I must tell you that Willow and I are getting QUITE good at the guitar. We can do walking fingers, and Easter Bunny Gets Depressed After Easter, and tomorrow we are going to the music shop to buy music notebooks so that Will can do the rest of her guitar homework, which is to draw some quarter notes.
Will woke us up early this morning with her guitar practice, and it's a good thing that she got it done, too, for she has been sick AGAIN today. Thank goodness no barfing, because I don't think my nerves could handle another stomach bug so soon, but I am firmly against medicating a non-severe fever, and guess whose child of course gets hysterical every time she has a fever?
Fortunately, the child was placated with an endless supply of Mythbusters and Magic School Bus, and so I still had time to sew, and do laundry, and draw pictures with the baby, and cook a veggie chili that I distractedly made far too salty, and straighten the house, and read
, and felt up some Easter eggs.
Felting with wool roving is one of the very few crafts that I do using new materials, and one of the very few activities of any sort that I do using animal products, and it's still not my favorite thing, frankly, but in a child's Easter basket it's non-plastic, non-sugary, non-factory-farmed chicken egg...and also colorful and soft and fun and suitable to be handed down to future generations of guitar-playing little girls, so there you go.
To felt your own Easter eggs, you will need:
- egg forms. After Easter, when I can pick them up for free at the Recycling Center, likely, I have plans to make felted wool shaker eggs with those awful plastic Easter eggs, but for these particular eggs, which I intend to be heirloom-quality for my children, I'm using wooden eggs from Casey's Wood Products. I also have a fondness for their wood dinosaur cut-outs, if you must know.
- wool roving. I buy my roving from The Arts at Eagle's Find, where I am assured that the shop owner knows the happy sheep from which the wool came.
- hot water
- dish soap
- aluminum foil and a clothes dryer--just go with me on this for a bit
1. Cut off a goodly amount of roving--anywhere from twice to three times the size of your object, depending on how bulky it is:
I always try to get by with a smaller amount of roving than I really need, but don't be like me--give yourself a generous amount of roving to work with.
2. Roll up your egg in your roving, trying not to have a bunch of the edges of the roving meet in the same place.
3. Get your roving-wrapped egg nice and saturated in the hot water and dish soap, and just sort of pat it down for a while. Pat, pat, pat all around the egg, gently working the roving into an even layer all over the egg. You don't want any spots that are too bulky, and you don't want any thin spots where the wood will peek through:
4. Keep doing this for a while, perhaps ten minutes or so, until the roving feels somewhat felted and holds itself around the egg. You can also rub, agitate, or roll the egg around in your hands--all that friction helps the roving felt.
5. When the roving is pretty well felted around the egg--it doesn't have to be perfect by any means--rinse out all of the dish soap, and then, while the egg is still soaking wet, wrap it snugly in some aluminum foil:
I'm not a big fan of aluminum foil, either, but parchment paper and wax paper just didn't work. Aluminum foil works.
6. Throw the foil-wrapped eggs into your dryer along with a load of clothes, and dry everything on hot. The heat and agitation in the dryer will do an excellent job of completing the felting on your eggs, while you go do something else.
When you're done, your eggs will look something like this:
Aren't they cool? I think that I'm going to felt around most of the smaller eggs in our collection, and save the larger ones for decorating in other ways. Easter is coming up, after all, and we haven't gotten out the Sharpies or hot glue even once!
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and backed and with a back-to-front binding made from a handmade dino-print quilted blanket scored from the Goodwill Outlet Store (stuff is $1.39 a pound there, so definitely under a buck):
I think the little girl likes it:
A lot:
The slightly smaller wall quilt, also dino-themed, is on its way to my Dinosaur swap partner, but I somehow managed to totally screw up the wall quilt that I was making for my pumpkinbear etsy shop, AND the girls, in a completely unauthorized activity, spilled smoothie all over the piles of fabric that I was using for the quilt, so that little project is on hold for a bit while some fabric goes through the wash and I take several deep breaths. I may use the time to re-make my idea from a wall quilt into another kid-sized lap quilt, anyway, because I LOVE how Will's turned out.
You do top and bottom, then left and right, then top and bottom again, taking turns to build up your block:
Obviously, some of the pieces on the longer side will have to be trimmed to be narrower than 1.5", otherwise you won't be able to get to a perfect square AND have the same number of pieces added.
When you're done with one block, repeat (can you figure out how I messed this one up?):
