Rainbow Crown Tutorial

I have made a few of these Waldorf rainbow crowns now for Birthdays and as gifts, and I have been asked a few times if I would share how I make them. So here we go (Su this is especially for you).

 First fold an A4 piece of paper in half and draw one half of what you would like your crown to look like. The middle point of the crown will be at the fold of the paper.

 Cut it out and this will be your pattern.

 Next measure a piece of white wool felt. This is only a rough size and don't cut the points yet as it is easier to paint the rainbow colours onto a block of fabric.

 Next you will need water based paints/ water colour pencils in a rainbow of colours. I use these pencils. They are our very favourite in our house and we use them for so much. They give a beautiful vibrant colour and are easy to use and wash off furniture, walls and people really well ;-P

 Starting with red at the top draw/ paint your rainbow. Before you begin have a rough idea of how wide each colour will be so that you don't have a mostly red and orange crown with no space left for blue and purple at the bottom. Note that if you are using a water colour pencil the fabric may stretch some so be gentle. It is better to go over it many times than rip the felt.

 Try to make the colour as strong as possible because it will fade when dried.

 Using a paintbrush and water go over your colours and allow one stripe of colour to gently bleed into the one below. At the end of each brush stroke wash your brush in clean water to keep the colour pure.

 When you are happy with the look of your rainbow lie it flat somewhere safe and let it dry naturally. This may take a couple of days.

 When the felt is completely dry place your crown pattern over the top and trim around it.

 Now you have the shape of your beautiful rainbow crown. At this point you can add or embroider any decorations  Perhaps your child's name, their age, some starts? Whatever you fancy or you can keep it a simple rainbow.

 Next pin the crown into another layer of felt. I used white again but you can use any colour. Cut around your crown as tightly as possible to the edge. The thickness of 2 layers of felt will help it hold it's shape and sit up on your child's head rather than flop over.

Measure a length of elastic. I tend to use about 15 cm, so that there is some allowance for sewing it in and also so that it will grow with your child. You can always tie a knot in the back of it while the head is small to make it fit more securely.  At each end of the crown pin in the elastic between the two layers of felt.

 Using blanket stitch and coloured embroidery thread go around the outside of your crown stitching the two layers of felt together.

At the elastic on each side add a couple of extra stitches to hold it very firmly in place.

 Now you have a beautiful rainbow crown.

Happy crafting :-)

Please note that all of these instructions are my own and I ask you to link back to me here if you should choose to share them. Also these crowns cannot be washed or even spot washed as the colour is not water tight.

Wooden spoon puppet ~ tutorial

This is such a great craft, I have made these a few times. It's one of those craft activities that can suit any age group, they are simple enough to make, but can be made as elaborate or simple as you want. So here's how to make a wooden spoon puppet...

Draw around a dinner plate on a piece of fabric and cut out.

Make a small mark in the middle of the fabric and about 5 cm on each side of the centre. Snip a cross on each mark. The middle hole is for the handle of the spoon and the other 2 are for thumb and forefinger to make the puppets arms, like this:

Now decorate the costume. This is the fun part and you can let your imagination go wild. Try glitter, felt, buttons, other pieces of fabric, sequins, ribbon etc...

Now you can attach the costume to the spoon. Do this by slipping the spoon through the centre hole and gathering the material at the neck and securing tightly with an elastic band. It's as simple as that!

This puppet has a little felt collar which hides the elastic band, but this is not necessary.

Now for hair, I happen to have lots of coloured wool roving, so we used that, but again you can use whatever you have handy: wool yarn, string, ribbon, cut paper, straw or you can even just draw it on.

Whatever you use put a good dollop of glue on the top of the spoon and attach the hair.

This puppet has long hair that I plaited on each side.
Now for the face,

stick on googly eyes if you have them, wax crayon works great for drawing on little mouths and cheeks.
If you want to have accessories you could make crowns or hats from paper, necklaces, cloaks and so on.
Now all you need to do is name it...

