Dollhouse Pillow

Once I saw this idea for a dollhouse pillow at A Beautiful Mess, I HAD to make one for the girls' felt dolls.  It may have taken me a year and half to finish the dolls, but it only took me a week to make the pillow such was my mania.  

I followed my own pattern because I wanted it to look like our house with the bay window and bushes in the front, and I wanted to be able to use it for the felt dolls.  However, there's a tutorial at A Beautiful Mess if you want to make your own.  

I already had all the fabric on hand from old projects, so the only thing I had to buy was the Polyfill to stuff it.  It took two bags, but with a coupon, it only cost me $15.  Hooray!  

The windows are pockets, and the front door opens.  

And it's big.  Really big.  Here's a picture of Maddie (complete with bunny slippers and fairy dress) to get an idea of the scale.  

We use the window pockets to store our felt paper dolls and their clothes.  But I'm sure as time goes on, other trinkets and treasures will make their way into those pockets.  

The front door opens up into a bed.  Vivi really likes trying to tuck the dolls in.  

I thought about adding more pockets and beds to the back of the pillow, but I decided to leave it plain in the end so that the girls have a flat, more comfortable, side to lean against.    

The girls are big fans.  They play with it.   

But more often they lounge on it...

And Maddie really loves to bounce on it!  

It's held up to the abuse well over the past three weeks.  Fingers crossed that those stitches hold for the long term!  

Felt Paper Dolls

I made the girls this set of felt paper dolls.  Madeline loves dressing and undressing her dolls, so these are perfect for her.   

I drew out my own patterns, traced them on to felt, embroidered their faces, and used my sewing machine to piece them together.  The dresses are made out of various scrap fabrics I had in the house, backed with felt and a circle of Velcro to help keep them in place.  The girls can pick the dolls up to play with them without their clothes falling off.  

There's a Madeline doll:  

Complete with Olaf Bear.  Obviously.  

Then I made her some friends:

And a whole mess of clothes:

Funny story about these dolls.  They were a long time in the making.  The summer I was pregnant with Vivienne (nearly two years ago), Madeline spotted some fabric paper dolls at a craft fair.  I felt that I could easily make her some using materials we already had at home, so I busily got to work that very same afternoon.  They came together over the next few days, and Madeline loved them, but I neglected to finish them.  The dolls were mostly complete, but there were little things like a missing piece of Velcro and unlined dresses that I just never got around to.   

This is why it's almost always a better idea to just buy something somebody else already made.  Cause sure, I could make my own, but will I ever finish it?   Iffy.  

Madeline recently dug the dolls out from the bottom of her toy box and asked me to finish their dresses.  I figured it was about time those poor dolls had some decent clothes, so last month I finally made it a priority to get them done.   

Now that Vivi is older, she really likes playing with them too, so I've got a Vivi doll waiting to be finished.  Hopefully it doesn't take me another year to get around to it.

You Rock! Monster Valentines

Sometimes I get random crafty urges that need to be taken care of immediately.  When we collected these beach rocks weeks ago, (before it started snowing forever and always) I just had to draw monster faces on them.  A few paint pens and half-an-hour later, voila!  Rock monsters.

Whenever I feel like there are not enough hours in the day to get the dishes and laundry done, I remind myself that there would be if I were not too busy doing stupid things like painting rocks.  Oh well, priorities.  

Those little rock monsters turned out cute, but then the problem becomes what to do them.  They sat in a bowl on our table for a month.  Maddie played with them.  Occasionally Vivi would try to eat one.  Don't eat rocks, Vivi.  You only have four teeth.  

So I decided to turn them into Valentines for Maddie's classmates.  I realize that this makes me that mom who gave out rocks for Valentine's Day, but at least it's not candy, right?  Maybe?  

I wrote, "You Rock!" on some neon pink index cards we already had, and taped the monsters in place.  

Madeline signed the backs and added some stickers.  

I put them in little 3 x 4 plastic bags, and they're good to go. 

If you have any extra rocks lying around, you too could give out rocks for Valentine's Day.  Cause nothing says, "I love you," like a rock.  And it doesn't have to be a rock monster.  Rock bunnies? Rock bugs? Rock lobsters?  The possibilities are endless.  

Happy Valentine's Day!  

Homemade Christmas Cards

I tried many, many times to get a cute Christmas picture of the girls together.  But this kept happening:

Such is life with babies...

