Friday, April 3, 2015

Straw Bale Gardening

My husband gets all the credit for our vegetable garden this year. He hauled the straw bales (left in the yard since November because the kids were building forts with them), soaking wet and several hundred pounds each, into the garden and lined them up where I wanted them per my little diagram. It is so beautiful and I am so happy! Leah's pumpkins, watermelons, winter and summer squashes, and celery have all germinated. She says the toilet paper tubes are working the best, although you have to water them more often because the cardboard wicks water away from your planting medium, and I agree with her. We have them on lazy Susans so that she can just spin them so they get sun evenly. I also like that you can write the type of seed and the planting date on the side of the tube! It's pouring here so I haven't planted anything that gets direct sown because I'm afraid the seeds will all wash away.

Full Disclosure:
DIY Lip Balm isn't happening this Easter -- the shopping list was just too expensive for us right now. But the idea will stay in the back of my mind. The children made the sewn felt eggs (I put their initials and the year on the back of each with Sharpie) and they will be decorations for the house as well as presents for teachers/relatives. I'm working on the knitted rabbits each evening. And the kids dyed the eggs today. We did the art tissue technique as well as the speckled ones. Just laid a tarp out on the living room floor! I gave each child (we had two kids come over today to do them with us) a paper towel. They wrote their names on their towel, to keep the eggs separate. Everyone did two of each technique. For the speckled ones, we just used tubes of watercolor paint and I let them blend in the water and see what thickness they preferred. They found out that if you make it wetter, your flecks are bigger. We just used old toothbrushes and they ran their fingers over the bristles to make the paint spray off. They had a great time! The speckled ones were my favorite:

Some techniques work best with white eggs, like the red cabbage dye. It's a beautiful blue but it's not strong enough to put color over brown or cream eggs. Brown chicken eggs still work really well for the art tissue technique though. The tissue was very strong. And the children said it was the favorite of their two techniques. I'm doing some more speckled ones myself tonight for the Egg Hunt, and the Painted Egg Cookies if I have the energy, and another mom and her son and our girls and Adam and I are doing an egg hunt Sunday morning. It's nice to be in a new neighborhood and start new traditions! The camo tarp on the floor was a special Southern Illinois touch. :-) Worked like a charm... and we didn't get dye or paint on the floor at all!!!

Since I'm not doing the Lip Balm, I think the girls might enjoy spending some time doing DIY Honey Facials. We have the lemon, the cinnamon, the plain yogurt, and the aloe vera plant for the juice. So this will cost me nothing and it will still make them feel pampered and happy! I can put a coupon for a DIY Honey Facial in each Easter basket.

Last Minute Gift Coupons template

Sunday, March 29, 2015

DIY Lip Balm

Our neighborhood food coop has a nice DIY page and I think I might try the DIY Lip Balm recipe as one last Easter gift.

As a surprise for her sisters, Natalie is making the Magic Tufty Cones from

She started them today. She is using Cat Grass as the grass seed and it should germinate Easter morning! I am making everyone a knitted rabbit. And, hopefully, lip balm!

(Not to take on too many things... It's a lovely windy March day so we have girls making kites -- also from All Year Round -- this afternoon. Adam and I were going to build and then let the children paint the pallet trellises cheery colors today... but that may have to wait. And I was going to make cookies... We bought some duck eggs from a friend and they are supposed to be great for baking. Who knows. I'm trying to remember that being pregnant means it all isn't going to get done. Last weekend we added seed and plant shopping to the weekly grocery trip and it made for a very late Sunday night dinner. But, on the bright side, we discovered our first seeds germinating this morning in little mini greenhouses made of strawberry containers, all the corrugated cardboard is down as our weed block layer, the straw bales are ready to go into place, and we are asking neighbors for their bags of leaves to be part of our compost/soil/nutrient layer in the "lasagna." Seems like everyone is raking leaves right now! Adam built me 3 more pallet compost bins this week so we now have 4. The garden is really happening!)

Anyway, the Lip Balm recipe calls for

1 tablespoon beeswax pearls (or 1 tablespoon grated, unbleached beeswax)
1 tablespoon shea butter
2 tablespoon carrier oil (sunflower, castor, almond or jojoba)
10-15 drops essential oil
1 teaspoon honey (optional, for those that like it slightly sweet)

I already have almond oil and coconut oil, essential oils, and honey. So I'll only need to get

100% Pure Unrefined Raw SHEA BUTTER

Beeswax Organic Pastilles, Yellow, 100% Pure

Empty Slide Top Tin Containers for Lip Balm (pack of 5)

I like the idea of having each girl collage & decorate the lid of her tin the way she likes. What a fun way to spend Easter morning!

