Category — Kid Crafts

There’s a lot of activity shaking down in our neck of Ottawa these days and as much as I want to just focus on food writing and cooking, my inner community activist is being consumed by the completely foolish reconstruction plans of an arterial highway/main street not far from us.  Yes, highway and main street!  That’s Ottawa planning for you.

Sigh.

I’ve been putting together some items for Alden’s expanded “play kitchen 2011.”  Last year, the husband crafted a lovely tabletop cooktop for him out of spare Ikea shelves and now we’d like to build an oven and shelf unit for the cooktop to sit on.  My role was to find some new playfood to use.  As much as he’s loved all the crochet foods I made last year, I just didn’t have time to dedicate to crafting more food.  I relied on the internet and found some super cute Erzi and Haba playfood on the Baby Naturopathics website.

I really like the Haba felt noodles: fettucine, bow ties and ravioli.  They were sort of ridiculously priced for felt and my inner “crafty mom” is still feeling a bit guilty for not making my own.  If you are crafty, you could easily whip these up with some felt at home.  But alas, time was of the essence.

Some things, were just too amazing to resist.  The coffee beans in the little tin?  He is going to love putting those in the mini espresso maker for “coffee”.  The roast chicken with the removable legs?  I think he’s going to love roasting it up in his oven.

I looked at many play versions of coffee makers but they were so expensive!  The mini espresso maker is the perfect size and essential for the kid who likes playing with the “real” thing.

I also picked up some tea bags, sausages, fish filets, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and jam.

The clincher?  The mini chef hat.  I found this one at J.D. Adams in the Glebe (but they also have them at the Glebe Emporium).

You don’t notice how much Easter is defined by chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs until you can’t eat them.  And after multiple stops at multiple grocery stores, there was not a single treat to be found without eggs, milk or nuts. Not even jelly beans.

I know that I could order some allergy friendly candy online, but this year, I didn’t feel it was necessary to go that route.

This year again, we are shunning the chocolates and marshmallow peeps for non-food items. I’ve been tucking away little surprises for a solid month (ever since the Valentine/Easter swapover).  It has taken a bit of work, but I’m happy to report that I have an Easter basket full of goodies ready and waiting.

Here’s what’s in the basket:

• Play-doh – comes in cute egg containers and a little basket.  (Found these at Toysrus in the checkout aisle)
• Frog basket, bunny cookie cutters, small bubble wand, Easter dishcloth and toy bunny – Loblaws
• Plastic empty eggs (reused from last year) – also from Loblaws
• Bunny stickers – Hallmark
• Small Easter puzzle – Hallmark

A friend told me that Zellers sells Easter eggs with cars in them (although, I couldn’t find them at our nearest store) and there are lots of other ideas forallergy-friendly Easter baskets all over the web.

And if all this fails… I have backup Duplo in the basement.  Always have a Plan B.

I had a request from a Ravelry friend for more details about the homemade play kitchen. The kitchen was the husband’s handywork and features our hacking material of choice: Ikea Ivar shelves. Somehow, we never manage to run out of spare Ivar shelves.

Other materials included: a wooden drawer handle for the sink faucet, wooden door knobs for the well… knobby bits, bowl for the sink, some little LED lights for the burners and a bit of spare plexiglass to cover the burner holes.

Alden really loves the “working” burners. The husband used his new router tool to make the burner coils and covered the center hole with a piece of plastic painted red on the inside to give the appearance of being “hot” when the light is turned on.  This part was quite the production in order to get the right tooly bits for the router. Thingamajobbies.   You know.  He ended up having to buy some set of thingamajobbies to get the right part.  Which probably means that we didn’t really save much cashamajobbies to build it.  I didn’t ask.

It is held together with some screws and has a clear varnish to protect the wood from any spills.  He did a nice job sanding the sharp edges and generally giving the wood a bit of a facelift.  (The shelves looked pretty grim when he started the project.  I’ll admit, I was worried about the appearance of the final product.)

The kitchen was designed to sit on top of a wooden blanket box that often doubles as our coffee table or truck zone… depending on the day.  The kitchen can easily be tucked into his closet as part of our toy rotation to keep things fresh.

