Thoughtful Friday

"Nature will bear the closest inspection,

She invites to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf

and take the insect view of her plain"

- Henry David Thoreau

crafting for a higher purpose

This week I find myself inspired. The source of this inspiration is SouleMama and her project Mama to Mama. This website was set up to give us crafters an opportunity to make a difference by doing what we love doing - crafting! The initial project (I am sure there will be more to come!) will benefit newborns in Northern Haiti where maternal mortality is the highest in the Western Hemisphere. Women mostly give birth without skilled help, and 1 in 40 women die from pregnancy or childbirth related complications. Konbit Sante is a volunteer organisation working to improve health conditions and they need basic maternity packs. The contribution we are invited to make is these little newborn knotty caps. Perfect opportunity to find a use for old cotton t-shirts! Patterns are available on the Mama to Mama website.

This afternoon I was sorting through Little Possum's clothes looking for outgrown items to recycle/reuse. I found some leggings and experimented a little. Guess what? The legs are perfect to turn into little beanies/knotty caps! Cut the leg off, a couple of seams to taper the leg a little more and hemming up (I haven't done the hemming yet in the photo below).

I would imagine that sleeves from long-sleeved t-shirts would work equally well as long as the diameter isn't too big!

This particular pair were a bit of a drab colour perhaps..... not many newborns in chocolate brown...., but it worked for a practice.

by popular demand....... Witches Fingers recipe!

A little late for this year's Hallowe'en, but you should have lots of time to plan for next year... :)

WITCHES FINGERS

1 cup butter

1 cup icing sugar

1 egg

1 tsp almond essence (and remember.... you now have to be 18 to buy this here in Oz....)

1 tsp vanilla essence/concentrate

2 2/3 cups plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

3/4 cup whole almonds - blanched

red cake decorating gel/writing gel

Preheat oven to 160 C

Beat butter, sugar, egg, almond essence and vanilla until soft.

Gradually beat in flour, baking powder and salt until mixed.

Cover dough and refrigerate for 30 min - makes dough easier to work with.

Work with 1/4 of the dough at a time -

roll a tbsp worth of dough into a finger shape

press almond into one end for a nail

shape the knuckles - you could be really creative and score the knuckles slightly to make them look even more authentic.

Place on lightly greased baking sheet and bake for 20-25min or until a nice pale golden (shortbread sort of colour)

Cool cookies down for a few minutes, then pull the almond off gently, put some red gel on the nailbed and press the almond back down... the gel should ooze out around, making it look deliciously disgusting.

Eat....

stitch by stitch

One little princess, one castle and one fairy princess, all genuine Little Possum designs lovingly embroidered by me.

Now I will be diving head first into my scraps tub to find the perfect fabrics to frame these treasures with. LP has some very nice cotton pyjamas that she has outgrown, and the fabric has some beautiful small roses. Might just do the job for one of the borders.


The final goal? I pondered a cushion, and I pondered a wallhanging before finally settling for 3 separate pictures that I will have framed. I am thinking family heirloom here! :)


Turtle is asking for his own work to be immortalised, so I am gathering some of his monster drawings and rocket/space drawings until I decide on a theme.

fairy friends

Take one mango box, some cardboard rolls, some scraps and glue..... the fairies are happy to have a home as luxurious as this, I am sure.


Although I do believe that the natural fairy habitat is in our flowerbed, it would seem that these particular 3 have become quite used to the trappings of indoor living. Making themselves right at home, they are. Given to have tea parties anywhere, anytime! The blue-winged one is a rather messy eater too, by the looks of things!

Little Possum has entered into correspondence with the fairies still in the garden, and she leaves tiny cards among the flowers for them to find. They are very polite fairies and always leave a card in return. LP saves these in her little treasure chest.

In a moment of doubt LP asked me to provide a handwriting sample to make sure it wasn't me writing the cards...... but my sample script wasn't small enough so LP is satisfied that it is indeed her little fairy friends leaving her letters.

lost for words?

My best find for the kids in October was this website. My kids all love doing wordsearches, and I think they are fantastic for helping with reading skills as well as being fun. The Wordsearch generator allows you to type in the words that you want to use in a puzzle. This way you can set the degree of difficulty (eg the number of words) and the theme. Setting the theme around a child's favourites like Pokemon characters or fairytale creatures makes it even more fun, and you can sneak a few spelling list words in too!
Happy puzzling!

trick or treat!

the food.......

the costumes......

the loot......

and the comments in the car on the way home from the Trunk or Treat activity:

"Mum, that was AWESOME!"

"This was the best day of my life!!"

if only it were so simple.....

Doodlebug is 9 years old now, and is starting to pay serious attention to the world around him and the issues at hand. Like the upcoming US election.

D: "It's the US presidential election on Tuesday"
Me: "Yes.. do you know who the candidates are?"
D: "Obama... Barack Obama and John McCain", "but who's the woman?"
Me: "That's Sarah Palin - she is McCain's running mate and will be the VP if he wins"
D: "So who's Obama's mate?"
(more discussion on the VP role)

Doodlebug then wanted to know who was the republican and the democrat, and
D: "What's the difference?"
cue a very simplified explanation of tax, welfare, health and education issues (we'll save foreign policy for another time) and how the 2 parties have different ideas of how to run the country, how to get money in and how to spend it.

When we got to tax and welfare, and the Democrat idea of increasing taxes to help those who need it, spreading the wealth. Doodlebug thought this was a great idea.

"After all, Mummy, those who are doing allright and have lots of money can help those who need it. They'll still be doing allright".

How do I explain the nature of greed, the attitude that "I earned it, I keep it..... let others sort themselves out" to a 9 yr old who thinks sharing makes perfect sense? If only it were that simple.

