DIY Minnie Mouse Pinata & Free Party Activty Sign Printables

Disclosure: I was sent the black jumbo streamers to review free of charge from Oriental Trading. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review.

Jonathan London's Froggy Series Themed Birthday Party Ideas and Giveaway

Disclosure: Penguin Kids gave me a copy of these books free of charge for this review and are providing the book for the giveaway. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation.  As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation.

Have you been following the fun challenge Penguin Kids gave this month? It all started because Froggy's Birthday Wish by Jonathan London and illustrated by Frank Remkiewicz was released on March 10th! We were lucky enough to receive a review copy as well as two other Froggy books, Froggy Builds a Tree House and Froggy Gets a Doggy. Have you discovered the Froggy series yet? They are so fun. We are going to provide some general Froggy birthday party ideas as well as ones from each book. For even more Froggy birthday party ideas check out my Froggy Birthday Party Pinterest Board!

Felt for the Home

Disclosure: Leisure Arts sent me a copy of this book in return for an honest review. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. The links are affiliate links where I will receive a small percentage of any purchases made through them at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting Crafty Moms Share!

We had a busy week back from our vacation and we are celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week a week early so my focus has been at school and not crafting. Ugh!! However I want to share thie fun book with you. It is Felt for the Home by Kimberly Layton. 

Virtual Book Club for Kids: Tomie dePaola

Sharing Saturday is still open if you would like to share your child-oriented crafts and activities or be inspired by the amazing ones already shared!

Today I thank God for a week with very few plans so hopefully I can get the rest I need!

Today is the kick off of November's Virtual Book Club for Kids Blog Hop. As you may know I have joined a wonderful group of bloggers to do this book club. Each month we feature an author and each of us picks a book to blog about and do some craft or activity with it. Then we invite you to join us by choosing a book by the author of the month and sharing in our blog hop. I join the following wonderful blogs to bring this to you each month.

Toddler Approved - Rainy Day Mum - Adventures in Reading with Kids -
 3 Dinosaurs - Royal Baloo -  The Educators' Spin On It -  
Inspiration Laboratories - Pleasantest Thing - Edventures with Kids - 
Two Big Two Little - Playing With Words 365 - Kitchen Counter Chronicles - Outlaw Mom -  Mommy and Me Book Club -  No Twiddle Twaddle - 
The Good Long Road - Ready. Set. Read 2 Me - Reading Confetti - 
Mama Smiles - Juggling with Kids- Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas -  
Creekside Learning - Creative Family Fun - The Usual Mayhem - 
Teach Preschool - PlayDrMom - CraftoArt - Here Come the Girls -  
Being a Conscious Parent - Smiling like Sunshine - Crayon Freckles -  
Train Up a Child - Smile Play Learn

This month's author is Tomie dePaolo. Now he has many books to choose from that appeal to different ages. This week we will talk about two of his books.

Angels, Angels Everywhere is a sweet little book for younger children. It goes through each page with different angels and they are labeled things like "Kitchen Angel" or "Play Angel". You can guess from the pictures what their role is as well.

Pascual and the Kitchen Angels is a book telling the life of Pascual, the patron saint of the kitchen. Pascual goes to a monastery to join the monks, but when the monks see all the food he brings from his family they ask him to cook. Not wanting to be sent away he goes to the kitchen and begins to pray since poor Pascual does not know how to cook or for that matter boil water. The angels come and cook while Pascual prays and prepare a wonderful feast. The monks are so impressed with his cooking they make Pascual their cook.


Since both of these books involve angels, we are sharing both of them today. For Pascual and the Kitchen Angels, we made wooden spoon kitchen angels.

I bought some wooden spoons at the Dollar Tree. We put a googly eye on each and then used felt for hair, dress and wings and a pipe cleaner for the halos. This craft can also work for Angels, Angels Everywhere since it also mentions kitchen angels.

We also made some lollipop angels. We are still working on using up our Halloween candy!

For these we used tissue paper, coffee filter dresses, cupcake liners (for wings) and pipe cleaner halos.

Then we made some paper plate angels. I think these are pretty self explanatory.

Then after Hazel went to bed, I made her an angel mobile. In Angels, Angels Everywhere we talk about the Bedtime Angel who tucks the children into bed and we always add that she stays and keeps them safe so they are not alone. I thought it would be fun to have a mobile of angels with one representing the Bedtime Angel. I put three angels on it to represent the Bedtime Angel, the Wake Up Angel, and the Guarding Angel. My plan is to hang it above Hazel's bed so she will see the angels looking over her each night.

