I thought this was going to be a cool birthday gift for Lucas (which I won’t yet name because I still hope to make one), but before I knew it, this needle-felting project rapidly became another Easter egg. I think I really love Easter eggs. This egg is rather like one I made and gave to Grandpa and Mimi a couple of weeks ago. I has flowers all the way around the back.
No doubt about it. Ours was a bounteous, Easter-filled weekend.
We hosted a wonderful gathering of friends on Saturday—one of our famous, all-day brunches. Our home was warmed by many dear ones and terrific food. We had an egg hunt for the kiddos and lots of chill time for the grown ups.
Sunday morning, on Easter, we woke very early to find the Easter bunny had come to our house and nibbled up almost all of the carrots we left out for him. He left us flowers and strawberries, and baskets of goodies for Lucas and Asher.
The Bunny also brought fun Easter books for the boys. The Easter Egg by Jan Brett for Asher, and The Story of the Butterfly Children by Sibylle von Olfers for Lucas. We love both of these author/illustrators very much! And we’d highly recommend either of these books to other children.
The baskets contained small toys, like needle-felted chicks inside colorful wet-felted Easter eggs. Asher received a wonderful wooden family of four bunnies with three bushes for them to play among. He got wrist ribbons for when he needs to fly like a bird or a butterfly, or perhaps even a yellow dragon. And there were some soy crayon “rocks,” but I think they look a lot like jelly beans.
Lucas received a big-boy felting needle with an egg-shaped handle, a wooden biplane model kit, a super-fancy stone egg, and some springtime note cards, in case he would like to write to his friends, whom he has been missing while on spring break.
We had a wonderful breakfast at VoVo and DiDi’s house, visited with Auntie Kelly and Matt and hunted even more eggs! Grandma had Easter baskets for them there, too.
We hunted again later in the day at RoRo and Nana’s house. (That’s a lot of egg hunts for two small boys, but they enjoyed each of them.) By the end of the day, Asher was hunting eggs like he’d been doing it every day of his life! He was dropping very few by the end. Lucas and Asher each got another book (can’t wait to read Stuart Little with Lucas) and more candy there. Two tiny babies were there, Alice and Travis. (And Asher hardly recognized them as humans.)
By the afternoon, the cold had turned to heavy rain showers and we were glad to get home, safe and snug that night. It was a marvelous two-day holiday for us and we are still enjoying our new goodies. Alas, Asher isn’t too keen on eating the hard-boiled eggs.
The day is not yet done, but the festivities are. We are tired and happy, and the rain is coming down. More later. For now, we wish you a Happy Easter!
We are expecting about 30 friends to come tomorrow and celebrate Easter with a day-long brunch. I can’t wait to see their smiling faces! Today has been for Easter projects. Banana bread is baking in the oven right now and making the whole house smell divine.
Ian and I are going to make a bunch of food:
We decorated and hung felt eggs today on our (somewhat neglected) ficus tree. These were made with crummy, 20¢ craft felt and scrap pieces of 100% wool felt. The boys were quite taken with the stars, so they focused on creating eggs with stars. Asher really loved using the scissors!
We’ve been dying Easter eggs too. We had to compromise. The boys wanted to use the pearlescent commercial dye kit that Grandma gave them. The eggs were both easy to color and are also quite beautiful, in lovely pastel shades.
I, on the other hand, was hankering to do some natural dying again, like we did in 2008. I’ve seen some gorgeous eggs online and in one of our craft books that use leaves and flowers to make a negative image on the egg. We did the yellow and red onion skin dyes today, and this is what we came up with. Not quite a perfect result, but two of them look really great. We’re supposed to shine them up with oil.
The dark brown eggs were dyed with the red onion skins. Three of them didn’t get the leaf technique. The lightest egg was dyed just by wrapping the boiled yellow onion skins around the egg and leaving it overnight. If we have time tonight, we’ll do some with red cabbage and hopefully make some pretty blue eggs, too.
OK. Gotta run to the grocery store! Happy Easter!
Friday was the last day of school for my kiddos. They seem ready for a break and they get two weeks off for Easter. Lucas has a cold again, with a nasty, nasty cough. It’s slowing him down. We’ll call this photo “aftermath”—this is what happens when Asher is given a little bit of red, blue, and yellow play-dough and then Lucas comes along with a tad of green.
Saturday started with me needle-felting a (spectacular—if I do say so myself) wool Easter egg on the way to brunch in Davis with Mimi and G.G. She’s such an awesome cook. We enjoyed eggs with roasted zucchini and Jarlsburg cheese, blueberry muffins, small sausages that were a huge hit with Asher, roasted potatoes, fruit salad, toast with homemade jam, coffee, and apple juice. Didn’t pull out my camera, though.
