How to Make Dried Citrus Slices for Ornaments and Garlands

 

I first posted this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

This winter, let just a little more sunshine into your home with dried citrus slices turned into ornaments and garlands.

I’m happy to admit that I decorate the absolute snot out of my house for Christmas. It is not tasteful at ALL, and I LOVE it.

What I love even more, though, are the decorations that I don’t have to make myself take down on January 2. The tinsel and the twinkle lights and the tree and the four hundred nutcrackers and the paper stars all have to go, even though it makes me 100% sad to put them away.

It’s a good thing, then, that I have convinced myself that my decorations that are “winter” themed, rather than purely for Christmas, get to stay up through February! The paper snowflakes get to stay. The gnomes get to stay. And all the citrus and cinnamon dough garlands get to stay, smelling sweet and looking lovely, until I finally take them down to make room for all the spring gardening stuff I’m starting to drag out.

These dried citrus slices are easy to make during a cozy half-day at home, and easy to string to make ornaments, garlands, and other holiday decorations. Here’s how!

To make dried citrus slices, you will need:

• citrus fruits. I’ve successfully dried naval oranges and grapefruits (in this tutorial, I’m drying grapefruit!). Any citrus fruit in which the peel clings to the fruit should work, but I doubt that a fruit like easy-peeling clementines would.
• sharp knife or mandolin. The thinner the better for these dried citrus slices! I hand-cut my grapefruit slices and caused myself some extra annoyance since they were so thick that they took ages to dry, but dry they did, so don’t worry if your knife skills are as ham-handed as mine are.
• oven set to 200 degrees or dehydrator. The dehydrator takes longer and is noisier, but it uses less energy and leaves your oven free.

Step 1: Slice your citrus fruit more evenly than I did!

Although apparently, you can just hack away at them like I did and that works okay, too!

Set aside the ends that are mostly peel, ideally tossing them into your garden to do a little natural composting before spring.

If I’m too lazy to even take my end bits out into the garden (sometimes it’s dark out there! Or, even worse, precipitating!!!), I like to put them down the garbage disposal for a little natural deodorizing.

Step 2: Dry or dehydrate.

Either put your slices on sheet pans into a 200-degree oven or arrange them, as pictured above, in your 15-year-old Nesco dehydrator. I used to use this dehydrator allllll the time when my kids were little, making them dehydrated fruit slices and fruit leather and flaxseed crackers and such, but these days I only pull it out to dry herbs and make decorations like these. 

Your citrus slices will take 2-3 hours to dry out in the oven. In the dehydrator, they’ll take more like 8-10 hours, but again, your oven will be free to bake cookies! Make your own choice depending on your own priorities, but as for me, *I* like cookies!

After a couple of hours in the oven or six hours in the dehydrator, check on the citrus slices, and remove any that look completely dried. I had to keep doing this, because, again, I cut my grapefruit slices as unevenly as it is possible to cut them. You, with your better knife skills, will only need to keep an eye out for the end pieces with the smaller diameters, as those will likely be dried before the middle pieces.

Step 3: Decorate!

This is the fun part!

My teenager and I made both ornaments and garlands with these dried citrus slices. To make the garlands, we interspersed the grapefruit slices with cinnamon dough cutouts (stay tuned for that recipe next week!), but to make the ornaments, we used just a blunt tapestry needle and some embroidery floss. Thread the needle, then pull it through the slice near the top. Pull it back through the same spot, then take the needle off the floss. Tie the two ends of floss together to make a loop, then put one end of the loop through the other to make a nice ornament hanger.

These dried citrus slices look lovely on a Christmas tree or in a garland across your window, sure, but don’t sleep on all the other pretty ways to use them. Hang them outside, display them in a bowl on the coffee table, wire them into a wreath, tie them into a gift topper, or do any one of a hundred more cute things.

Also feel free to experiment with other types of citrus. I like orange for my own winter decorating, but there’s no rule saying that you can’t jazz up your decor with the yellow and green of lemons and limes, or the dark red of blood oranges.

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I Made a Little Quilt That Is a Ghost for The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt

The best thing, for me, about having a small niece, is that I can still make all the cute children's things that I want to make, because I still have someone to give them to!

Honestly, I might actually make more things for my niece than I did for my own kids, if you don't count things like clothes or homeschool materials or collaborative crafts, because when my own kids were this little kid's age, I was too busy parenting little kids to get enough crafty time to actually make them cute things! My younger kid was four years old by the time I made her first quilt, oops!

