Little Pink Houses for you and me

In my ongoing endeavor to "use ALL the craft supplies I've accumulated", I spent my last few weeks of crafty time working on my little chipboard house kits.

I purchased these kits a couple of years ago with the intention of making wee-little house Christmas ornaments.  In fact, they have hangers built into their chimneys for just such a purpose.  I found, though, that my numerous attempts to work on them during the winter would generally end in frustrating creative roadblocks.  The construction of the houses involved a lot of sit-and-hold-while-glue-dries, the designs never seemed to come together smoothly, and the results didn't pan out to look anything like the original concept I'd had in my head (as vague as it was to begin with). For me, the collage process involves a lot of "walk away and think about it", so perhaps Christmas is not the season for me to do collages in the first place. After the winter holidays came to a close, I turned to Pinterest for inspiration on Putz houses - traditional little cardboard house villages, which are usually covered in glitter, and generally put out at Christmas time, although I did find some themed for Easter.  After the relative success of my altered tins, and remembering that I did complete one spring themed house last year, I thought I would apply the spring theme to the rest of my little Putzy houses.

I now have a wee village (which will grow by one house once I get the rest of the Easter decorations out of the attic)

The pink farm house was the first, and most frustrating, house to start with... frustrating only in that it was already assembled, but painted dark red and brown and I wasn't fond of how it looked at all.  I repainted this house 3 times before I was satisfied with the color combination.  The addition of window frames, a little flower garden, and a coating of the traditional Putz glitter finally finished this 2-year old project.

Bonus: finally using the little flower tabs my mom handed down to me.

With that success under my belt, I began digging through my paper stash, putting together color combinations, and picking out inhabitants for my little village.  The map house came together quickly, as did the purple bird house.  The tall gnome house gave me a little trouble, as I'd picked a nice realistic looking clover for the ground, and the swirly red for the roof, so the house needed to be dark... however none of my blue monochrome papers looked quite right.  I set it aside for a couple days, then finally came across the bold stripes which seem to be just the right amount of dark and light to work.

I found that mod-podging all the pieces before assembly made for much easier work.  I also gave up on my regular glue and attempted both double-stick tape and hot glue for the house assembly.  The double-stick tape generally held the first couple houses together well, although one roof was not perfectly lined up, and so part of it kept popping up. so I eventually fixed it with hot glue.  Also, the wee fences would not hold with tape at all, so those were fixed with hot glue as well. Hot glue held everything well, but is not very forgiving if you don't line it up right, and also has the possibility of burnt fingertips, so I would practice putting the pieces together a few times prior to applying the glue.  That seemed to do the trick, and the few extra globs (which seem to be inevitable with hot glue) were easily removed with my xacto knife.

My favorites are my little church, and the red gnome house.

This bird paper pack is among my favorite in my whole stash, and a bird themed church is appropriate for me.

I love the raindrop paper on this roof, and the flags on the fence, such a cheerful little gnome house!

Eggless Easter Eggs of the Felted Sort

This year's experiment in egg decorating was inspired by my friend H's post about some beautiful wool rovings.... I've always wanted to try needle felting (and frankly needed an excuse to by a box of pretty pretty colors) so I did a little searching around and found out that needle felting eggs is really quite simple.

Get a styrofoam egg.

Wrap it in some wool roving.

Get a felting needle and stab the bajeezus out of it until it sticks.

This is not only a great opportunity to experiment with pretty colors, patterns and pictures, but it is one heck of a stress reliever.  G always enjoys new craft opportunities and jumped right in, however I was pleasantly surprised when also D picked up a needle and worked his creative magic.  Together we felted over a dozen colorful Easter Eggs... so much fun!

Eggless Easter

Decorating Easter eggs has always been a giant exercise in patience and paranoia for me.  As a kid, my mom would have one of the neighbors boil eggs in their house - so as to avoid the high potential for an asthma attack for me.  Once the eggs were safely boiled and cooled, they were returned to our dining room table... where we would line up the identical set of coffee mugs (which I swear we only used for this purpose) filled the appropriate amount of vinegar, plopped the little sweet-tart looking discs in, and went to work transforming the evil little ovals of death into brightly colored holiday decorations.

My efforts were generally hindered by wearing my mother's rubber dish washing gloves and attempting to balance these fragile beasts on the end of the flimsy bent wire "egg holder" that came with the decorating kit.  More often than not, I simply gave up trying to handle them myself and directed my dad to plunk them into the various colors.  I participated for the traditional family gathering aspect of it, I wasn't going to have anything more to do with them anyway... the eggs were turned into snacks and egg salad for the rest of the family, and come Easter morning, the kid's egg hunt was for the plastic sort that had prizes and candy hidden inside.

I'm not sure if I've grown even more paranoid as the years go on, or if I've just decided that life is to frackin' short to be actively adding potential health hazards to it, but either way I believe I have entirely given up on the traditional real-egg-dying baloney.  I've tried to stick with it out of some sense of loyalty to the past, some years combining the precarious-egg-dying with the far more enjoyable wooden-egg-painting... but really, when it comes down to it, what's the point?

I don't want hard boiled eggs in my house.  The smell makes my stomach turn over, the sight of them in my fridge makes my hand instinctively recoil as I reach for my coffee creamer, and as incredibly careful and cautious as both D and G are when handling the little devils... I spend my days feverishly scrubbing down counters to avoid breaking out in hives and secretly plotting out ways I can "accidentally" throw out what's left and just be done with the whole stinkin' holiday.  (Now take that paranoia and multiply it a thousand times over when someone who is not as careful as D comes over and starts cracking one open on my kitchen counter.  *shudder*)

My alternative tradition is to decorate fake eggs.

Last year I picked up several bags of paper mache eggs, and G and I had a lovely time sitting and painting the little guys.  She found it far more interesting to be able to paint designs rather than plunk them in a cup and just... watch.  Also, she enjoys not having to be afraid of dropping them.  This makes me feel satisfied that my allergy is not depriving my child of our own holiday family tradition.

This year I saw an article in Family Circle magazine about ways to decorate plastic eggs.  When I took a trip to Michael's last week I picked up some of their new, brightly colored paper mache eggs, a few packs of origami paper, and tonight G and I sat down and experimented with a few designs (as well as breaking out the pastel paints for the leftover paper mache eggs from last year)

The result of tonight's efforts:

What I also love about this project - besides being able to save them as decorations for future Easters, is that it can be an ongoing project all the way up to Easter, which gives us more than just an afternoon of sitting around smelling vinegar.

Edit on Sunday: Today's Egg Adventures