These angels are made with a pipe cleaner, wooden bead, scraps of yarn and felt for clothes. I used the pipe cleaner halo and a I cut a silver poinsettia I got at the Dollar Tree for wings. Then I strung them and hung them on a circle of floral wire. My balance is  not perfect yet, but I will work on it.

For even more angel crafts you can check out all the ones we did last year for the angel swap we participated in. 

Every time we read Angels, Angels Everywhere Hazel tells me she really likes it! What Tomie dePaola books have you been reading lately? I hope you will join us in our blog hop! Next week we will be sharing another Tomie dePaola book and craft/activity. I hope you will join us again!

Cinnamon Applesauce Dough Ornaments

As promised here are some of our ornaments. The ones above were ones I decorated. We started this after I saw so many pins on pinterest of them. I decided to go with the recipe at Homemade Gifts Made Easy. I liked this one versus the other ones because it didn't have glue in it. I didn't like the idea of glue on my rolling pin. I also originally saw a recipe that called for 2 cups of cinnamon and bought accordingly, but then couldn't find that recipe. If I make these again I would use less cinnamon since the dough was a bit dry--though I'm guessing it depends on the applesauce you are using. Hazel loved helping mix by hand and get her hands dirty. We had a lot of fun with this recipe. I thought about taking pictures while mixing, but my hands were just as dirty. Sorry!

I loved having them in the oven. It made the whole house smell so wonderful. I hung a few around (the broken ones) already. Hazel began to decorate with glitter glue. We started with the ones I got at the Dollar Tree. However, Hazel had some trouble with them so we took a field trip to Lakeshore Learning to buy the ones she had used there. I was shocked to see the exact same ones as the Dollar Tree, but they also had the bigger ones.

Hazel went to town decorating and they make take several days to dry now.

I had to take some away from her saying they were decorated enough. See below. But we had fun!

Hazel's over decorated ornaments

Works in progress

Some I decorated

Holiday Wreaths & Ornaments with Supplies from Dollar Tree -- a Crafty Weekends Link Party

Disclosure: I was compensated for this post. This post also contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links.

I have been in such a holiday mood. I don't really like Halloween, so I think I have been trying to skip over it and get to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Plus the amazing Christmas products at Thirty-One are only available in October and November so I have been trying to let people know about them and am planning a holiday shopping party in the beginning of November. I was thinking it would be fun to have some door prizes and just prizes to make the party more of a celebration. What better prizes than homemade ones and I made some with supplies from Dollar Tree. I made two wreaths and some different ornaments.

Spring and Easter Crafts

This week we have been busy making Easter egg crafts and some spring crafts. We got a few ideas from Family Fun. The first is a paper mache egg diorama made to look like the sugar ones. I bought some water bomb balloons so they would be more egg shaped than the round ones. We used their recipe for paste and did our best to get three layers one. Hazel had a few issues but it was not too bad. The hardest thing was finding things to go inside the eggs.

This is messy, so make sure you put the newspaper down! They also can drip while drying, so leave it there for the first bit. The nice part of the flour water paste is that it cleans up fairly easily. This is a simple paper mache of dipping the tissue paper into the homemade paste and smoothing it onto a balloon. Some are smoother than others, but when making with a three-year-old we are not looking for perfection.

After they have completely dried you pop the balloon and cut a hole. Then you fill it with some Easter grass and a figurine. You can also decorate the outside around the hole, but you have to make more paste for this. Then glue a bow on top and glue a jar lid to the bottom to get it to stand.

The next craft we also got from Family Fun. We got to use our water balloons and I made the homemade paste again instead of the glue mixture and we invaded my yarn supply.

Hazel had more difficulty with these. She did not quite get the idea of wrapping the yarn. She wanted to apply it in bunches which did not stick and she also got a lot of the paste on it so it showed (this is the one downfall of using the paste and not the glue mixture). She decided to make all red ones because Chrysanthemum (formerly Ducky) wanted them red. She also experimented with putting the balloon in the paste instead of the glue. It didn't work but she kept trying.

The general idea of these are to dip the yarn in the paste/glue and wrap around the balloons. You let them dry and then pop the balloons and have a beautiful yarn egg.

