Bluey Fest 2023

This was possibly one of the most fun things we did at home this year. Lots of just hanging out, but so much quality time together. 

For some back story, Bluey is an Australian kids show, aimed at four to seven year olds. My girls were either on the older end or older than the target demographic when it came out, and we don't watch too much TV as it is (Play School all the way), but gradually we found ourselves enjoying the Bluey. As far as children's TV goes, it's so quality. Both the writing and animation is great, not to mention the topics covered and portrayal of kids imagination play and positive parenting just blows every other kids cartoon out of the water. Suffice to say, we love it. 

I'd seen a fair few episodes and had even started using them in the music classroom (such quality music, both original and remixed classics) but Steve had been missing out. Somewhere towards the start of 2023, we started watching the episodes together whenever we needed a bit of a break. It was really nice to sit down every now and then to watch a few episodes and just enjoy the good quality humor that was Bluey. 

At the start of November, ABC announce they would run "Bluey Fest" which was where they would play Bluey episodes all day from 6am to 7:30pm. People were encouraged to vote for their favorite Bluey episodes for the count down of top 100. 

We voted. 

And also planned our day. 

Sophie had bought a Bluey Cookbook, which I've mentioned before, and since we had seen all the episodes, we had a lot to choose from. We planned, all our meals around food that appears in Bluey, including snacks, though Steve vetoed another Duck Cake. We also printed the charades cards that Sophie coloured and I laminated. 

Rachel helped cut out the fabric to make a Bob Bilby puppet. 

I printed Bluey bunting. 

Even though it sounds like the actual day was going to be a lot of TV watching, it really wasn't. The girls did watch a bit before breakfast (proffertjes), but then we ate and went to church just like normal. When we got home, we popped it on again, but the girls were also colouring some Bluey pictures while we watched and chatted. 

We took a break for our Bluey themed lunch (sausages and capsicum salad with Aunty Mary's dressing) and Hugo came over, so the three kids went off to have a swim together at our neighbor's place. 

Steve was sadly missing most of this day, since he and his brother went to Bundaberg for the weekend to help his dad move. He made it back for the last hour of Bluey though, so did get to see the top ten. It was so fun to watch together and we all agreed the top episode (Cricket) was an excellent one. 

Still not sure why the grannies episodes are so high up though. 

Crowns

This is by no means the first of all that I should catch up on in the Land of Blogging, but I do think it's the simplest little thing, so it's a good place to start: I made the girls crowns. 

They have been absolutely loving going to Guides each week for a year now, and last Friday was Coronation themed. They were invited to dress as royalty and enjoy the night in their fancy wear. Their dresses is another story, but what they needed first and foremost was a crown. 

There are no rubbish plastic crowns in our dress ups, so I offered to make them one each out of felt. They were excited to design them. I think the end result is a little oversized, but meh. It's funny because what I envisioned was basic felt, maybe some cut outs, with loads of sequins. The girls had very different ideas. 

Sophie's crown represented wisdom, so she wanted an owl and olive tree leaves. It was all to be silver, greens and blues. We had some back and forth over the owl design, since she wanted it to be as realistic as possible, but in the end I think it works. 

Rachel was convinced by the sequins, but again, surprisingly few. She wanted her crown to be nature themed. While we were looking for something for the centre, I remembered that strange floral thing that she had kept from when her face was painted last December at the piano concert. It was perfect and now also, not loitering around in my kitchen. Double win. 

The girls had a great night, and you'll have to come back to see what they chose to wear. 

Cactus

This might have been the first thing I made with my housewife in tow. My current pin cushion was something that I made with random scraps after the previous one, which was in a ceramic bowl, broke one afternoon. Must have been years ago, and I really didn't take much time with it, so it wasn't much to look at, much less use as a pin cushion. 

Time for a replacement. 

This took a couple of weeks and is so stinking cute. There is really not much to say about it. Made of felt and lots of hand sewing. The bottom is filled with rice so that it sits up nicely on my sewing table. 

Cactus pin cushion for the win. 

Seven Years Late

When Sophie was nearly one, she had her first Christmas, and I made her a felt Christmas tree. Turns out I never blogged about it. Weird. Anyway here it is:

I got the pattern/idea from a blog post I'd seen on the internet somewhere. I don't remember where it was now, but I have a vague recollection of actually emailing the original creator for a pattern, and she was Italian. I think. Moving on, it was a pretty simple: felt tree and lots of ornaments. 