Thoughtful Friday

" The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes (...)"

- William Shakespeare

("Merchant of Venice")

it's getting a bit spooky around here....

Another great giveaway!!

Indie Fixx has put together the most amazing bundles for this giveaway. Click on the image, enter the competition....... and let Jen know you read about it here..... Good luck!

FHE - a crafty one

last night's FHE was a messy one - it was wonderful!! We had made monsterheads to collect treats in on Hallowe'en and the evening was spent painting while we chatted about school, global warming and whatever else the children wanted to talk about. I love to hear what they are thinking about and wondering about.

getting ready to make papier mache

3 eggs drying off overnight

grrrrrrrrrowl!

painting, mixing colours... (how many shades of browny purple can we achieve?)

Hallowe'en - we are almost ready!!

For the Hallowe'en costumes I was hoping that the children would have wanted to recycle their costumes from earlier this year, and be convicts, dragons or fairies.... or any combination of those. But they all decided on being spooky for this year's Trunk or Treat activity. I didn't do any sewing this time, though...

The bat was made dissecting a cheap black umbrella (perfect use for that old umbrella with the broken spoke sitting in the hallway closet!), cutting out the metal bits and dividing up the fabric to make 2 wings that I glued onto a black long sleeved T-shirt (glued to the seams of the sleeves and the side seams of the shirt).

Add the black leggings and some black socks as well as a hood with some ears glued on, and we have a bat!

The skeleton was even easier....... except the struggle for anatomical correctness. Poor Turtle looks slightly doublejointed, and he has the pelvis of a childbearing woman...

A pot of white fabric paint was all it took to turn a long sleeved T-shirt and a pair of black trackies into a skeleton costume. For a bit of added excitement, I painted on a layer of phosphorescent fabric paint so that we will glow in the dark. Woo hoo!

But, where is the third costume, I hear you say? Well, the ghost is a little shy..... but will be captured and put on display tomorrow!

our higgledy piggledy garden

Spring has sprung and summer is on its way. It seems that we are all gardening at the moment. Green Thumb seems to be highly contagious. I think Suzi might have been the source of the outbreak, but Lisha seems to be affected as well. This week the bug hit us and we have been gardening..

Ours is a bit of a higgledy piggledy garden with plants in random places and me hoping they'll be friends with their neighbour. I hear there is a system to which plants that thrive next to each other, but I am hoping that my garden of individuals will come together in a common cause - to bear fruit!

Sam inspired me with his strawberry jam, so in a moment of spontaneity I planted a couple of strawberry plants. Add that to the zucchini, cucumber, capsicum,tomatoes, rhubarb, beans, watermelon, lettuce, onion and various herbs growing in a couple of beds. The carrots are a little particular, so I planted them in a box by themselves. And just for fun we planted lots of sunflower seeds around the garden as well.

The worms in the wormfarm have been busy making lots of compost which I spread over the garden, and if I listen very carefully I think I can hear the plants saying "yum yum!". As I dug out the compost I decided to let a handful of worms come along for a sea-change. I hope they like their new patch!

My greatest joy in the garden at the moment is our passionfruit vine. Apparently I should have been pruning it some weeks ago before it started flowering.... oops... But it is now full of beautiful flowers, bearing the promise of a big harvest of fruit later in the summer. Better keep that a secret from the local cockatoos and possums!

Marie Terese gown giveaway at Grosgrain!

For those of us who have little girls who like dress-up, here is the ultimate of princess gowns.... and it's a giveaway!! (but you've got to hurry.... it ends very soon). I just stumbled across this website during my blogland surf, and couldn't believe the gorgeous creations this clever woman has made....... makes me think my costumes could do with a little tarting up :)

Thoughtful Friday

"We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull while others are bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box"
- Robert Fulghum

another sleeping child photo

yes, I know I posted my sleeping treasures a couple of evenings ago.... but when MOTH came home this evening and did his rounds, he came out looking for the camera. He pointed out that if we painted Doodlebug blue, he'd look remarkably like a smurf. So, I had to have a little play around with my paint.net software.... I couldn't work out how to tint his skin, so I went second best.......

Hallowe'en is almost here

and we're getting ready.... Already a bat has moved into our house and I'm sure other spooky creatures will be following soon. And, if that wasn't scary enough.... we seem to have a new spider in the house... I always thought the huntsman was a little intimidating, but this new one is a particularly hairy, googly-eyed, long-legged specimen and it has taken up residence outside Turtle's room! I might need Mason's expert help to identify this one
Turtle made a black pom-pom, for legs I twisted 3 pipecleaners together and tied them to the pompom, add a pair of googly eyes, and a new species is born!

doing my rounds after coming home from work....

I found this motley crew.... a Doodlebug with a beanie on his head (were you feeling cold tonight, my darling?), a Turtle whose hair is having a party tonight (some serious combing required in the morning, my treasure), and a sweet little Possum fast asleep in her Paradise of Pink (did the fairies whisk you off to a land of dreams?)

"sleep, my sweethearts, have no fear

sleep my darlings, I am here" (Mem Fox, "Sleepy Bears")

"The most powerful combination of human emotions in the world is not called out by any grand cosmic event, nor accounts found in history books or in a novel, but merely by a parent gazing down upon a sleeping child"

Thomas S. Monson

magazine campaign update...

I am continuing my campaign. Since the petrol stations/forecourt operators have been dismissive of my concerns regarding their prominent display of "adult content" magazines, I decided to take the matter up with our local MP. One of the offending petrol stations is literally around the corner from his office, so I am hoping for a little MP clout.

Meanwhile I see from this news item that the petrol stations are in hot water over their magazine sales. Keep the pressure up!