crafty kids

Carter has been asking me to sew for ages. He watches me sew all the time and knows the ins and outs of my sewing machine (Have I mentioned my new machine? I bought it from a friend and it's leaps and bounds better than my old machine. I'm very much in love with it.) He knows what the pedal does, how to put down the presser foot and lift it up. He'll stand on the back side of my machine and lift it up and down for me. If I get up he hops in my chair and tries to take the bobbin in and out and messes with the thread to rethread the machine, twirls knobs and all sorts of cute and horribly annoying things.

Some time ago we went to the fabric store and chose some fabric for him to make a pillow. We were finally able to sit down today while Oz was napping and sew. He sat in my chair and I raised the pedal up so he could reach it. He sewed the entire pillow, stuffed it and then worked with me to close up the opening by hand. He was so proud of himself.






Watch the video, it's super adorable.


The finished product.

easter eggs

We didn't celebrate Easter last year, but this year my husband decided he wanted to so I left him in charge of it. It turns out what he really wanted was Easter candy (which I'm pretty sure you can buy without having to celebrate the holiday) and he had no real desire to do any of the traditional things. After limping along in his planning for a week I took over the things that I enjoyed about the holiday, which included dying eggs.



Earlier last week I had caught a glimpse of Martha Stewart's 36 Easter Eggs and decided to try a few techniques out. Just like everything Martha does, they ended up being harder than they looked.

First we tried out the lace eggs. Martha's turned out crisp and beautiful. My first two attempts were barely visible, but my third attempt turned out much better.



Not as crisp as hers, but still nice. We also tried the botanical eggs, but instead of leaves, I made some cutouts of Mater and Lightning McQueen as those were much better suited to the egg audience in this house.



Our last try was the marbleized swirls, but they turned out nothing like hers so I overdyed them with teal since that seemed to cover all manner of sin. All in all, we ended up with a lovely bunch of eggs that looked darling on the dinner table.