Ballerina E

No, we haven't enrolled E in ballet classes. She has a soft toy of the character "Angelina Ballerina". We don't watch the TV show, but she does like the toy and loves to point out that Angelina has a tutu and a crown. E will often wear her 'princess crown' that I made for her and dance around the house pretending to be Angelina Ballerina. We have a couple of Angelina board books that my husband found in an op-shop, one of which is called "Angelina Can...". It's a very simple book. "Angelina can... leap... spin... do an arabesque... etc." E loves to do "as Angelina can".

Today I made E a "no-sew tutu" using this short video tutorial. I had just enough tulle left over from another project and I already had the elastic on hand, too. I know this next photo is really blurry, but it shows E "doing an arabesque," her favourite ballet move.

E loves to dance around the house, which is great because it has been stormy here for the last few days and we haven't had much chance to run around outside. Her other favourite dance is "Gangnam Style". It's funny to watch her do that dance.

-Polly

Happy Halloween

So, yesterday was Halloween. We don't do trick-or-treating or anything like that, but we had our own little Halloween fun.

I sewed together some "bat wings" for E to wear around the house, following these instructions (found via Pinterest) and using an old t-shirt for the fabric. She certainly wore herself out 'flying' around like a bat. We read "Going Batty", by Charles Reasoner, which has been a favourite board book for quite some time. E loved to act like the bat in the book by saying "Boo!" too all her toys and going upside-down.

It was surprisingly difficult to find Halloween stickers in the stores this year. There were plenty of generic costumes and horrible-looking candies, though. So that E could do a Halloween collage, I printed off a page of cute Halloween drawings (and drew a few of my own) and cut them out. Then E, armed with a glue-stick, stuck them onto some paper and added some details with coloured markers. She made two of these collages, one A4 size, the other A3.

I've seen these little hand-print ghosts done various times before. Yesterday we had a go at making our own. E loves painting and making hand-prints. We simply used white paint on black paper. When they were dry, we added some googly-eyes and they were done. So simple, but so cute.

While we had the paints out, E did some other paintings as well. I gave her some more colours to use and she painted using a combination of brushwork and finger or hand painting. The white-on-black for the ghosts worked really well, so I gave her a piece of red card to paint on using the white and that turned out really well, too. She still wasn't done with painting, so she did some (more colourful ones) on standard white paper, too.

Li'l Death

Earlier in the week, I had cut out some bat shapes from felt, thinking I'd make some bat-bunting or something. I never got around to finishing it, but E used the shapes and other felt scraps to make pictures on an un-cut piece of craft felt. I did make some Halloween-y paper toys. I made a little coffin (from here) which E liked filling with all kinds of treasures from gum-nuts to crayons to socks. I also made the "Li'l Death" from urban threads. Unfortunately our printer doesn't print in black, so I made a white and greyish grim reaper.

We definitely went for the 'cute' side of Halloween this year. E was a bit worried by the little witch (a trick-or-treater, not much bigger than E) who came to our house, but she soon realised that the witch and her similarly spooky friends were friendly witches and such. E gave them a smile and a wave goodbye.

-Polly

Paper Toys

Back on our train-themed day, I made some little paper trains and scenery that I found templates for at sanrio.co.jp. They were fun to make and really cute. Yesterday, I got the bug again and made a bunch of new paper toys.

 I found the template for the LMFAO robot on so-fresh.fr:

 

By far the simplest toy that I made was this simple cube with Monstro's face (from The Binding of Isaac). The template for this one can be found at the cubeecraft website:

I also made a couple of cute paper toys of the Spongebob Squarepants characters Gary and Plankton. These templates can be found at kamibox.de.

These paper toys certainly don't last long in the hands of a toddler, but I have fun making them and E has fun playing with them until they're too scrunched up to be classed as 'toys' any longer.

Anyone else found a crafty obsession lately?

-Polly

Flowers and Warm Weather

We spent a lot of time this morning out in the backyard, on the swing-set, pottering in the garden and just enjoying the warm weather. The day will soon become too hot to be doing much at all out there, so luckily we were all up fairly early to enjoy it. It has been hot and sunny here every day this week. Here's E on her swing, somewhere you can find her at least once a day:

The new seedlings in the garden are going well and have been getting lots of sun. The sprinkler system is all set up again, so they're getting well watered too. E and her dad went out and bought some more plants the other day: some flowers this time, which they planted along the back fence.

I'm not sure what these flowers are called. They are all different colours: pink, yellow, orange, magenta, bright red and deep red. We added a few bags of redgum chips around them and I think it looks rather pretty.

:)

-Polly

Spring Planting

So we finally got around to doing our Spring garden. We left it too late to start with seeds, so yesterday we went out and bought some seedlings, a bag of manure and a couple of big bags of mulch. This morning, E and I went outside in the (much needed) rain and planted all our new seedlings in the veggie beds. E also had great fun jumping in puddles. It's been a while since it rained.

Golden Oregano

Heirloom Oxheart Tomato

We've filled all of our veggie beds again now. The new plants are sweetcorn, zucchini, two different types of tomato, jalapenoes, mild chillies, basil, mint and oregano. Still surviving from last season's planting are parsley, beetroot, kohlrabi, red onion, celery, silverbeet, parsnips and one lonely Japanese burdock. We also have some eggplants, oregano, brown onions and older tomato plants that aren't in the beds, but surviving elsewhere in the garden. I'm looking forward to the bounty.

E enjoying the garden in the afternoon sunshine

We pulled  up some of the silverbeet, beetroot and parsnip and the last of the turnips and swedes. They became the base for a minestrone that I made for dinner. Gotta love those home-grown veggies. When hubby got home from work, he installed new sprinkler heads, so it will be easy to keep it all watered.

Happy gardening :)

-Polly

Peek-a-boo

It's been a whole week since I've posted here. Miss me?
I haven't been taking a lot of photos of our life lately and those that I have are still on the camera which I don't have access to at the moment. I still have my phone-camera, so here's a couple of photos of E playing a favourite game:

Peek-a-boo!

-Polly

Jiggling Jellyfish

The letter 'J' is a very active letter... think 'jumping' and 'jiggling'. We certainly did a lot of jumping and jiggling as E was learning about the letter. Our picture is of a jellyfish in the shape of a 'J'.

The following weekend, we visited AQWA (Aquarium of Western Australia), where we could see some real jellyfish.

We got to see a lot of other interesting sea creatures, too. E loved the giant sting rays and the sea turtles. Here's some pictures of some other things we saw:

anemone

boxfish

lots of fish

octopus and corals

-Polly