The kiddos explored the beautiful yard a bit. Lucas climbed a tree. We watched birds feeding at the birdfeeders. We admired Mimi’s new ceramic sculptures; she’s building an underwater scene in a corner of her yard, complete with sea creatures and seaweed and, soon, mermaids. The kids threw the ball for Maggie Dog. I ended up giving my needle-felted egg to Mimi and G.G. for Easter. (Wish I had taken a photo of it! It had a bunny and flowers and grasses.)
Then we went to the Explorit Science Center. I’ve been wanting to take the kids there for a long time. It’s a pretty great place with all kinds of hands-on science for children. Unfortunately, it’s also in danger of closing due to budget problems. Like all the great, local places to take children: Effie Yeaw Nature Center, Discovery Museum, etc. We played with centrifugal force, parachutes, topography, water and soil erosion, gears, paper buckyballs, animal life cycles, saw skins of all types, watched live black widows, cichlids, and tarantulas, and learned all sorts of nifty facts. Until Lucas was worn out and I had to go home to meet my father.
Back at home, I opened the mail and found a fat royalty check that was such a good surprise. Feeling great, I kissed my boys goodbye. Dad picked me up and took me to a play at the B Street Theater: Becky’s New Car. It was clever and often laugh-out-loud funny. Such a treat! Afterward, we went out to dinner at the Buckhorn Grill with Roger and Rosemary, longtime friends of my parents. Rose told me all about scrap-booking and making aprons, her one and only sewing pursuit. Roger flies remote-control airplanes. I wonder if retirement will be that much fun for me someday.
And for the boys left at home? Pizza, of course, and some movie about Little Red Riding Hood. I came home later that night and found that Ian had cleaned the playroom (Yay!) and was playing Half-Life. We retired and watched “Friends.” Great day, no question about it.
Sunday began with some much needed house-cleaning. I swept up about a pound of dirt from the floors. Ew! I just can’t keep up with the boys—they bring dirt and sand in constantly. And because it was Sunday and Daddy was home, some Lego fun was in order, of course.
Went out to lunch at Sunflower and ran into Lucas’s classmate’s family. We enjoyed letting the four children play and chase chickens while the four adults chatted. Asher works so hard to keep up and manages too pretty well! And it’s great watching how well Lucas gets along with his chums.
I dragged the family to the nursery where I got some flowers and found a dwarf citrus tree for my giant pot that Ian got me for Christmas. I wanted something that would look pretty all year and ended up with a red valencia orange tree. I was originally looking for a lemon tree, but couldn’t find any that were small enough. They all seemed to want to grow to at least 10 feet. The orange produces “tasty” fruits with deep, dark red flesh and few seeds, and purplish red to orange red skins. It’s supposed to be compact, nice looking, very ornamental, heavy bearing, and hold fruit well. I’m hoping it will do well in the pot, given the tag says it makes excellent indoor plant; “just clip to shape.” Yay for finding nursery gift certificates from 2004!
My wisteria is blooming like mad all over the back fence and to a height of about 20 feet into the air. It looks fantastic. Today I walked out there to listen to the bees; they’re making a huge racket. I caught pics of a honey bee and this big, fat guy taking advantage of the flowers. I really hope the wisteria still looks this beautiful next Saturday when we have friends over!
I’ve been doing a lot of needle-felting in the evenings after the children go to bed. I’m finding that my capacity for intense mental concentration (as I would need for editing) is just no longer there after about 9 p.m. I’m enough of a worrywart that I have trouble relaxing and find that having something to occupy my hands helps. I can’t really explain why the stabby-stabby motion of needle-felting is soothing to me, but there you go.
Here’s my new blue bird friend. Somehow, making spring art (art? can I call it that?) seems appropriate. This mama bird will live on our nature table for a while.
I just wasn’t satisfied with the eyes I tried out. I kind of like her without eyes, but maybe I’ll add some later.
These three blue eggs are only about an inch long.
However, these Easter eggs I’ve been needle-felting are two and a half inches long and fit nicely in the palm of my hand.
The year has turned a quarter, and I’m loving the open windows and fresh breezes. I’m wearing a sundress! Ian and I had some much-needed time out together this weekend and it was wonderful. Some spring cleaning is in order, but you needn’t worry because we won’t try to do it all at once. We like to ease into these things a little bit each day. My dear hubby is currently tackling his pile of ironing.
I’ve pulled the shorts from older cousins out of the garage for Lucas to wear in the coming weeks and given away a box, a giant bag, and two grocery sacks of toddler clothes to two darling boys we know. Out with the old and too-small!