Saturday, March 28, 2015

More Easter Crafts

In searching for my notes on the cute knitted bunny pattern I made once, I found a blog post from 2008 which I thought was really funny: Easter Egg Hunt. One thing I like about blogging is being able to look back at what I did with the children. And I threw a party once in a nightgown? REALLY???

I also found an even older post from my old blog with lists of Easter craft pattern resources, so I thought I'd copy that and put it here:

Easter

Easter is one of my favorite holidays and one I gather ideas for all year round. Here are my own favorite books, recipes, projects and ideas for celebrating this holiday.

Favorite Picture Books

The Golden Egg Book by Margaret Wise Brown
The Bunny Who Found Easter by Charlotte Zolotow
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Dubose Heyward
Summer Is...by Charlotte Zolotow

All Year Round

All Year Round by Ann Druitt, Christine Fynes-Clinton, and Marije Rowling is one of the best Waldorf books for celebrations throughout the year. Here are the Easter projects included in this book:

HOLY WEEK

Palm Sunday

Lenten garden
Magic tufty cones
A Palm Sunday and Easter decoration
Bread cockerels

Maundy Thursday

Chervil soup

Good Friday

Hot cross buns

Holy Saturday

Easter bread ring

Easter

The Easter garden
Easter candles
Hare (knitting pattern)
Cockered, hen and chick (knitting patterns)
Butterflies
- Cut-out butterfly
- Tissue paper butterfly
- Dress-net butterfly
Easter eggs
- Onion skin dye
- Batik eggs
- Scratched eggs
- Pace-egging (game)
- How to blow an egg
- How to hang an egg
- Crepe and tissue paper decorations
- Batik eggs for children
- Painted eggs
More things to do with eggs
- Miniature garden in an egg
- Surprise-egg-box
- Egg with seeds
Pop-up Easter egg card
Easter card
Simple Easter egg cut-outs

The Easter Craft Book

The Easter Craft Book by Thomas and Petra Berger is a little harder to find but well worth the trouble. It includes an amazing variety of projects. Here is the table of contents:

Spring
- Mother Earth and the flower-children in coloured wool
- Flower-children made from felt
- A picture made of fairy-tale wool
- Transparency made of modelling wax
- Palm Sunday branches
- A paper Palm Sunday cock

Dough figures
- Figures made with dough
- A cock for the Palm Sunday branch
- An Easter hare
- An Easter nest with an egg
- Little bread men
- Easter wreath made of dough
- Filled chickens
- A fruit-cake Easter hare or lamb
- A Whitsun bird made of dough

Easter figures with salt-dough
- Making salt-dough figures with children
- A plaited wreath of salt-dough
- Salt-dough for intricate figures
- An Easter hare
- An Easter medallion
- An Easter tree

A festive table
- An Easter tree
- Easter branches with eggs
- A box or eggshell with cress
- A little lamb made of butter
- Home-made egg cups
- Folding an egg-cup
- Cutting out doilies
- A plaited Easter basket or box
- Decorating candles

Working with wood and textiles
- A knotted cloth hare
- Woollen chickens (pom-poms)
- Woollen rabbits (pom-poms)
- A knitted hare -- 2006
- A knitted chicken
- A knitted Easter hare as an egg-cosy
- A felt egg-cosy
- A felt hen as an egg-cosy
- An Easter hare as a finger-puppet
- An Easter hare as a glove-puppet
- A knitted Easter hare as a glove-puppet

Decorating Easter eggs
- Before beginning to decorate
- Blowing out eggs
- Hanging up the eggs
- Eggs to be decorated by children
- Colouring eggs with plant dyes
- Painting eggs with water-colours
- Decorating eggs with wax
- Decorating eggs by scratching away the colour
- Using a stamp on eggs
- Decorating eggs with trimmings and wool (fabric notions)
- Decorating eggs with dried flowers and leaves
- Decorating eggs with quilling
- Decorating eggs with paper flowers
- Decorating eggs with straw and wood-shavings
- Making bakik eggs with flowers and plants
- Crech and Ukranian batik eggs

Working with paper
- Cutting out concertina paper
- Easter transparencies
- An origami hen
- An origami hare
- An origami swan
- Little doves of cardboard and tissue-paper
- Tissue-paper butterflies
- Flowers made of tissue-paper
- Elves made of tissue-paper