So when I saw The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt in a local bookstore a few weeks ago, and I was immediately charmed by it, and then immediately after that I wanted to make a little ghost quilt--I did!

Happily, the book's endpapers feature the quilt design of the titular little ghost, making it super easy to see what similar fabrics would look like. And even more happily, I did not have to buy a single thing to make this quilt! To be fair, a couple of the fabrics that I used are remnants that I'd previously bought with no purpose in mind, but everything else was honest-to-goodness scraps and stash, from the fabric for the top to the cotton batting to the cotton sheet I used as the backing.

All of the pieces are 5" squares. I wanted my quilt to be 10 blocks by 12 blocks, so I needed 120 blocks total. I sort of tried to keep the colors even between purple, aqua, and white, but it's a little blue-heavy. There are just a few grey blocks scattered in, because it turns out that I don't actually own very much grey fabric. The little ghost quilt in the book also has tan blocks, but for some reason I don't have ANY tan fabric, and anyway, I wasn't really feeling the tan colorway... which is perhaps one reason for why I don't own any tan fabric, lol!

To make the quilt, you lay out your pieces and rearrange them until you like the way they look as a whole, then stack them by rows, piece each row, then piece the rows themselves together, being quite fussy about lining up the corners:

Then you take up your entire family room floor making your quilt sandwich!

This is why I can never say that my creations come from a pet-free home, ahem. I would NEVER want my creations to come from a pet-free home!

I pinned my quilt quite well to the batting/backing, trimmed it out roughly, then quilted it via stitch in the ditch, earning myself yet another day of having a wonky back in the process. Why must quilting be so ergonomically incorrect?!?

Here's how it looks all nicely quilted and ready to be properly trimmed:

I got through trimming the batting before my supervisor came to check up on me:

I trimmed the backing to 1" wider than the quilt on all sides, then folded it in half twice, clipped it in place using every plastic sewing clip I own, and stitched it down:

Proper quilters use a blind stitch or another invisible stitch, but I'm happy with a plain old zig-zag.

And there's my little ghost quilt!

The lighting was soooo perfect right when I finished, but in the hour it took me to run out and do early voting, it got completely overcast. But I had to take my photos anyway, because Halloween presents are more fun if you can get them in the mail in time for the recipient to receive them before, you know, Halloween!

...and that's a bunch of cat hairs there on the purple block, sigh. I did wash it and dry it, and then go over it with the lint roller, before I put it in the mail.

Because you don't have to follow a pattern, just make sure that the pieces look cute together as a whole, this is actually one of the quickest quilts I've ever sewn:

I'm always especially pleased when I can work any of my favorite meaningful fabrics into a piece. Below, the smocked blue fabric used to be part of the only skirt that my older kid ever willingly wore. The silky white fabric to its right is actually from my wedding dress!

My favorite part, though, is that I used variegated thread to quilt it, and it looks so nice from the back!

Isn't it crazy that you can make something so substantial, and so pretty and perfect, entirely from materials you already have on hand? Historically, that's exactly what quilting should be, including reusing those bits of old clothes, and I LOVE that there's a children's book that encourages children to notice and care for the simple, unassuming gift of a patchwork quilt:

I didn't have any ghosts on hand to put into it, though, so that part's going to have to figure itself out later. 

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In Which I Sewed Fancy Witch Hats Until I Literally Ran Out Of Fancy Fabric

Never mind that I don't actually have any occasion for wearing my fancy witch hat lined up yet. I'll think of something.

Anyway, doesn't the old saying go, "If you sew a fancy witch hat, the occasion for wearing said fancy witch hat will come?" When the occasion arrives, I shall be prepared!

I used this free witch hat pattern from Keiko Lynn to get started, although I sort of riffed on it and did my own thing regarding construction. The pattern has the perfect dimensions, 17" across and 22" tall, and looks adorable on everyone I've seen wearing it. 

My fabric stash is appallingly disorganized, which actually has the benefit of causing me to make some delightful discoveries while I'm in the process of digging through every inch of fabric I own to uncover the one small swatch that I know I have somewhere around here. So while I was looking for the nice black Kona cotton that I knew I'd bought a pretty large remnant of the other day--

--I also came across the flower-embroidered tulle that I (over)bought a few years ago to make the kid a dance skirt:

It looked delightful stitched over the black cotton, so then when I was cleaning out my kid's old Trashion/Refashion Show fabric stash and found a length of white tulle embroidered with gold--I think it used to be a curtain?--I remembered the rest of my wedding dress that I've been cutting up and sewing into cute stuff for a few months now:

The perfect interfacing, I've decided, is Pellon 809. I tried to go stiffer for one hat, but it was nearly impossible to stitch curves when sewing with it, and while I like how nice and sticky-out the brim is, it kinda hurts my head to wear it. The Pellon 809 makes a slightly drapier brim--

--but at least you can sew it and wear it without tears!

