Animal Books & More for the Very Young

Disclosure: I was sent these books to review free of charge in exchange for an honest review. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review.

My week and life has been turned upside down, so my posts may be a bit more sporadic. Sorry!! But family has to come first and right now my family needs me to be focused on them. However today I have some time to write about some fun books for younger kids. All of them involve animals. The first is Old MacDonald's Things that Go by Jane Clarke and illustrated by Migy Blanco.

The Find It Book -- Review

Disclosure: Parragon Books sent me a copy of this book free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As always I am providing links to the book for your convenience.

 We are sharing a book Hazel is really enjoying this month as part of the Parragon Book Buddies Program, The Find It Book by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Lisa Sheehan. This beautiful book is the latest by Margaret Wise Brown who also wrote Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, and All the Little Fathers. In this book the reader is asked to find various things from famous nursery rhymes in the beautiful illustrations. Lisa Sheehan is up for the AOI World Illustrations Award for her illustrations in this book. (Source)

Nursery Rhyme Fun with Book Reviews

Make sure you enter the Earth Day Giveaway we are co-hosting!!

Disclosure: Candlewick Press gave me a copies of these book free of charge to review. 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.

Now if you have been reading Crafty Moms Share, you know we have a thing for nursery rhymes. In particular Hazel LOVES Hey, Diddle Diddle. Yes we have a nursery rhyme quilt, have dressed as the dish and spoon for Halloween, had a nursery rhyme birthday party and have just about every version and spin off written of Hey, Diddle Diddle (and yes there are quite a few). Well Candlewick Press added two more nursery rhyme books to our collection. 

Halloween

Congratulations to Andrea F. for winning the ebook of Christmas Crafts for Kids and a belated congratulations to Brenda W. for winning The ABC's of Australian Animals yoga book!

I have never really liked the scary parts of Halloween. I don't like where Halloween has gone and how over the top it is. I do remember loving dressing up and trick-or-treating as a child, so I wanted Hazel to have that experience without all the drama and commercialism. For her first Halloween I was excited to dress her up and take her to some family and friends' houses. Now of course she is excited to dress up and go trick-or-treating. I have made her costumes except for the first year where I found an adorable one at a consignment shop.

I chose the duck and lion costumes. She wanted to be the dish and spoon with me since she use to take my hand and tell me to run so we could be the dish and spoon from Hey Diddle, Diddle. Last year she wanted to be Rapunzel and this year she wants to be Cinderella. I finally finished her dress. I still need to put the elastics in her lower sleeves/gloves, but I need her here to measure her arms to do that. Here is the dress.

I bought her a Cinderella wig to go with the costume. I will add a picture to this post once she is dressed up for trick-or-treating. 

She picked the darker blue for her gown instead of the Disney light blue. I should add she has two light blue dress up dresses to be Cinderella, but will not leave either one for any length of time since the cheap fabrics bother her skin. This is why I make so many of her costumes. 

Now Hazel is easily scared so Halloween is not a time we pull out the scary and gory decorations. We tend to focus on pumpkins, though we do have a large spider and web on our staircase this year and some friendly ghosts in our front entrance. I have struggled with explaining Halloween to Hazel and why so many people like to dress up scary. Last year I used the Mexican Day of the Dead to help explain it. Today I found a wonderful way to do it and to bring the religious meaning back to the holiday. Over at Catholic Icing there is a wonderful post on Explaining Halloween to Catholic Kids. I would say not being Catholic, that it could be used for any Christian children.

Then there is the issue of the candy. We try to limit Hazel's sugar input (and should really limit ours more). We have used the story of the Pumpkin Fairy to help with this. I shared our version of the story here.

This year we spent some time making the egg carton pumpkins that you have seen around on-line including some at Sharing Saturday. We took our candy corn rice krispie treats a step further and made them apple and pumpkin shape (we used cookie cutters). We decorated them this time with M&M's and Steve helped Hazel with the decorating.

The final thing I would like to share with you is a wonderful book. Now the note to parents says it is not a Halloween book, but it is about a jack-o'-lantern. The book is The Pumpkin Patch Parable by Liz Curtis Higgs. I bought a copy of this book for my church and then found a used copy at the used book store and picked one up for ourselves. The church used it for Hazel's class earlier this month and one of the crafts they made was a simple one. They took orange jack-o'-lantern goody bags and stuffed them and then added a special leaf on the tie.

The book goes through a farmer planting a pumpkin patch and then when harvest time comes choosing one special large pumpkin to carve a smiling face and leaving it on his porch for all to see. Throughout the book, there are Bible quotes to go with the story. It is really a nice book to take some of the scary away from Halloween and make you like jack-o'-lanterns more.

So that is a bit about our Halloween. How do you celebrate? We are really excited that this year it appears there will not be a Halloween storm so Steve will be home with us!

Snow and Nursery Rhymes

We finally got some snow, but Hazel and I are stuck inside with colds. So much for her building a snowman. However, last night I cut her out some felt so she could "build" and dress her own snowman. She was having fun with it this morning.