So I thought a photo card might not happen this year.

Instead, with the help of Maddie's thumbs and some craft materials we already had around the house, we made our cards.  

We started by making two just for the grandparents, but they were so cute that we kept going.  

Maddie's thumbs were game, so she stamped away.  

After they dried, I drew some quick doodles to turn her prints into Santa and his reindeer.  I did not invent this idea.  I think I probably saw it on Pinterest cause that's where all good ideas are born.  

But I did come up with our other design:

Cause Yeti are awesome.  

Maddie colored in the trees!

I like how they're each a bit different.  They also took less than an hour to make.  Hoo-Ray!  

Then I tried for a picture one last time, and a miracle occurred:

They were staring at the television over my head.  Ellen I think...

I taped the pictures to the back of our cards and called it a day.  

Merry Christmas!

Monday Morning Messes with Mumma and Maddie Bear

I don't think there's anything lovelier than autumn in New England.  Fall is my favorite.

So, when I saw the directions for Fall Leaf Window Stickers at The Mess for Less, I thought this little project would be the perfect way to bring some of those brilliant fall colors indoors.  Plus, we already had all the materials on hand.  

I drew some leaf shapes on a sheet of contact paper.  The original tutorial offers a leaf printable to trace if you are more of a perfectionist than I am.  

I used some painter's tape to secure the contact paper to the table, and let Madeline go to town painting.  

She started off carefully staying in the lines, but Maddie likes to fill all the white space with color.  Before long, it looked like this:

We let the paint dry for a few hours, and then I cut out the leaf shapes.  After the shapes were cut, we removed the backing from the contact paper, and Madeline stuck them on our front windows.    

The sun shines through the paint in the late afternoon.   

Ta-da! The perfect fall craft. Madeline had fun, it took minimal effort on my part, she could get as messy as she wanted, and the end result still looks lovely.  I love the idea of removable window stickers in general.  The possibilities are endless. 

Monday Morning Messes with Maddie Bear

I've been trying to keep Madeline busy as these cold months drag on here in sunny New England.  We get out of the house a lot, and she goes to preschool a few mornings a week.  But on days when it's too cold to get dressed and Eric works late, I try to provide some interesting indoor activities for her to explore.

To lead into Saint Patrick's Day, we've been focusing on rainbows. 

For our first activity, I cut small squares of colored paper for Madeline to sort into a rainbow.  She enjoyed sorting the colors into different piles, but she wasn't too interested in gluing them down in rainbow formation.  

Instead, I left the squares out on the table with some glue and paper in case inspiration struck.  She poured the glue all over her paper to make "roads". Then she used the paper squares to make "houses".  By the time she was done, she had created a map of all our loved ones' houses.  Florida and Africa were also included because obviously...

Next, we used Skittles to practice counting and graphing.  I used a printable found here. She liked this because she got to eat the candy at the end.  She learned a little subtraction as she ate the candies one by one.  

I'm helping Madeline learn to spell her name, so I printed letters on the leftover squares of paper.  She arranged the letters in the correct order to reveal her name in rainbow colors.  

I followed up by asking her to use words to describe herself.  I wrote down her answers on strips of colored paper and attached them to her name. (I was going for a cloud...whatever.)

I was surprised, and pleased, that I didn't have to prompt her to come up with adjectives.  She is a confident child.  I love it.

M's favorite activity was a rainbow scavenger hunt.  We took turns picking bits of colored paper out of a box.  Then we had to find something in the room that matched our color. (Luckily, there were Legos nearby.) We continued until all the paper was gone, and we were left with a rainbow of toys on our living room floor.  She loved this!

We also played with color mixing using an ice cube tray, some food coloring, and a dropper.  I filled the tray with water and dyed three boxes red, blue, and yellow.  Then she used the dropper to create new colors in the empty boxes.  I showed her how red and blue make purple, etc, then I left her to investigate on her own.  We squirted some of the colors on a paper towel to observe how they mixed too. 

This activity kept her busy for a long time.  She kept asking, "Mumma, what will happen if we mix in this color?"   Pretty soon all we had was brown or gray.  

 Lastly, we finished up by making a rainbow cake. Maddie helped me mix the batter, but she mostly spent her time licking frosting from the beaters.

We had eaten half of it before I remembered to take a picture.   Yum, cake!