They were great fun to make and the kids love playing with them too :-)

chocolate fish tutorial

One of Andy's great loves is fishing and so most presents we make for him are either fishing or gardening related ...he also loves chocolate, so Rebe and I dreamed up a way of combining the two... Chocolate fish!

On greaseproof paper (baking parchment) draw out simple fish shapes.

melt a large bar and a half of white chocolate in a bain marie.

carefully spoon the chocolate into the shapes on the paper, keeping within the lines as best you can.

Put one end of a length of string (about a foot long) where the mouth of your fish would be and put a plop more melted chocolate on top to seal it.

now for the hard part....
get your helpers to break up chocolate buttons into halves and quarters...without eating them all!!!

Smarties for eyes and pieces of buttons for scales. Make sure that they don't press them too hard into the chocolate! Then put away up high (out of reach) for a night until they have set.

When the fish are completely set carefully peal them from the parchment and tie the other end of their line to a small twig. I displayed ours in a jug weighted with a bag of lentils to stop them from toppling over.

I can't tell you how much these were loved! We played and played with them, shrieking with glee at having caught one, nibbling pieces and then catching another from under the table.

We will definitely be making them again :-)

touch

My dear Rebe has always had very sensitive skin. She feels pain very acutely and her skin is one of the first places that will show if she is feeling stressed or run down. When she was teething as a little one she used to always get terrible patches of eczema here and there until the tooth had broken through.
This time of year, the back end of winter, when immune systems are being tested to the limit, vitamin D supplies are low in the body, her skin becomes very dry and she gets itchy patches behind her knees and on her back. We have to be very careful with soaps and detergents, but the thing that works best is bear rubs! Long, deep relaxing bear rubs after a nice bath just before bed: good for the skin, good for the soul.

For a few years now we have been making our own cream. I have gradually built up my confidence doing so and will share with you how we make our bear rub cream.

You need:
a really good oil...we're using cold pressed organic sesame oil. This oil has lots of great properties: it is healing and the oil of choice in Ayurveda, and I love the nutty, earthy smell. You could equally use olive oil or almond oil.

dried lavender
dried calendula flowers
lavender essential oil (because we like quite a strong lavender-y smell)
beeswax

Put all your dried flowers in a small pot (we used about a handful of lavender and 2 of calendula)

Pour in enough oil to cover the flowers.
Heat until the oil is quite hot (but you couldn't fry chips in it) then take the pot off the heat and allow to steep for about half an hour.

Grate the beeswax

When the oil is cool enough to touch, strain the flowers out by pouring the oil through a muslin.

Squeeze out the extra oil (it looks and smells good enough to eat!)

Put the oil back into the pot and put back on a low heat.

Add 5-7 drops of lavender essential oil and the grated bees wax. Stir over the heat until all the wax has melted.

To test the consistency of the cream drop a tiny bit into some cold metal. If it sets very hard and white you can add a little more oil, if it doesn't set add more beeswax.

Pour the cream into wee jars and allow to set. This may take over night.

It is lovely stuff and all the kids got bear rubs last night.

It got me thinking a lot about touch. Rebe, of all of my children, needs touch. She craves it and asks for it. As a baby she cried and cried if she were ever put down. I think that often she needed nothing more than touch: to be held and stroked and patted.
I didn't really understand much about attachment parenting when she was tiny, and I was very confused and exhausted trying to find ways to put her down. I wish I had just held her more, I wish I'd had a wrap sling, I wish we had done more massage...but we didn't and I try not to feel too guilty about it. Instead I am glad that I know now and that I can see the importance of touch for her.

I do think that we underestimate the power of touch, the importance of touch. Our skin is the biggest sense organ of our body, we take in a huge amount of information through it. It really should be looked after and loved.

In our society and culture touch is pretty frowned upon. If you consider the amount of equipment there is on the market that creates a separation between parent and child there is a definite message there that too much touching is unhealthy or undesirable. In other cultures men hold hands walking along the street, people kiss as a greeting, mothers carry their babies for a long time and all the time. But here we hardly ever touch, in fact our sense of personal space is quite big and we defend it fiercely.