I decided to use the ones we made to decorate the dining room. I hung them from the chandelier (which is high enough so the cats can't play with them).

I also made Hazel some flower fairies. I found this package of flower bath petals or something like that in the clearance section at Michaels for 45 cents.

Having recently seen Marie's of Softearth World post on Thumbellina, I bought them with that in mind. So I pulled out some peg dolls and made them into fairies to match the blue flowers.

Hazel also painted some wooden butterflies that I bought at the Dollar Tree. I then glued one ribbons for her to hang them on her tree.

We have been a little behind on switching her tree to spring so these will help.

Ok, that catches you up on all of our crafting this week. What have you been up to? I hope you will come back and share at Sharing Saturday! And if you have any family time related posts please come share at Happy Family Times each Tuesday.

This is where I link up...

Gingerbread Play Date

Today we had a gingerbread play date with one of Hazel's best friends and his mother. To get started we had foam gingerbread men to decorate. I had bought them ages ago at the Dollar Tree I think. We had glitter glue, stickers, ribbon, googly eyes, beads and pom poms out to decorate them.

Hazel and I also read Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett (December's author of the month for the Virtual Book Club for Kids). Our friends were running late, so we did not have time to read it as a group, but Hazel and I enjoyed the story.


We had made some gingerbread cookie dough. I cheated and used a Betty Crocker mix I bought on sale post-Christmas. I had planned on making the dough from scratch, but didn't quite do it and then read my favorite recipe needed at least four hours in the refrigerator before rolling and cutting, and since they were due in just over an hour, I decided that wasn't going to happen. I had bought a white cookie icing for each of them and lots of candy and sprinkles to decorate.

We also made some gingerbread playdough. I combined the recipes from The Imagination Tree and Two Big and Two Little. I used all the spices in Two Big and Two Little's recipe, but the amounts and mix style of The Imagination Tree's recipe. We did not have a lot of time to play with it together, but sent some home with her friend and Hazel and one of her high school babysitters played with it more this afternoon. These pictures are a combination of both.

I know we were a little late for gingerbread, but we had fun anyway!

Christmas Fractal Lesson

 

Over the years I have shared my love for fractals with you. I began with my introduction to frozen fractals after Elsa sings about them in "Let It Go" in Disney's Frozen. A fractal is an object that has self-similarity, or each part looks like the whole. It introduces new ideas of symmetry, dimensionality, and more. Fractal geometry often explains some of the irregularities of our world. It can be a very complex topic to understand, but it is an important one. Fractals are making advances in our medical world, entertainment (movies, computer games and more) as well as science. There are some topics that kids even young kids can understand. Since they were introduced in Frozen, many kids have now heard of them. I feel it is important to teach kids about them and give them a true idea of what they are. 

Nice weather here = time outside!!

Who is at my door?

Today is beautiful out. We got up early and played inside, though we hung a load of wash on the line this morning. Then we ran our errands--vote, library, craft store and dollar store, pet store and grocery store. Then we came home an played outside.I pulled out the box of clothes and clips I got and sewed for Hazel's swingset. Her first response was her normal one..."No, no! I don't want them. They will blow away!" But after I started hanging them she realized they wouldn't blow away and wanted to start help hanging them. She loves her outside house.

Our birthday party

We also played with her sandbox. I bought her a cake pan, a muffin pan and some measuring cups at the Dollar Tree today, so she decided to bake a sand cake and cupcakes and we had a birthday party. We left it set up to have another one for when Daddy gets home. We have moved her sand table into the garage so she will be able to play with it all winter. Our garage is well insulated so it doesn't get too cold in the winter. I think I'm going to make her an oven out of a cardboard box for the garage and outside (in the summer) for her mudpies and sand cakes. We have the box from her car seat saved so I could use it for something, and I think this is my something.

A quick craft to share. On Sunday we worked on some new napkin rings. Here are the ones we made for ourselves. Steve and I spelled out the names/words and helped Hazel get them on in the correct order, but then let her do the other beads. We made other personalized ones for our family and friends for Christmas gifts from Hazel and I also did other Christmas kind of words--joy, hope, faith, Christ, Thank God, etc. I may bring these to our church for the Breakfast with Santa Children's market. Maybe I'll make some nice cloth napkins to go with them.

