Beautiful Butterfly Garland

I recently discovered Play at Home Mom's blog and facebook page. They have lots of great ideas for activities to do with your kids. What's really great is that their kids are about the same age or younger than our daughter, so the ideas are generally age-appropriate! Yay!

One of our favorite new activities is painting with liquid watercolor.

You add drops of concentrated liquid watercolor into water and start painting--very easy!

Our little artist's favorite thing to do is pour and mix the colors.

The paintbrushes are pretty cool, too, they're good for mixing the colors on the paper!

Most of our colors got mixed to look mostly purple. :)

Hanging up to dry!

Then I decided to do something fun: I rubbed both sides of the paper (it was 110 lb cardstock) with oil and sandwiched it with papertowels and heavy books to help the paper flatten again. The oil caused the paper to become slightly translucent. Then I traced butterflies onto the paper.

I cut them out...

And sewed them all together into a chain at different intervals.

Then we hung the butterflies up over our girl's bed. They turned out so beautifully!

She was thrilled with them and wants to make more. :)

So that's some of our summer fun around here!
~Regina

Summer Fun

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Between keeping up with our 2 1/2 year old, completing some much-needed sewing projects, and having my parents come to visit, I'm pretty exhausted. :) But on to the goodies...

Every afternoon, I've been trying to do some "big" activity with our daughter. Three times a week, it's swimming, but the other days it's something creative outside. Stuff like sidewalk paint...

 To make sidewalk paint: combine equal parts cornstarch and water, mix well, add food coloring or liquid watercolors...

 Regular painting on big sheets of paper...

 And liquid water colors...

 Which can be turned into fun things like butterfly garlands!

I've also had some fun sewing projects, like my husband's Father's day present: a "Don't Panic" beach towel! I learned how to machine appliqué with this project--time consuming, but not difficult.

 A new nightgown for our daughter. I had a pattern for this style, but the sizing was too small, so I used a stretchy fabric and used the pattern simply as a shape guide.

 I think it turned out wonderfully and can't wait to make another one for her! :)

 And curtains for our living room. I've had this fabric for over a year (lived in 3 different houses since buying it) and finally used it!

 The curtains turned out nice, but the slightly stretchy crinkle cotton was a pain and a half to work with. BUT I did learn how to use my rolled hemmer foot while sewing them, which I'm thrilled about.

And, finally quite a few cooking or baking projects, like homemade strawberry jam using apples and lemons for pectin rather than store-bought pectin.

 Mmmmm! I made this jam a month ago and we've already eaten almost 3 out of the 4 8oz jars.

And a totally random zucchini coffee cake using bisquick. I put 3 cups of grated zucchini into the bisquick recipe for an 8x8 pan. Next time I'll only do 2 cups of zucchini.

 I even put zucchini into the topping, too, which made it really wet...

 So I swirled it into the batter.

 I also had to bake it 15-20 minutes longer than called for (totally expected). So it bake for a total of 40-45 minutes. Oh, and yes, this is a 7x11 pan and I wouldn't use a pan any smaller for the zucchini-added cake.

 Yummy! The very bottom of the cake has that slightly pudding-y feel to it, which is nice, but I think that means I put in a bit too much zucchini.

So, there's a sampling of what I've been up to over the past month. Busy, busy around here!

~Regina