spiritual processes than any activity – both provide comfort, order, and beauty. when the art image is the embodiment of a feeling, such as the grief of a loss (yes, even that of a pet snail,) the art object can becomes empowered as a talisman of sorts, providing containment and solidity for an otherwise nebulous emotion. the art we all made as offerings in the snail’s funeral helped to elevate the ceremony to that of a ritual, modeling for N healthy ways of saying goodbye and processing feelings that can be difficult.

artful altar for marigold

once we broke the news to N that marigold had passed on, we decided we would hold a ceremony the following day in our backyard to celebrate his life and return his body to the earth. i explained to N that we might each want to have an offering for marigold on an altar space at the ceremony. she said she wanted to make a backdrop for the altar, a small sign, and a golden candle.

N creating the altar "backdrop." details on this technique coming soon on the blog. stay tuned!

N rolled a golden candle from beeswax for the altar, and made a little image of herself and marigold.

my husband offered flowers, and he cut heart shapes out of petals for the altar. i chose to offer a yellow snail candle holder that i quickly crafted with sculpey when N was asleep the evening prior to the funeral. (i don’t like to bake sculpey near her because of the fumes, so i did it at night with the windows and backdoor open while she was asleep in her room with her door closed.)

dried berries & branches for antennae

we gathered together around the altar in the backyard last weekend. my husband and i both said kind words and memories about marigold. N said she was “too shy” to say anything, but stood quietly and chin-quivery in front of the altar.

we buried marigold’s body in our flowerbed, where so many snails swarm in the spring. marigold’s spirit will be in good company in the coming months. N added a rock for his gravestone, and she decorated the grave site with her daddy’s heart petal offerings.

here lies marigold. as far as snails go, he was fast and sweet.

after a mindful, heartful goodbye to her snail, N was ready to move on to the reception food (popsicles) and making fairy houses in the backyard.

in creating our fall mantel (after plenty of pinterest research, of course) i decided we needed an indoor autumn wreath. i scored a really cool paned window at the salvage yard a couple of weeks ago, and it was begging for a little adornment. i’ve seen these cute little felt flowers all over the internet lately, and thought we’d give them a shot.

i purchased a $4 grapevine wreath from michael’s as the base. decor-wise, i straddle the line (not so elegantly) between rustic and modern, and the grapevine wreaths are definitely on the earthier side of things. i was hoping some sleek felt spirals would make them somehow more chic. N helped me to select some autumn colors of felt at michael’s, too. we decided to stay with just three colors. she had fun helping out in the whole process, which helps her to take pride in her creations as part of our home.

though i had seen the felt flowers around the blogosphere, i wasn’t quite sure where i first saw/pinned them and how to begin. after i conducted a search for a video tutorial, i coincidentally landed on my high school friend, beth’s, AMAZING blog, Home Stories A2Z, and she taught me and N how to do it! love that!

we followed beth’s clear directions, and it was suuuuper simple. N even made a flower of her own (but i did the hot glue part, of course.)

the flowers turned out rather cute! (i can see how it could get addictive… i now want to make N a headband with smaller versions of these on it!)

now to figure out the rest of the mantel… my painted pumpkin project for halloweening the mantel has been a total craft-fail so far. i’ll share about that soon…

a work in progress...

do you do a fall mantel or halloween mantel or switch it up? what’s warming your hearth this season?