Lucas and I have planted some seeds straight into the ground, which is something I’ve never had much luck with before. We figure it’s unlikely we’ll have anymore frost, and since we’ll probably get several more rains we’ll take advantage of the free water. We planted some beans, red chard, spinach, poppies, nasturtiums, and morning glories, all from seed packets I had lying around. I don’t know if we’ll get lucky and get some shoots, but it was worth a shot and better than discarding seeds from past years.
We have gathered together some of our spring books to enjoy. Here are some favorites that we own.
Hope you”re enjoying spring weather, spring cleaning, and spring reading, too!
The leprechauns visited last night! Thankfully we left out some goodies for them, so they didn’t feel the need to play tricks on us.
We gave them honey, cream, and brownies and Lucas chose to decorate the plate with lots of his own sparkly treasures.
And of course there were some brownies for us.
This morning we discovered all the cream, honey, and brownies were gone! Gold nuggets, gold dust, and gold beads were found in our home and on the offering plate we left outside. Some lucky four-leafed shamrocks were left for Asher and Lucas. Lucas asked me how big the leprechauns are. I said, “I don’t know because I’ve never seen one, but I have always imagined them to be about knee-high.”
At Lucas’s school, the leprechauns made mischief. When we arrived in the morning we found that classroom chairs had been stacked to the ceiling! Students’ possessions were mixed up and in disarray. The chalk board said Friday, not Wednesday! All sorts of things were out of whack. Such shenanigans! Lucas and his buddy described the day as “pretty much a whole day of recess,” and given that his face was green with chalk dust at the end of the day, I think that means they had great fun.
We had a supper of corned beef and cabbage, carrots, onions, and celery with roasted red potatoes and garlic. Lucas’s buddy and the boy’s mom and brother ate with us. Ian brought home some Guinness and we rocked out to the Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, and Black 47.
All in all, just about perfect. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
Saint Patrick’s Day is coming and I have to admit, it’s a holiday that I quite like. I just always have liked it; don’t really know why. I have always made sure not to be pinched by wearing plenty of green on Saint Patrick’s Day.
I was inspired to needle-felt a Saint Patrick, mainly to see if I could make a doll this big. He’s almost 12 inches tall and made entirely out of wool roving, two pipe cleaners, and some sort of silky fiber that Parnasus gave me a long time ago, which was perfect for his soft beard and hair. I don’t really know what it is. His bishop’s hat sports a jaunty shamrock, which is kind of like a cross, too, and it gives a nature connection that I appreciate. I felted little green snakes onto Patrick’s robes. I’m happy with how he turned out! (Now I know I can make a similar Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or seasonal doll like Queen Summer or King Winter, or whatever.)
Saint Patrick’s Day isn’t a big holiday in the Waldorf school, which could be because it falls just before the spring equinox and Easter. Since Lucas is in second grade this year and the curriculum has focused on lots of stories about saints, I figured we would bring Saint Patrick into our home.
Some very brief online research reveals that the legend of Saint Patrick is that he drove all the snakes out of Ireland, which may be a metaphor of Christianity conquering the indigenous, pagan (snaky) religion. I also found plenty of sites that claimed this story and its interpretation was nonsense. Probably Ireland never had snakes. It’s known that Patrick was the son of a wealthy Roman-British family who was captured, taken to Ireland, and enslaved for six years. Later he escaped and returned to Britain, entered the priesthood and studied for years, and then became a missionary in Ireland again, where he converted people to Christianity for twenty years. An angel told him in a dream to convert the Irish. He may have used the three-lobed shamrock to teach the Irish people about the Holy Trinity. Who knows?
The Dear Little Shamrock
There’s a dear little plant that grows in Ireland.
‘Twas Saint Patrick himself sure that set it.
And the sun on his labor with pleasure did smile.
And a tear from his eyes oft-times wet it.
It grows thro’ the bog, thro’ the brake, and the mireland,
And it’s called the dear little Shamrock of Ireland.That dear little plant still grows in our land,
Fresh and fair as the daughters of Erin,
Whose smiles can bewitch, and whose eyes can command,
In each climate they ever appear in:
For they shine thro’ the bog, thro’ the brake, and the mireland,
Just like their own dear little Shamrock of Ireland.That dear little plant that springs from our soil,
When its three little leaves are extended,
Denotes from the stalk we together should toil,
And ourselves by ourselves be befriended.
And still thro’ the bog, thro’ the brake, and the mireland,
From one root should branch, like the Shamrock of Ireland.—Andrew Cherry
Grandma visited today with Valentine’s presents for the boys. When they saw these lollipops, their eyes became wide as (heart-shaped) saucers! We love you, VoVo!