Cute baby Sophie loved it. 

At the time, I got it to stand up with lots of bubble wrap that I had lying around. Any year that I put it out, between then and now, I did the same thing. This year, I didn't have any bubble wrap lying around, because I was cleaning out all my family day care gear and had donated it to the local school prep classroom. I tried to stuff it with pillows, but given the round, conical nature of the tree, and the square/rectangular shape of the pillows, it really didn't look great. 

Time to actually bite the bullet. The problem was, I didn't want a huge tree shaped pillow to have to store all year round. That was the reason I didn't make one in the first place. So I considered things, thought about it, procrastinated some, and came up with a solution.

Solution: Make three pillows. Seems complicated, but I figured if I cut the tree shape into three sections, only the top section really needed to be cone shaped (and thus a useless pillow). The bottom two pillows, or tiers, if you will, could just be circle pillows. These circle pillows I could actually use in the lounge room all year round, so I'd only have to store the top conical pillow.

As far as I could see, this solved the storage problem, and also gave us some more pillows for the living room, which were in short supply. 

So I made three pillows. I have plans to actually cover the bottom two with really nice fabric, probably this awesome fruit and flamingo stuff that I made shorts for Sophie out of earlier in the year, and the rest of the whale fabric that became Rachel's first school bag, but I ran out of time before Christmas. Too busy culling toys and selling all the day care things that I no longer needed since I was all finished with that. 

The good news is that inside the Christmas tree, you don't even notice that they aren't covered with fancy pillow cases, so I've still got time. 

The last thing I did was make Rachel her very own stocking. When I initially made the tree, Rachel was a small bump inside me, and we used to call her Yuka Lei, just for fun. But now that she's out and grown into a regular sized small person of six years, it was probably time she had a stocking for the tree to match the rest of the family. 

Better late than never right? 

Table Tent

Be warned: This is a long post.

I've been teasing you guys about this latest creation since the middle of October. Even though that's only four weeks ago, it feel like I've been working on it a lot longer than that. Maybe I have, but it can only be a few weeks longer, so, given the scope of this project, the fact that it only took six-ish weeks is pretty stellar.

I had seen ideas for this kind of thing on the internet before, (which is probably why, when people tell me I could sell a pattern, or start making them, I tell them I don't think so. It's not really my idea at all!), but we previously had a round-ish dining room table, that had all four legs doing some strange curvy thing into the middle before coming out again to support the table. It was not conducive to play at all.

Then our chairs fell apart. Then we got free ones from Steve's work. Then those chairs fell apart too. And for the first time in our lives, we were thinking about actually having to purchase dining room furniture. It was a little daunting even just thinking about it, let alone actually shopping for it. Thankfully, right as we needed to make a decision, the people who lived diagonally behind us announced that when they moved they wouldn't be taking a dining room set and would anyone like it, for free? Yes please! Let's put off being grown ups and buying dining room furniture just a little longer shall we? :D

The new dining room table has legs on the outside, and is rectangular. All the things it needs to be to allow for a table tent to be made. My time had come!

In an effort to continue using up the material in my stash, I started there. For a table tent, you need quite a lot of fabric, it's ideal for recycling things like sheets. Luckily, I had some sheets. A linen one that was from my great Aunts, kind of special actually, because I can even remember the day they gave it to us: Steve and I had gone around for afternoon tea to tell them we were engaged. My Aunty Vi disappeared into a room at the back of their unit and came out with some sheets for us straight away. When I showed them to mum, she said they must have come from the hotel that they had once had. Special.

Anyway, there was another one that I've no idea where it came from, and some blue checked ones that Steve used as a teenager that his mum gave me a while ago (probably with the space sheets), and a cot sheet of blue stars that my friend Megan from down the road had given me (when she gave me the other star cot sheet that became Rachel's dress). Then I had a heap of a bright yellow material (not a bed sheet), which I think came in the same lot as the blue floral from this post, though I'm not sure. I do know that I didn't buy it. Finally, some green checked material from the lady at church. It was kind of soft and flannel-y feeling.