Voila!

We did it, we did it, we did it! Yay!  You know we did it….

OH MAN, I have been stuck watching way too much Dora the Explorer lately.  That darn “we did it” song is spinning in my brain on a neverending loop.  Unfortunately, the little man thinks Dora is the greatest thing in the universe.  SIGH. No, mega SIGH.

Over the weekend (and part of Monday night) I made an origami paper advent calendar thingy and I think it’s pretty cool.  I used up paper and ribbons from my stash paying a moderate amount of attention to colour coordination. I didn’t want a fugly advent.  I started this project on Saturday with a toddler under foot and frankly, by Sunday I was convinced that our advent would only have 12 days.  It got fiddly getting the ribbons attached and I will admit, I got a little bored.  I persevered through Monday night and had my little elf help hang them on the mantel.

Yesterday, I wanted to kick the calendar off on a high note – you will see a little tractor tucked in the first basket.  Oh man, was Alden in love with this tractor.  He held it all the way to school.  And cried when he had to put it away.  Oh, to be two and addicted to wheels!

The baskets were SUPER easy to make – even I could figure out the instructions. (Don’t ask about the origami tree I attempted. Utter fail.) Here is a link to the full instructions. I found the link to this pattern from an Aussie website called Kids Craft Weekly.  There are SO many great ideas on this site for crafty projects.  Lovely.

Progres is being made on the Christmas play food project – despite leaving the majority of my food coloured yarn at work and all of my crochet hooks. Oops. Note to self – buy a second set of hooks for home.

This weekend, I switched gears and did some knitted items that weren’t in the “official plan”. I tried my hand at two cupcake patterns and I’m starting to think, I could totally write a better version since I didn’t exactly follow the instructions on either pattern. I definitely preferred the cupcake that was knitted with a removable wrapper for two reasons: first, it has a wrapper! second: the smaller size is really much cuter. So, sometime I’d like to write a seamless version because I found the seaming fiddly and had problems making the base of the wrapper and cake flat.

On Sunday night, I made up a pattern for a spring onion / baby leek and I think it really worked out well. I just need to whip up a couple more so that I can tie them together as a bunch.

Last week during my lunch hours, I finished up a carrot and a garlic bulb. The carrot was inspired by the pattern from Tasty Crochet but without all the weird decreases. I prefer the storybook style triangle carrot to her more realistic version. Seriously, this is like the cutest carrot ever. Alden’s bunny is going to be soooo happy. The garlic bulb was a modifed version of a mini pumpkin pattern that I saw on Ravelry. Again, I think if I made it again, there are a few things I’d change to make it a bit taller and tapered at the top, but overall, I think this one is passable as a garlic bulb.

Finally, a knitting hack that I am pretty proud of… the kiwi! I didn’t have the exact kiwi-brown in my stash, but I don’t think it matters. It still looks 98% like a real kiwi.

Still in progress – the pizza slice. I’ve reached the annoying toppings part and I’m not really looking forward to finishing it. Ugh.

If you’re on Ravelry, you can find all the details and links to the patterns from my project page.

This year marked our second Halloween in the new neighbourhood, but first attempt at trick or treating. Now, our allergy situation makes the “treating” part tricky – there really aren’t any egg/milk/nut-free treats being sold at the grocery store.  So,  I went ahead and made some allergy friendly treats – packaged them up in individual baggies and dropped them off in advance to our neighbours.  The baggies contained things like raisins, stickers, apples, Mum mums and play dough.

My neighbours were happy to play along and we stopped at about 10 houses.  The perfect amount for a fledgeling trick-or-treater.  Although we had practiced saying “Trick or Treat” and “thank you” at home, he clammed up when it came to speaking. Rather, he stuck his little bag out and waited for the treats to fall.  He caught onto that pretty quickly.  No, make that very quickly.

I was pretty proud that we wore his sheep costume that I knit. He pouted and scowled for weeks at the thought of wearing the hat… let alone the matching vesty/sweater. I was determined that he would wear the costume… determined. In the end, the weather was so cold that he didn’t complain at all – not one peep! – about wearing a hat. The vesty part fit right over his winter coat, so he didn’t feel like an itchy sheep. Win! No – super win!

