Playground Love

It feels like we’ve been insanely busy lately! All three of us had birthdays in the past few weeks. For my birthday, A spent the weekend with her grandparents in Abbotsford meaning, M + I had a dinner (Maenam- rating: awesome!) and a movie date (The Hangover- rating: meh, funny in parts)!

For M’s birthday, I surprised him with tix for the Phoenix Suns + Portland Trailblazers pre-season game at GM place. Although he checks the NBA site daily, somehow he hadn’t heard about this game! What a surprise!

So- goodies for you today include:

1. Pics of a dress…

…Made for A last year when I enrolled in a sewing class with the VSB’s Continuing Education. I pulled this out of the closet yesterday and am so happy it fits her. I had completely forgotten about it. I am so glad that I took the time to learn proper terminology and techniques for basic-intermediate sewing. I found out neat things like the existence of zipper feet, how important pressing and ironing can be and had a lot of fun in general creating all sorts of things.

In addition to the dress, I made a reversible blanket that is water resistant on one side and a fuzzy orange fleece on the other. This is really light weight and stuffs really neatly into a stuff sack made with the same purple water resistant fabric, a recycled rainbow guitar strap and a clippy thingy (so my terminology hasn’t advanced since the end of the class March 2008).

2. Pics of the sewing machine…

…I have been gifted with by my grandma. I am a bit daunted by all the fancy functions, but awed by it’s amazing construction (it’s metal, folks- not plastic!), comes in a great tiny fold-out table with matching stool (which I will repaint and recover), and also comes with an assortment of fancy add-on bits and bobs   (I see a zipper foot, yay!). I am really excited to get this up and running but first must track down an on/off switch which was sheared off during the packing for my parents’ WPG to YVR Cross-Canada Couch Surfing adventure.

3. Pictures of the birthday banner…

…I made for A’s party a few weeks ago. I used acrylic (the purple and white)  and wool felt (green) for this project. I had never used wool felt before, it’s got a really nice weight to it, where as the acrylic is almost a feather weight. Wool would not have worked with the crowns I made as birthday goodies.

I cut out a bunch of triangles, sewing the short edge over about 1/4 inch and threaded some yarn through to hang the banner from. I cut out rectangles of white felt to make the letters so that they would all be the same height and width and used scissors to design the letters from there. Easy and re-usable! I’ll be able to use this for many birthdays to come, and the “Amina” part of the banner can be detached and used for  or anyone’s birthday celebration.

4. Pictures of some scarves…

that Heather and I dyed up the other week. Kool-aid and food colouring does it everytime. When the scarves are all together, they actually smell faintly sweet- reminds me of my childhood. Although I can’t really remember drinking a ton of Kool-aid,  I do remember those silly commercials where the Kool-aid guy would crash through walls and things.

Hope you enjoyed! Upcoming projects: tie-dying and words of wisdom for camping with a toddler.

xok

At last, a healthy way to use up all of that Kool Aid sitting in your cupboard!

A bunch of us got together a few weeks ago for a koolaid dyeing party. This is what we used:

• 30 inch x 30 inch Habotai Silk scarves (undyed) from Maiwa. Dharma Trading in the US has a great price on these as well though.

• To prep the scarves, place as many as you can into a glass bowl with hot water and 2 cups of vinegar for 30 mins.

• For dyeing, use 3 cups warm water, 2 cups vinegar, and 3 packs of Kool Aid for every 2 scarves.

• Let the scarves sit in the liquid, stirring regularily. The scarves will literally suck out all the colour from the Kool Aid and the water will turn milky.

• At this point, take the scarves out and run under warm water until the water runs clear. I noticed the reds tended to run a lot- if you find this is happening with your reds, place them in more water and vinegar and let them soak for about another ten mins. Run them under warm water until the water runs clear.

• Hang to dry.

Simple and fun! I did this with some moms, but I’ve read that it can be fun to get older kids to help with this as well. Some Kool Aid colours worked better than others. The bright ones came out really lovely. We started to experiment with food colouring as well, but ran out of scarves when things really got creative. We were all a bit disappointed that our night had to come to an end. I am hoping to do some more soon. They make great gifts- I’ve alrady given a bunch away for birthdays! Encourage your little one’s imagination to run wild with these. They can be used for all sorts of things. How do you use yours?

In the picture above, the rose coloured scarf was done with red Kool Aid+ blue food colouring. The bright yellow was done with food colouring.