I managed to get three entire witch hats out of the black cotton/black embellished tulle combo: one for me, one for my younger kid--because if you do not dress as a witch sometime in October, do you even attend a historically women's college?--and one that I sold in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop:

I only had enough wedding dress fabric to make one hat, also already sold:

And of course, is it even a proper witch hat if it hasn't been blessed by one's familiar?

I am actually dying to make more of these hats, which tbh I do not need to do because I just finished piecing a Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt quilt (if you need to radicalize any young friends/relatives into the true and correct conviction that quilts are special and magical so that you can give them quilts for every occasion and have a fighting chance that they'll like them, I highly recommend this book!) and still need to back and quilt and bind it and get it in the mail to my niece. Also my current coasters are too summery and I want to make some autumn ones. And I got this book from the library and so obviously I now need to make name buntings for my younger kid and her roommates. 

So it's for the best that I literally do not have anymore fabric in my stash to be sewing witch hats with. But if I end up at Goodwill this weekend and somebody's tacky old prom dress with its hundred yards of embellished tulle just happens to fall into my cart... well, life is tough sometimes! 

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How to Dye Pasta to Make Sensory Materials

Pretty much the last family activity that we did before taking the kids to college was an evening of making sensory materials together.

You know, as you do!

I'd had the idea that my preschool niece might like some of the same homemade sensory materials that my own kids had enjoyed at her age. We made her slime (although my kids actually played with oobleck, not slime, throughout their preschool years, you might remember that my younger kid went through a BIG slime phase as a tween and still has the recipe memorized), play dough, sand dough, cloud dough, dyed Epsom salts, and a couple of colors of this dyed pasta.

Out of all of those options, the pasta is the easiest! It takes just a few minutes of hands-on time, spread out over the course of a full day. Here's how to make it:

Materials

To make this sensory material, you will need:

• dry pasta. The pasta that you use is limited only by your imagination, your budget, and the size of the jar you plan to use. Rotini and elbow macaroni were perennial favorites with my kids, but bowties and shells also turn out exceptionally cute. Star pasta is a splurge but would be adorable, and spaghetti would be cool-looking but unwieldy to dye and delicate when finished.
• liquid food coloring or liquid watercolors. I use the snot out of our liquid watercolors, and used them for this particular project, but before I knew such a thing existed I made many fine and colorful batches of dyed pasta with cheap liquid food coloring. 
• old jars. I've always used glass jars, as in old spaghetti sauce or salsa jars, and never plastic, but I don't see why plastic wouldn't work.
• rubbing alcohol. You need this because it's a non-water-based solvent that can distribute the dye without dissolving the pasta. Some of my hippier friends buy super-high-proof organic vodka to make their own disinfectants, though, so if you like, I bet you can use that!
• newspaper, brown paper bags, cardboard, etc. You want something to spread the pasta out on to dry, ideally something you can toss in the recycling bin when you're done.

How to Dye the Dried Pasta

Pour dried pasta into a jar, filling it no more than halfway. Check out this old photo I found of my adorable older darling completing this step. She looks like she might be five?

Five was a really great age for that kid. Actually, though, twenty is turning out to also be a great year for her!

Add enough rubbing alcohol to just cover the bottom of the jar, then add the dye. Put the lid on and shake it around until the dye is evenly distributed, then add more dye as desired until the pasta looks about as saturated as you want it to be.

Here's the part you have to remember: put the jars on a table or counter you frequently walk by, and then for the rest of the day, every time you pass the jars, agitate them and shake them around for a few seconds to further distribute the dye and unstick any pasta bits.

After a few hours of that, dump out the jas and spread the pasta out in an even layer on your blotting paper:

Leave the pasta to finish drying out at least overnight, or even as long as a full day:

Your blotting paper gets pretty messy, so that's why you want something you can toss!

When the pasta has finished drying, kids can play with it right away, or you can store it in deli containers at room temperature. Look how cute it looks combined with all the other sensory materials in my niece's present stash!

