A Bit of Fall Nesting for My Mantel

This Fall, I'm finding myself simplifying. Summer brought layer on layer of color and energy into our home, and I need things to feel a bit warmer and calmer. The wreath is one of my favorites- I've had it for years, and have an assortment of silk and real flower picks, leaves, pine cones, and berry sprays to suit whatever season is at hand. The mirror is from Ikea, and the boxes are part of a nesting set that belonged to my grandmother. The flower garland...well, some colors I'm just not prepared to give up yet! (There are still some blooms outside, right? It's not totally out of place :) Oh, and the clock was a gift from my husband's aunt when we moved into our first house. If you can believe it, it's a plywood table round sponge painted with about 20 different colors. I love it!

The garland was a very sweet gift from fellow blogger Bobbi- the amount of work that went into crocheting all those flowers astounds me! (I think she has some fall colored ones in her Etsy shop now...with little acorns....so adorable!)

Preferred?

Woot- CSN contacted me again about doing a review.  Seems I'm on their "preferred blogger" list.  *blush*

The only problem is...I can never, ever decide what to order.  Seriously, it's a huge shopping network!

Anyone up for modern bedding?  (I have baby stuff on the brain...look how awesome those sheets are!)

Or look, I can pretend I'm back at a certain cell phone company I worked for very, very briefly after they devoured....err....acquired the company I was at... (please tell me I'm not the only telecommunications alumni out there...you guys know what I'm talking about, right?  If that little "jack" pillow down there was orange...)

Or maybe something more grown up is to your taste?  Yummy... I love those pea cocks!  

What gives?  I never knew I liked modern, but apparently modern bedding is kind of my cup of tea.

I Made This: Modpodged Shoes

I saw a few mentions in the past year of people Modpodging their shoes. Hmm....they all used fabric, but I thought I'd give it a go with tissue paper!

These are Ernie's church shoes. They looked a little worse for wear in the toes, and the ribbons were frayed, but they still had a bit of room so I wanted to revamp them just enough to buy us some time before she outgrew them.

I started by snipping away all the ribbons and froo-fra, then starting at one spot and painting a good thick coat of Modpodge, and sticking on chunky pieces of tissue paper, letting them be a bit rumpled and wrinkly, especially in the spots that needed more coverage. (This is a great reason to save tissue paper from gift bags, even if it's torn and wrinkled, if it has a FABULOUS print.)

She hasn't worn them yet (typical- I spend all this time re-doing her FAVORITE church shoes, and she decides to wear her glittery red shoes...the ones that are next on my list to be re-vamped because they're worn in the toes too!) but they are still flexible and look like they'll stand up to another few months of church.

*Story: My niece is very hard to impress. I made these shoes at her house after she went to sleep, and when she came down in the morning she stopped, turned to her mother, and said "I. Want. Shoes. Like. THAT." I promised her she could have these when Ernie outgrew them, if her mother couldn't find anything else we could gussy up for her!*

I've linked this up to the weekly Mad in Crafts linky festival- go check out the other fabulous projects!

Getting Ready for the Moon Festival

Mid-Autumn (or Moon Festival) is next week Wednesday! We're planning on celebrating with my sister's family- traditionally, families gather at night for picnics and moon-gazing on hilltops and in parks. Children might get lanterns to run around with, and people gift others with round fruits, like pomegranates, citrus, etc. The round reminds them of the moon, and gifting families with round fruits also shows your desire that their family will be whole and complete. Families eat moon cakes (very rich, buttery pastry cakes, with a round center of lotus bean paste or egg yolk.) The moon cakes traditionally have pictures imprinted on the top of various pictures having to do with the store of Chang-E, the Moon Princess. The moon is nice and full and bright, the harvest is in, and it's time to celebrate!

We've checked a few books out from the library to get my girls ready to celebrate- we're planning a daytime celebration with their cousins.

The Pet Dragon, by Cristoph Niemann- a really clever story about a girl and her pet dragon. Each page has a character or piece of the picture formed around the Chinese character for that same character or object, it's been a nice introduction into the Chinese use of symbols instead of letters. Ernie practiced drawing a few of her favorites (as you can see in the picture.)

Lin Yi's Lantern, by Brenda Williams and Benjamin Lacombe- A little boy is sent to the market to purchase everything they need for their Moon Festival celebration. He needs moon cakes, star fruit, rice yams....and peanuts for Uncle Hui, because they're his favorite. His mother says if he bargains well, he can use the rest of his money to purchase a red rabbit lantern! It's a very sweet story.

Red Eggs and Dragon Boats, by Carol Stepanchuk- A synopsis of various Chinese holidays and festivals, with nice little insets of trivia and recipes.

Food and Festivals: China, by Amy Shui and Stuart Thompson- Another run down of food and festivals in China, this one has photographs, and trivia and recipes as well.

