baby G's rug (in progress)

In October M will have a co-star on our blog, his new sister G.  We're just starting to get things ready for G's room and Pinterest is providing lots of great (potential) ideas.  The first attempt I'm making at a DIY item for her room is a rag rug.  There are lots of examples out there but this blog, DIY & Crafts, was the site that provided my inspirational pictures and instructions.  I think the one this mom made is adorable.

In theory, a "rag rug" is supposed to be made of old clothes or other materials you don't need anymore.  I loved the idea of using old baby clothes but Baby G's room colors are yellow, gray, and light purple.  M's old wardrobe pretty much consists of blues, reds, and greens so that didn't really work out.  M and I went to Joann Fabrics and bought material instead.  I've never bought fabric for anything in my life so it was an interesting experience that included picking up and putting back at least ten different fabrics.  I settled on a really soft cotton.  The only downside is that the edges fray a bit when it's cut.  I'm not anywhere near enough of a fabric expert to tell you what kind of material might not do that though.

One of the problems I had was figuring out how much material to buy.  I read various blogs and blog comments from people who had made them and found a lot of different answers.  I ended up buying three yards of each color.

Here's my warning on this project: it's very time consuming.  I've been working on it about one week and I've maybe put in four hours total of work on it.  Here's the current progress:

At least I have 18 weeks left.  The bottom is a non-slip rug mat you'd use under an area rug.  The only thing I'm doing differently than DIY & Crafts is tying the pieces instead of leaving them loose.  The piece of rug mat I bought is about 3 feet by 5 feet.  We'll see if the whole thing gets done or if it gets cut down.  This blog will be updated when it's finished, hopefully before October 24th.

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UPDATE: 6/25

I've gotten through the first 9 yards of fabric and ended up with about 3 feet by a little over 1 1/2 feet of finished rug.  

UPDATE:  Read about the finished rug here.

farm crayon party favors

M turned two this week and we celebrated with a farm-themed party.  I shared a lot of our party decorations from M's first birthday party but I didn't do too many decorations this year.  I did want to share our favor.  We gave M's little friends farm-shaped crayons.  I've seen these done on both Pinterest and Facebook in a variety of shapes and they were pretty easy to make.

I started by ordering the farm-shaped candy mold that included figures of a cow, sheep, horse, and tractor.  I found ours on ebay for under $2.  M had a wide variety of broken crayons so we collected all of them up, took off the wrappers, and broke them into smaller pieces.  I used a sharp knife to cut them small, which isn't completely necessary, but they melt faster.

M liked helping by filling the candy mold with the pieces.  He was more involved than I expected him to be, which was nice.  We filled each mold then baked them at 200 degrees for about 15-20 minutes each.  I'm guessing on the time because I really just kept an eye on them until they were completely melted.  Our candy mold was made of thin plastic (on the cheap side) and it warped after 3 or 4 batches so I would probably turn the oven down to 150 next time if I was using a similar mold.  I have seen some nicer ones that can probably stand the higher heat though.

When they were melted we stuck the whole tray (on a cookie sheet for easier moving) into the fridge to cool.  After about 10 minutes they popped right out of the mold.  The tractors were a little tricky because they had a thin middle section and kept breaking.  We had to overload them with crayon pieces to get them to work.

We got small cellophane favor bags, put a few in each, and attached a "made by M" tag.  M got a set of extras (and rejects) that seem to have held up pretty well.  I've found that he hasn't broken any by coloring with them but some haven't stood up to him throwing or dropping them.  We have a few headless cows around the house.  

I really liked this idea.  I found through searching that candy molds come in a wide variety of shapes (who knew?) so you could potentially make these for almost any occasion.  

ice cream in a bag

We haven't posted too much lately but summer is coming (seems like it's here today) and M and I already have a long list of fun activities to try in the coming weeks. 