If you’re interested in knitting up a sheep costume yourself, there is a great free pattern up on Ravelry from a fellow Ontarian knitter. It was a super quick knit on 15mm needles! using double stranded super bulky yarn. It was pretty much the craziest knitting I’ve ever done. I had it knitted up in less than a week, so it wasn’t too time consuming. (yay!) It was the perfect costume for a cold Canadian Halloween. And it got lots of compliments from the neighbours which made me pretty happy.

Mostly, I’m pretty proud of my little sheep for being such a good sport. Baaa!

Ok craft supply companies. (Prang, Budget, Elmers,  Color Splash and any others I just haven’t called yet)   Listen up.  You need to include an ingredient list on your craft supplies.  I don’t need to know the super secret formula for your paint, but I need to know if things like your tempera paint includes egg.  (Because historically, tempera paint contained egg.  And because you guys certainly don’t like putting labels on your products… or contact information. Seriously, at least put a 1-800 number on the bottle.)

Oh, and the product safety data sheets that supposedly contain all safety related information?  Yeah.  They don’t say anything about food allergens in your product.

And while most of the paint companies I’ve contacted so far (4 and counting) have said that their tempera paints don’t include egg, I’m not really convinced if I can’t see it in print.  And yelling over your shoulder to ask “Sheila” if your product contains egg, doesn’t really seem like good customer relations or product safety knowledge.

And Elmer’s? Well, you can’t even answer your phone, email or Twitter.  **Edited at 3:04pm – they just tweeted back that it does not contain egg.  So, Twitter seems to be the quickest way to resolve an issue with them.  Thanks!**

And frankly, I’m not really sure what to do about it all.  I’ve sent an email to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to ask about labelling laws for non-food items (no response yet… although, it’s only been an hour and I know how long crafting a response in the government takes.)

Update – September 28: Well, the kind autobots at CFIA did reply to my email only to tell me that they only deal with food items and that I can contact Health Canada with my labelling questions. So, the ball is now in Health Canada’s court. Bounce.

I guess you can tell that I’m mad.  Imagine that – a mad “mommy blogger”.

One year olds are fun.  Lots of fun, in fact.  Finally, I can start pulling out the crafty projects I’ve been tucking away for over a year.   Last week I decided that our day together would involved goop.  Lots of goop.  It’s a good project for a toddler – if a little ends up in their mouth (or the cat’s) it’s ok.

My goop recipe is very basic:

• 1/4 cup of water
• 1/2 cup of corn starch
• some blueberry juice for colour

You may need to add a little more water if you find it too cakey and not gooey enough.  Alden loved when I loaded my hands up with goop and let it all drip off.  Even Orville wanted to get involved.  I don’t know what the cat was thinking, but he was pretty brave coming over to investigate.  He managed to remain un-gooped during the whole activity.  Amazing.

I can see us making this again when we are tucked inside during the winter.

Well, as if moving into a new house and getting the kitchen fixed up wasn’t enough on our plate – we discovered that our little guy was allergic to cow’s milk.  Neither the husband or myself have any allergies, so we’re not quite sure how this happened.  Apparently, cow’s milk allergy is very common in children and most grow out of it by the time they are two or so.  (fingers crossed)

So, until then both myself and the kid are going dairy-free.  Because giving up soft cheese when I was pregnant wasn’t hard enough.  I looooove cheese and ice cream and yogourt.  Admittedly, this is going to be a real challenge.  First big failure: soy cream cheese?  That was the most foul thing I have ever tasted.  It was so thin and silky and just not right.  It went into the bin.  Ugh.  The memories haunt my tastebuds.

Small upside, I get to make our dairy-free meals on the new granite counter.  How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

Ever since watching the Marketplace episode about “Made in Canada” foods, I’ve been reading labels like mad.  This led to the bread machine purchase… and now, the ice cream machine.  (Most store-bought ice cream doesn’t even have milk in it!  Link)

How better to break in the new machine, than by participating in Ice Cream Ireland’s ice cream taste tests!  The testing starts tomorrow!