Balloon Flowers Lawn Decorations.

For each flower:

1 - Wooden dowel

5 - Balloons for petals

1 - Contrasting color balloon for Center

Green Duck Tape

Rubber Cement

*Wire Hanger (optional)

1. Cut a pieces of duck tape the length of your dowel. Center the dowel on the duck tape and wrap the tape around the dowel.  

2. To make leaves, fold strips of duck tape in half (stick sides together) and cut leaf shapes out of the tape. Bend leaves around stem and tape in place.

3. Blow up the 5 petal balloons to the same size and the contrasting balloon slightly smaller. Tie the petal balloons to the contrasting balloon. Once done it will look like this:

4. On a flat surface spread out the petals to make a 5 petal flower holding the center in place. Use rubber cement at all the places the balloons touch each other and hold until dry (a minute or two)

5. Thread the stem behind the balloon knots in back and tape in place.

*If you are going to be placing in hard ground you may want to cut two pieces of wire from a wire hanger to tape to the bottom of the stem to make it easier to push into the ground.

Birthday Party Hat

Well, Mooglebean's first birthday is coming up, so I have decided to dust off my crafty skills and see if I can make the decorations for the party instead of buying them.  My goal is to do a happy birthday banner, centerpieces, a cake table centerpiece and a birthday girl party hat. I also want to make her party dress but we will see how that goes. I decided to start with the party hat.  

First let me preface this by saying that, I understand that she will be one, that she hates things on her head and that I will be lucky if I even get a picture of her with it on her head. Know all of this is still not stopping me.

We have chosen butterflies as the theme for her party and the first thing I got was colored card stock in the colors I wanted and a punch to cut out beautiful little butterflies

I found this wonderful tutorial/template at http://jonesdesigncompany.com/tutorial/party-hat-tutorial/ I enlarged the pattern to make the overall hat larger and I decorated mine with:

• ·         A piece of 12 x 12 scrapbook paper that matched the theme
• ·         Punched butterflies secured to floral wire with hot glue
• ·         Decorative flower petal trim 
• ·         White feather accessory
• ·         Cardstock

A hot glue gun held everything together for me.

Think I can convince her to wear it? 

Rainbow fabric toy

Old wipes boxes are wonderful, truly wonderful. If Mooglebean likes something she likes it 10 times more if she has to pull it out of a wipes box. Mylar tissue paper is a good example, she loves it and in the beginning she loved pulling it out of the wipes box. However, now that she is a bit older she likes putting it back in the box too.

One day while at the fabric store I saw all the beautiful patterns available in quilters' squares and had a brilliant idea. I sewed squares of fabric to one another end to end like a magician scarf and put in the box so now when she pulls the red scarf the next is orange than yellow and so on. Mooglebean was about 9 months old, sitting well, crawling but not walking yet.

This toy can teach cause and effect, fine motor control and promote curiosity. By using the colors in rainbow order it could also be used to teach the colors later on and by having each fabric have a different pattern I could teach patterns. I was so proud of myself and the toy that I made...

Mooglebean was terrified of it. Seriously, her little bottom lip would quiver and she would burst into tears  every time I tried to show her how it worked. We figured out that she most likely didn't understand how the fabric coming out of the box seemed to her to fly out and get bigger than the box. I left it out if she wanted to play with it but never played with it myself. Over time she became more and more interested in it and now loves to pull the entire thing out of the box as quick as she can and look at me like "That was fun Mommy, now put it back so I can do it again."