Finding all of the fabrics was step one. Thinking about how things would come together was step two and took a lot more time. I knew I wanted it to be fully lined, so the inside walls would be different to the outside. I worried that it would be too hot, so it obviously needed windows for ventilation, not just fun. I ummed and ahhed over curtains but ended up not bothering mostly for the heat reason, but also because I was a little over the windows by that point.

I also took ages to figure out what I wanted to do with the door, for which I didn't initially have fabric for. Luckily, I took all of the sheets over to my parents house to cut out (because they have a table big enough and space for kids to play and not be in the way while I was cutting) and as I cut, mum mentioned she had some red fabric she wasn't using. Turned out it was the perfect amount for the door. And I mean the perfect amount.

Then I thought a lot about whether or not I would put words or windows on the door, and how it would come together. It's the thinking that takes the most time! I also knew I wanted the garden part of the house to be usable and interactive for the kids. I was a little bit inspired by Ikat Bag's Little Blue House (of course), but I also know my girls like things to be useful or changeable. They play with it much longer if there are options.

Anyway, when I finally got sewing, things came together pretty quickly, though I did keep adding details, which lengthened the process quite a bit. If I were doing this for anyone that was not my daughters, I'd probably not bother with fully lining it, because that's really overkill for a play-tent. And would make window instillation much easier.

My friend from down the road Leesa had just started a sewing studio in Moorooka, which you can check out here. It's a great space to sew in and they have all sorts of classes that you can do. I went along with mum on a few Wednesday nights of Social Sewing to work on the table tent. It was really good to sew with other like minded people who I could also bounce ideas off.  First thing I made was the bunting, out of the cot sheet. I was going to sew it in to the tent, but mum suggested using velcro to make it removable, which I liked even more.

Then I put the walls together (sewing the green grass onto the bottom of each outside wall) and worked on the gardens. The gardens look spectacular when they were a work in progress and lay flat on the ground (as you can see in the next WIP photo), but they don't look as great on the actual table, or so I think. The weight of the flowers makes them droop, and because the gardens are so close to the floor, the hang of the fabric means you can't see some of them.

Not the end of the world though. The girls still love picking the flowers. It was one of the first things they did when they discovered the house in the morning.

After they had picked the flowers, they asked where they could put them, which made me so grateful that I had thought to sew a basket on to the front for them to display flowers in. There are two kinds of flowers, those on stems (green pipe cleaners) that are kind of droopy, that get "planted" into the longer green clumps of felt grass.

Then there are smaller flowers with no stems that are buttoned on. These can be unbuttoned and put on the decorative buttons on the basket for display. I hand sewed all of those flowers out of felt. Again, using  up felt from my stash. It was a nice change of pace (as always) and I even had a little bag of the cut flowers, needles and thread that I could take out into the yard and work on while the kids played. Ahh the serenity.

I also put a mail pocket on the other side of the front door, obviously for mail. As yet, unused, but it's only been a day.

The door splits in two. There are ties up the top, so you can roll up the top half and tie it out of the way. Sophie just lay it on top of the table though, so I guess that works too. The bottom half lays flat to be a mat. When the door is "closed" it's held together by velcro dots.

Inside the house are the a pocket on the wall for the bunting to be stored in, when not in use, and some "art work" which I "framed with some more material. The pictures are actually some spare fabric I had from the Colouring In Kindy Dresses so Ikea material. I had the girls colour random bits and then cut them out and sewed them in.

The pocket material is left over from some cot bumpers I made in 2014, and I feel like I've used it somewhere else, but can't think where. The frames on the pictures are some left over material from the Pink Flowers Bunting that I made in 2016. I really like the "pictures" because I feel they are something special for the girls. They even signed them with their wobbly-learning-to-write signatures. Love!

I feel like I should talk about the windows, but they were honestly such a pain in the butt to sew that I really don't want to. If people are interested in their story, they can ask me in the comments.

Finally, here are some little detail shots of the gardens. I sewed a few little extra buttons on for Rachel, who loves her bugs. There are two bees and one little lady bug.

And several felt butterflies flying around too, making the garden beautiful.

When it's all packed up and done, it looks like this:

Which is a lot of material with copious amounts of play potential. Provided it stays with this table, because it is exactly the right size.