I do think this is pretty unhealthy! I wonder how much underage sex in our society is actually due to craving for touch? I wonder how much of poor body image is due to lack of touch? From being very young we are taught not to touch things that are disgusting or horrible. I wonder do young men and women equate not being touched by anyone with being horrible or disgusting?

We need touch and I am so grateful to Rebe for teaching me about the importance of touch, of contact. Touching someone is so silent and yet it can say so loudly I love you.

hugs x

Little Play People Tutorial

This tutorial was first published in JUNO summer edition 2011, I thought that I would share it with you here.


Materials:
Fabric scraps
T-shirt material in a skin colour
Needle and thread
Wool roving/ stuffing
2 pipe cleaners
Grain (millet/ salt/ sand/ lentils/ rice)
Fine black marker pen
Red wax crayon

Head

To make the head, cut a piece of t-shirt fabric approximately 10cm x 10cm.
Roll a piece of wool roving or stuffing up into a tight ball about the size of a walnut. Wrap this in your skin fabric. Secure the skin by wrapping a length of strong thread around the bottom of the ball and tying several knots.

Arms
Cut 2 more squares of t-shirt fabric approximately 4cm x 4cm.
Take a pipe cleaner, about 1 cm down fold the pipe cleaner over. Wrap this in a little wool roving/ stuffing and then wrap the t-shirt material around it. Tie this on tightly with strong thread. It should look like a little lolly pop.

Sleeves (make 2)
Cut a piece of fabric that measures 6cm x 10 cm. Fold this in half (right side in) and sew along the edge. Turn your tube right side out. Insert the pipe cleaner. Fold the edge of the sleeve over and stitch to the hand

Body
Cut a circle approximately 6cm in diameter in the same/ matching fabric. Also cut a rectangle of the same fabric 14cm x 10cm. With the right sides in sew the edge of the circle to the edge of the rectangle. Then sew up the side of the rectangle to make a tube. Leave a gap of about 3 cm from the top and cut a slit of 3cm on the opposite side of your tube. This is where the arms will stick out. Turn the tube right side out and half fill with your grainStuff the tube tightly with wool roving/ stuffing up to the bottom of the arm slits.

Wrap the pipe cleaners around the neck of the head then insert this into the top of the body. Folding the top of the material over, stitch the material into the neck. Next, sew the two side of the tube closed over the tops of the arms to make shoulders and stitch around the arm holes into the sleeves

The basic body shape is finished, now for the fun part; decorating and finishing your little person. Use a fine nib, permanent marker to draw on a simple face, or of course you could emboider the face using cotton thread. Rub a little red wax crayon onto the cheeks to give them a bit of colour.

Hair
For long hair, wrap some wool yarn around a book or CD case then cut at one side so you have lots of long strands. Carefully, so as not to bunch them up, sew a seam down the middle of the yarn, turn and repeat a few times. Firmly stitch this to your dolls head and then enjoy making her hairstyles. You may want to add the odd stitch here and there to secure the hair further down the head.
The gnomes beard and fringe is made by stitching yarn directly into his head leaving long loops. You may want to mark in pencil where you want his beard to be before you start to make it look even.

Clothing
The gnomes coat and the princess’ robe are made by lying the body onto a piece of fabric 11cm x 6cm (the princess’ robe is much longer, you can play around with this). Mark where the tops and bottoms of the arms are. Cut along these slits, I used pinking shears so I didn’t have to hem them, otherwise you may want to hem the edges to stop them unravelling. Then fold the top of the fabric down to just above the arm holes, and sew along. If you like you can add a button or snap fastens or a simple tie so the coat will open and close.
To make a gnome hat fold a triangle of fabric that will fit onto the head. With right sides together sew up the back. Turn the hat right side out, folding the edges under, firmly stitch to the head.
The Princess crown is a piece of yellow felt cut with a zig zag, joined at one end and firmly stitched onto her head.

These are lovely toys, my kids really enjoy them. There are no limits to the dolls you can create; a family for the dolls house, characters from fairy tales. I’m sure you will enjoy creating these little play people as much as your little people will enjoy playing with them.