Kids can simply play with this pasta, of course, but it also makes a great addition to a play kitchen or mud kitchen, or to a pretend construction site. Dump trucks love to drive around pink elbow pasta! 

And, of course, you can do art with it, especially making mosaics with different types and colors of pastas. You know you want your own pasta mosaic masterpiece hung on your wall!

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Beach Craft: Make a Sandy Handprint Keepsake

I originally posted this tutorial on Crafting a Green World way back in 2019, but we first did this craft in 2012 during a vacation to Cape Cod. I JUST told my older kid that we lied about the day of her birthday on this trip, so that she wouldn't be sad that all we did was drive across the country the day she turned six. Instead, we went to Plymouth, played on the beach, and ate candy for dinner!

The beach is one vacation spot that ensures that you come away with beautiful souvenirs.

A handful of sand, the choicest of clam shells, rocks worn smooth by the waves, as much driftwood as your trunk will hold- any of these free natural objects make for timeless, treasured souvenirs.

But how can you record something just as precious, but just the opposite of timeless? How can you take home and treasure something as ephemeral as a footprint in the sand, or the smallness of your child’s hand the day that she first saw the Atlantic Ocean?

My kids and I have been very into plaster of Paris projects this summer. It turns out that plaster of Paris forms just as well in an easy mold of beach sand, one that you can create right on the beach, and it mixes just as well with sea water as it does tap water, and it leaves on the surface of your print a fine layer of embedded sand, perfect for recording a special trip to the ocean.

Tools & Supplies

You will need:

• Plaster of Paris: One-and-a-half cups of plaster of Paris is enough for four handprints of a small child, two footprints of a small child, one child’s handprint and one adult’s handprint, or one adult’s footprint.
• Resealable plastic bag that’s at the end of its useful life. This is a good project to finish off the bag from yesterday’s lunch, or the bag that your deli cheese came in, or the bag that the treat came home in from the last birthday party that your child went to. Plastic bags, when used sparingly and only when they’re really useful, will help you do this project neatly and efficiently and with as little trash as possible.
• Measuring cup
• Watertight pail

Directions

1. Measure Out Your Plaster

Before you go to the beach, measure out the appropriate amount of plaster of Paris and put it into a resealable plastic bag. Read the directions on your container of plaster to be sure, but generally, the ratio is 1:1.5, water to plaster of Paris. Sometimes I write how much water I’ll need to add directly onto my bag- otherwise, I tend to reverse the ratio and ruin my batch.

2. Pack Up Your Beach Bag

When you pack for the beach, bring that bag of plaster of Paris, a measuring cup for adding the seawater, and a pail for toting the water.

3. Find a Clean Spot in the Sand

At the beach, find a spot of clean sand. For a handprint or footprint, you’ll want to use somewhat damp sand, like what you get below the high tide line. This sand will hold an impression the best and make the clearest, sharpest mold.

If your little child is having trouble making a firm impression into the damp sand, till it up and smooth it back down to make it easier to shift.

4. Make the Impression

Put a hand or foot firmly down into the sand, then lift it straight back up. You want a relatively deep impression here, or your finished mold will be very thin. You will likely need to gently but firmly press down on a child’s hand or foot to help him or her make a deeper impression than they have the strength to do on their own.

Alternately, you can also dig and draw into the sand to make your own artistic mold.

5. Mix the Plaster and Seawater

Carry up some seawater in your pail, then add the appropriate amount of seawater to the plaster in your bag and seal it closed. Knead and agitate the plastic bag until the plaster is completely mixed. This is even easier than mixing your plaster in a bowl, since you can easily feel if there are any lumps remaining in your bag.

6. Pour the Plaster Into the Sand Molds

Open one end of the plastic bag, then pour the plaster to fill all your molds.

7. Let it Harden

Use the directions that came with your plaster to determine how long you should wait before you unmold your handprint. Depending on the temperature of the sand, you may have to wait longer than the directions indicate before your plaster has cured.

8. Remove Your Print

Gently excavate your print, give it a quick rinse in the ocean, and you’re done!

Now you have your beach sand souvenir and a keepsake for the grandparents, as well.

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Sew a Solar Eclipse Bunting from Stash Fabric

 

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

This solar eclipse bunting ensures clear skies for April 8!

Hey, who’s got a sewing machine and a total solar eclipse happening in her literal backyard this Spring?

I mean, maybe you, but DEFINITELY me!