Thanks for making it through the post (if you are indeed still with me). I hope the pictures and my ramblings do this justice. The girls and I just had dinner on the floor of the kitchen because they are so busy playing in their table house that they've moved half of their rooms in. What have I done?!

Peter Pan

My girls have been slowly introduced to some of the Disney classics, including the animated version of Peter Pan. Rachel took to Peter Pan more than Sophie, and last week, after she insisted her ordinary green hat was her Peter Pan hat, I thought I'd make her an actual Peter Pan hat. 

Image from DisneyStore.com

There are a plethora of Peter Pan/Robin Hood style hat DIY's floating around, but I used this tutorial as my base. It said it was toddler sized, and given Rachel is two and a half, I thought it would be perfect.

It was rather enormous for my little Rachel, so I did some adjustments and then it fit perfectly. Made it with just green felt and red felt for the feather. It's a little bit like Christmas actually.

Rachel loved it. I did some stitching on the feather to give it a bit more style and I really like it. It also made it curl a little which was nice. I didn't originally sew the feather in, but have had to recently, because otherwise it gets lost in all of the adventures to Neverland.

I thought Sophie would be able to use her Tinkerbell costume to play with Rachel-Peter Pan, but Tinkerbell is not really a main/nice character in the movie, so she usually plays Wendy. Time for another costume, right? 

While I was away in Melbourne (before I made the Peter Pan hat), the girls played Peter Pan and Wendy quite a bit, and Steve was delegated the character of Captain Hook. Sometimes the girls even refer to him as "Captain" which he is quite ok with.

Felt Puzzles

A few weeks ago, I was looking for something to do with my hands while there was a bit of down time that didn't involve getting Sally the sewing machine out. So I looked at my pintrest board (one day I want it to be full of pictures of things that I've actually done, rather than just put there and dreamed about. :P) and noticed this little activity.

Dug through the felt box and came out with enough stuff to make them up. Lots of hand stitching and a little bit of machine sewing later and they are done. I actually finished them about two weeks ago, but forgot to take good photos and then totally forgot to blog about it at all. Thankfully I sat down on Thursday night and wrote an extensive list of things to do, digging from the far corners of my mind, which included blogging about this. (I say thankfully, but really, that very long to do list is quite daunting, even if crossing things off is satisfying.)

So here we are! That alien space craft does actually match up properly by the way, I just didn't notice when I took the photo and couldn't be bothered retake a photo when I did realise. I pre cut the back pieces of felt but managed to loose one the day I came to sew the backs on. Alas! Even though I've since found it - I still haven't sat down at the machine to sew it on. Maybe tonight.

Anyway, even when I'd thought it was lost for good and I'd always have one puzzle piece that wasn't backed, I didn't mind at all, because it reminded me of the story of the Tin Solider. I mentioned it to Steve who said he didn't know the story!

Shock! How can you go through child hood without reading the story of the Tin Solider who is short a leg because he was the last made in his regiment and there wasn't enough tin for him to have both legs? He lives in the nursery and the little boy loves the Tin Solider and plays with him even though he isshort one leg. And then he falls in love with a Ballerina, who, pirouetting on one leg, the Tin Solider mistakenly thinks only has one leg as he. Enter the villain as the goblin pushes the Tin Solider off the window ledge out into the street where he is unfortunately knocked into the gutter and down into the sewer. Just when his luck can't get any worse, he is swallowed by a fish!

At last, when we think the Tin Solider is no more, the fish is caught, sold and cut open by the cook of the house he came from! Hooray, our hero has returned to the nursery, reunited with his love, the Ballerina. Then (is it the wind or that nasty goblin again?), the Tin Solider is again blown from his place on the mantle and this time into the fire, where he melts in the heat. Some versions of this tale, and in fact, the ones I love the best, have the Ballerina jumping into (or falling by the same gust of wind) the fire as well, thus the lovers die together.

Steve told me it was not a very uplifting story. Maybe not, but not every story can have a happily ever after.

Besides, my puzzle story does have a happily ever after, because I did find the backing felt for that aeroplane piece. And even if I hadn't I still loved the puzzle and the pieces just as they were, just like the little boy loved the Tin Solider and played with him even though he was short one leg.