Today we experimented with making our own ice cream using the Ice Cream in a Bag recipe. We used the one from the Disney website but Googling "ice cream in a bag" brings up plenty. 

This is the process:

Mix 1 cup of Half and Half, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract in a ziploc bag. In a larger (ours were actually the same size) ziploc bag fill 1/2 way with ice cubes and add 1/2 cup of salt. Then shake the whole thing for about 5 minutes. 

Obviously I prepared it but M enjoyed both shaking the bag and dancing to the sound when I shook the bag. It was a little on the heavy side for him but he managed. 

Ours was done in a little less than 5 minutes. It's pretty easy to tell when it's ready. On the website of one of the recipes I read it showed children eating the ice cream right out of the smaller bag. We put ours in a bowl and added sprinkles because the inside bag comes out covered in salt. I wasn't a huge fan of the taste (maybe less vanilla extract if we do it again) but M liked it!  One other thing- as you can see in the picture it melted rather quickly after coming out of the bag. M didn't mind but I imagine it would melt super fast outside on a hot day. 

abc book

M has been getting into the ABCs. We've always had a big foam alphabet mat on the floor in his toy corner of the basement. When our dog Skippy had back surgery and couldn't walk on our hardwood floors we had to use a alphabet mat to make him a path through the kitchen. M will try saying the letter names as he walks on it or he'll pull one right out and try to tell me what it is.

One of our first posts on this blog was about M's people book, a simple little photo album with pictures of his family and friends and labels of their names. That's always been one of his favorites. He loves looking at photographs and I've made him various other albums that are "his" that he can pull out to look through. Our newest book is an alphabet book of M's favorite things (and a few people). It's mostly people but also includes some coloring book pictures or magazine pictures (some of those letters are tough!). The most important part is that each picture is of something M can quickly recognize and say the word for. This way, when we look through it I can say, "Z is for..." and he can be part of the reading by saying "zebra."

I bought another cheapie photo album and a pack of scrapbooking letter stickers bringing the cost of this project to probably about $5. M loves it and even though its not done (X ideas welcome, as M doesn't know X-rays yet), we've "read" it several times since yesterday.

Here is a sample page, T is for Thomas:

window blocks

M has these great foam blocks that we use all the time (we're big fans of blocks).  Today we came up with a new use for them that M had a lot of fun with.  We used water to stick them to our slider and make pictures...

We got a small bowl of water to dip the blocks in and then we stuck them to the glass.  We made a tower and then some letters.  M's favorite part was the dipping...

but he also caught on to the sticking part.  He was also a fan of splashing which is why we only used about a cup and a half of water.  However, I put paper towel under the bowl and when doing this again I would definitely use a towel (or two).  If you have anything made of that foamy material it's a great activity because the pieces just wipe off at the end.

egg carton caterpillar

This is an oldie but a goodie so I'll keep it brief....

Take an old egg carton and cut it in half.  Turn it upside down and paint/decorate it.  We used our favorite Crayola paint:

Our My favorite part of painting these days is that we use one color at a time and M has to tell me the color word for the new color he wants to use.  His favorite colors are blue and red so even though he can say all the colors, he typically will tell me that everything is either blue or red - except when we're painting and he has a real reason to tell me the right color!

Anyway, let the caterpillar dry then add eyes and a pipe cleaner antenna :

Valentines

M doesn't go to daycare so we didn't have any little friends to make Valentines for this year.  Instead, we made some for a few of our relatives.  These were fairly easy to do and M had a pretty good role in helping to make them, which is always my goal.

We started by gathering a bunch of our pink and red construction paper sheets and painting them.

Next I traced M's hands on cardboard and cut out several of each hand from the paintings he made:

 Last, I cut out some hearts and glued a left and right hand onto the heart.  We had extra hearts so I made a decoration for the door to our basement as well.  We tend to hang a lot of M's art there:

On the back of each I wrote them out and then M "signed" them with crayon.  There's always something I don't get a picture of!