Y’all, I am REVVED UP for this solar eclipse. I have been excited about it for nearly a decade by now, and ESPECIALLY excited about it for the last seven years! I’m going to have a yard full of people, I’ve got enough eclipse glasses for everybody, there will be four different kinds of lemonade on offer, and there will be solar eclipse decorations if I have to sew every single stitch myself.

Which, considering that Party City doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo, I probably will!

My first official decoration is this solar eclipse bunting sewn from upcycled blue jeans and stash fabric. Y’all know how much I love buntings, so this choice shouldn’t surprise you. And thanks to the easy templates I used and my sewing machine’s superpower that is the zigzag stitch, I was able to take this bunting from concept to completion in half an afternoon. Here’s how!

Here’s what I used to make this bunting, but remember that I sewed entirely from my stash. So if you’ve got something different in YOUR stash, go ahead and use what you’ve got!

• bunting templates. I folded an 8.5″x11″ piece of paper into an isosceles triangle for the pennants, and a wide-mouthed Mason jar lid ring for the suns and moons. For the total eclipse flare, I traced a sun onto the fabric, then drew the flares by hand around it.
• fabric. I used denim (specifically all-cotton old blue jeans) for the pennants, stash flannel for the suns, and stash Kona cotton for the moons. The eclipse flare is upcycled from an old canvas tote bag.
• bias tape. Double-fold bias tape is my favorite shortcut for sewing buntings! I buy all my bias tape from Laceking on etsy, but you can DIY this, as well.
• sewing, cutting, and marking tools. I used my Singer Heavy Duty 4411 and a universal needle for this project, but any sewing machine should be able to handle denim plus a couple of layers of cotton-weight fabric. Sharp fabric scissors are handy for cutting out details in the appliques, and I like my Frixion pens for marking, as they erase with the heat from an iron.

Step 1: Create the templates and cut out all the fabric.

I cut seven pennants out of old blue jeans using the isosceles triangle template that I cut from a piece of 8.5″x11″ paper. Because this piece is decorative, you can even use parts of the jeans with too much wear to reuse otherwise. In the photo above, check out the pennant at the top of the photo–can you see the worn-out knee there? You won’t even notice it in the completed bunting!

To make the suns and moons, I cut six yellow circles and seven black circles using a wide-mouth Mason jar lid ring as my template.

To make that eclipse flare that will be part of the center pennant, I upcycled an old striped canvas tote. I traced the sun template where I wanted the flare to be centered, then traced the pennant around it so that I could hand-draw the flare to fit the pennant.

Step 2: Applique all the Sun pieces.

I put yellow thread in my sewing machine, and set it to a zigzag stitch with a length of 2 and a width of 3. I eyeballed the placement of the suns, laying out all the pennants in a row so I could make sure that they matched, then appliqued them to the pennants.

Appliqueing the flare to the pennant required a bit more finesse, but a confident beginner should be able to do it. Just go slowly and don’t forget to make sure the needle is down when you rotate the fabric.

Step 3: Applique the Moons to the pennants.

I switched out the thread in the sewing machine to black, and went ahead and stitched the moon to the center of the flare, since I knew exactly where it was supposed to be.

To place the rest of the moons, I laid out the entire bunting on the floor so I could eyeball the whole thing at once.

If you’re in the Northern hemisphere for the 2024 eclipse, you’ll be facing South, and the Moon will be coming from the West, so we read this bunting from right to left. The Moon passes across the Sun on a diagonal from top right to bottom left. I placed the Moon pieces on each pennant to mimic the process of the eclipse, roughly trying to make them symmetrical without getting too pedantic about it.

Using the same sewing machine settings, I appliqued all the Moons to the pennants. Notice that the Moon goes off the pennant a few times. I trimmed all that away.

Step 4: Staystitch around the pennants, then add bias tape.

I switched back to yellow thread, then staystitched the perimeter of each pennant flag with a straight stitch at a length of 3. This will keep the denim from fraying beyond where I want it to, as well as stitching down the edges of the moons that I trimmed.

I measured and stitched shut approximately 12″ of bias tape, then started adding the pennants and stitching them into the fold of the bias tape. At the end of the pennants, I continued stitching the bias tape to itself for another 12″, then cut it.

I tied both ends of the bias tape into an overhand knot, and my bunting was finished!

My bunting is already installed over my nicest window. After April 8, there won’t be another total solar eclipse that hits the United States until 2033 (anyone want to meet me in Alaska to watch it?), but instead of putting this bunting into storage until then, I’m kind of thinking that I’ll find another place to install it permanently–perhaps on my porch? It’s too pretty not to look at every day!

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