Finally a few things to check out:

From Joyful Toddlers: Fall Celebrations: Martinmas. Great information about the Martinmas celebration including a story to share. Martinmas is on November 11th, so this Friday. We made a lantern at school and will be making more this week.

From Bending Birches a link to a film on vaccinations. It seems to lean towards not vaccinating but does try to show both sides pretty fairly. It is only being presented free through today, so go check it out. I know I believe in vaccinating, but am always curious about the studies, etc. Of course yesterday one of my friends posted something about parents buying lollipops on-line that were licked by a kid with chicken pox to give their kids. Which I thought was disgusting (and so did the friend). Who knows what other diseases, etc. are on the lollipop.

My Garden Birthday Party Ideas

So Penguin Kids challenged me (and you) to come up with some birthday party ideas based on favorite books this month. They will be sending me some books to do this with and also wanted us to use our own favorites. I decided our first party idea would be to the theme of the book My Garden by Kevin Henkes. This is one of my favorite books and Hazel loves reading it still. We shared it a couple years ago with a few different crafts and ideas as part of the Virtual Book Club for Children. This story is about a girl telling us how her garden would be different than her mother's. The girl is very imaginative and it includes things like growing jelly bean buses and shells and having only chocolate bunnies. We decided to start with the table settings.

DIY Wild Kratts Themed Birthday Party -- Product Review

Disclosure: I was sent these items to review free of charge from Oriental Trading. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. I am including links to the products for your convenience but do not receive anything if you buy from them.

I have been promising a post about our Wild Kratts themed birthday party and here it is. The rest of the week I will be doing posts on New Year Resolutions and products that are helping with mine. But with New Year's come Hazel's birthday party. It is always over Christmas vacation, but this year we decided to have her party with her school friends after the vacation and we discovered many more people come when it is not on vacation!! But first our invitation.

DIY Doll Camping Equipment

Happy New Year!! I hope all of you have a healthy and successful 2015!! I know I am planning some exciting things for Crafty Moms Share and hope you will stay tuned. (One of the best ways to stay tuned is to subscribe to Crafty Moms Share! See the ways to do so in the right column.) I am lining up some amazing giveaways and reviews as well as fun crafts and activities to do with your child(ren). 

Today I thought I would share the main part of Hazel's birthday present from us. This year's family birthday party was American Girl Doll themed, so it seemed appropriate to give her something for her dolls. We gave her the beautiful carrying case with murphy bed from Queens Treasure for Christmas with a homemade quilt. When we were at the American Girl Doll Store for my birthday this summer, Hazel fell in love with the tent they sell. However I was not going to spend $85 on it. I figured I could come up with some way to make one. I happened to find roasting sticks on clearance for a $1 at the end of the summer and bought them thinking they could be the poles for the tent. I also saw this great tutorial over at The Frugal Crafter using cardboard to stiffen the sides, but I really wanted her tent to have a window like the one at the American Girl Doll Store. After a couple of tries I got a tent. It is not perfect and I now know what I would do differently. The first would be not bothering with the "poles". 

Harry Potter Birthday Party

I took a bit of a break for the holidays. Christmas is often the only time we get to spend with one of my sisters and her son and then Hazel's birthday hits us. It is always a busy time and I decided to focus on family. It was wonderful. 

Minnie Mouse Party Foods and Activities -- The Details

Since the my post the other day became so long with sharing our decorations, I thought today I would share the details of what we served and what the kids played. Let's start with the cake since every birthday party needs a cake. Our cake was the strawberry cake we have made for most of Hazel's parties. The original recipe is found at Confections of a Foodie Bride. I have made changes over the past couple of years. At some point I will have to actually write down my changes and post about them. We made an eight-inch round cake and three small round cakes. I bought these pans at Joann Fabrics with a coupon for the ears.  We bought a container of chocolate frosting since black frosting is hard to come by and has so many chemicals for colors. 

Minnie Mouse Party & Decoration Product Review

 Disclosure: I was sent the decorations to review free of charge from Oriental Trading. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. I added links to the particular products for your convenience, but not for any compensation.


So yesterday was the Minnie Mouse Half Birthday Party. Hazel had a blast. Now we spent a lot of time getting ready for this party and have posted many DIY ideas already. We also received five items from Oriental Trading that we used for the party. A few weeks ago we shared our Minnie Pinata and the black streamers we used to make it.