The Minpins: The Painting Day

Thursdays are our Painting Days, so after we finished our songs and stories for the day the kids ran to the table to pull on their smocks. (Painting days are kind of a big deal. They involve PAINT, after all.)

We talked a little bit about our Minpin story again, and Ernie described everything she could about the Gruncher. It's a terrible, huge, smoke-breathing monster. The smoke is orange. (The smoke comes from the huge fire in the monster's throat/belly: he likes his food cooked, you see, so he cooks it on the way down. Pretty efficient!) We all set out to paint our very own Gruncher monsters.

Mimi, at first, pitched a royal fit because I want the girls to learn to share. Yes, I gave them ONE tray of paints to work from. Well, she just couldn't cope with that and resorted to painting her paper with her water and paper towel, before she deigned to reach for the color closest to her: brown. She had quite the puddle of water going on! It was kind of fun to see the paint swirling around on her page, and once again: I heart my oilcloth tablecloth. Oh, and laminate floors. They're indestructible.

(A note about the paint tray--you can see it in the pictures above. It's a plastic tray that used to hold ice-cream filled mochi. We have another tray with much smaller dimples, that used to hold ferrerro rocher candies. The water cups -- which you can't see-- used to hold apple sauce. I seem to have a garbage fetish when it comes to supplies for my kids.)

We talked a little about color theory too, as I mixed up green and orange paint for our monsters and trees. Ernie wanted a darker blue, so she mixed black into her blue paint.

Mimi's final product. Wonder Daddy pointed out that her Gruncher has a mouth! A great, big, gaping mouth. Yipes, scary!

Ernie's Gruncher, in red. The fellow with a yellow head and blue body is Little Billy. The structure on the left is the large tree that Little Billy climbed, and the red on the bottom, with the red dots, is the "carpet of strawberries." The leader of the Minpins, Don Mini, described the forest floor as being carpeted with strawberries, and Ernie took him at his word! She said that the strawberries would all melt and get hard, to make a carpet. Alright then. (Oh dear. The Gruncher is not bleeding- it seems I didn't let him dry sufficiently before hanging up the painting, and the paint dripped.)

I was happy to see that Ernie, at least, was OK right away with sharing paints, and also to see how much detail she'd retained from reading the story together. She's starting to get the hang of working with a paint brush- strokes, not scribbles. When she's 100% kind to her plastic art brushes, I'll move her to my nicer bristle brushes in varying sizes and shapes.


Paints are tempura, paper is construction paper from Ikea, as are the art smocks

The Minpins- A Pipecleaner Doll Tutorial

The girls and I finished reading The Minpins, by Roahld Dahl. It was, by far, our favorite read-aloud book to date. Long enough that it took a week to read (about 15 minutes a day) but short enough that it only took about a week to read! Gorgeous pictures, a thrilling story (with lots of thrill, and thankfully zero damage done- an important detail for kids), and a wonderfully sweet and tidy ending. Common to other Dahl books, the child is the hero and a gallant rule-breaker while the mother is largely absent from the story and rather close-minded and overly-cautious when present. However, the story is well-written and this is my only quibble. (Not everything can be so heavy handed as stories like...say...Goldilocks and the Three Bears, whose heroine in certain versions breaks into the home, destroys their property, and is then eaten as supposedly just and proper punishment.)

In the story, Little Billy climbs a tree and discovers a race of tiny tree-dwelling people with sticky boots for climbing and heads the size of peas, who call themselves the Minpins. The girls and I sat down with a package of pipe cleaners today to make a few Minpins for ourself- these are very simple! I hope to revisit this story, or similar ones, when my girls are a bit older and more dextrous to make things like clothespin dolls and such.

To make one doll, you'll need one pipe cleaner.

1) Cut the pipe cleaner in half, and set one half aside.
2) From step one, cut the remaining piece in half, and set half aside again. You should now have a 1/4 piece of a pipe cleaner for the scrap pile, and a 1/4 piece and a 1/2 piece for working with.
3) Pick up the larger piece and bend in half without creasing, and bend a loop in the center- this is the head. Bend the tail ends out at 90 degrees to make the feet.
4) Pick up the smaller piece and bend in half to form a "v"- slide it onto the first piece just below the head, and cross the ends a few times, wrapping them around the neck, to secure to the body- there's your arms!

You can cut small clothes out, tiny flower to glue to the heads, tiny circles to draw faces on and glue on the heads, etc. These minpins currently reside in a small paper house Ernie made at school a few months ago, but I'm hoping to find a suitable tree branch in the yard for them to live in while they visit us.

She didn't stay in bed

I found this on Ernie's shelf as we tucked her into bed tonight. I am guessing Miss OCD didn't take a nap today.