We were checking out all the clothes and accessories I cut out--vest, skirt, boots, bow tie, etc. Then she decided the boots needed their own eyes and noses.

The other craft we did involved using some of the Tagxedo prints I made and using the nursery rhyme party hats we made, but didn't use at Hazel's party. I unstuck them and mod podged them onto unfinished frames I bought at Michaels for $1.

The glue isn't completely dry yet, so I will have to do some touch-ups after it is, but that is what we have been up to.





In case you are interested here are the Tagxedo prints I did.

I cropped this one since it was an ice skate and not a shoe

I added Word Art in Word for the handle

I didn't do this one yet, Mary Had a Little Lamb

Hey Diddle, Diddle version I didn't use

I have my cropped and edited pictures in a Word document here. They are sized to fit a 4 x 6 frame.

Enjoy!!

Square It Up Quilts

So back in September when I was really just beginning to get into the blog world, I won a contest over at Sew Happy Geek. I won a pattern designed by Jenna of Sew Happy Geek called Square It Up! and the fabric to make it from the Fat Quarter Shop. I haven't really been quilting in about three years. I made but did not finish a baby quilt for Hazel. It is almost done, but I don't know what I'm going to do with it.

Anyway, this pattern went together so quickly and I noticed how the colors of the fabric I won matched my bedroom walls perfectly so I decided to buy more fabric and extend it to be a bed quilt. I shared the pictures of the completed quilt on Friday, (but I put one at the top in case you don't want to go back). The original size quilt top I pictured here. On October 19th, I was honored to guest blog at Sew Happy Geek and I showed three quilt tops at my blog here. While waiting for the fabric to extend the quilt, I decided to make one for Hazel. I had found the perfect center block for her--a Hey Diddle, Diddle square that was suppose to make a pillow. Since it came with two, I also made a baby quilt. I basically did hers and the baby quilt as scrap quilts though I did buy a few more nursery rhyme fabrics to go with my nursery rhyme theme.

Well today, I finished Hazel's quilt. (My shoulders are not very happy about spending so much time bent and pushing the heavy quilts the past week--oh, well.) So today, I'm happy to share some pictures with you. I took the majority of the pictures on the guest bed since the bed rail and all her pillows and the wall make it hard to get a good picture at her bed. Behind the guest bed is the beautiful quilt my mother made me to take to college. It is a family favorite--my father really wants it to hang in their house, so I put it in the guest room they stay in.

And then her bed--she has a cold so we have the wedge pillow on there and what not, but you'll see what looks like.

Now I just need to finish the baby quilt. I also need to add a huge thank you to my mother for helping me back, layer and pin both of these large quilts!! She actually even provided me with the backing fabrics. Thanks, Mom!! I love you!

Happy New Year!! And now onto the birthday party pictures

Happy New Year to you and your family!! I hope 2012 is your best year yet in every way!

I promised to share pictures from Hazel's third birthday party, so this is the post. You may remember I shared the invitation, the favors and some decorations, decorations done with My Memories, and birthday hats and more decorations previously. So I won't repeat those at least not too much.

Nursery Rhyme Birthday Party Preparation Under Way

This week we have been busy getting things ready for Hazel's 3rd birthday. I shared the invitation I made with you previously. Now I'll show you some of the crafts we have been working on. I need to do the last part of Hazel's dress, but I made her a dress from some Hey Diddle, Diddle fabric which I used in her quilt. I am making a pinafore for it as well. I also need to finish sewing the cloth napkins. I bought Three Blind Mice and Humpty Dumpty fabrics on clearance for napkins and am serging the edges since I couldn't find any nursery rhyme themed paper products. I figure I'll make a quilt out of them after the party.

 

Hazel and I spent a bit of time this week on favors. I had found 18 Strawberry Buttercream wax tarts on clearance earlier this year and bought them. Unfortunately we need  more than 18 adult favors, so we made some of the cinnamon apple ornaments in hearts and stamped them with a Thanks stamp.

I figured I could use the same rhyme for both. We also included a couple of pretty magnets in each bag.

Adult Favor Tag

For the children we made homemade play dough. We made orange and blue both with glitter and scented clove orange (using ground cloves and orange extract).  And we made a lavender play dough with dried lavender flowers and glitter in it and scented also with lemon extract. I bought little plastic snack cups at the dollar store to put them in and then we will put one in each gift bag. On this one we put a tag with Pat-a-cake type rhyme on it.

Play dough tag

 We also made some Jack and Jill hats. After finishing two, I decided that was enough of these. I changed the idea a bit but had gotten it from a craft book I found in the library.

We also are working on the Mary, Mary Quite Contrary centerpiece. Again an idea from the same book. The homemade flowers include ones that have silver bells, and shells and pictures of pretty maids as well as ones that are just pretty.

What we still have to do is make a wreath from old nursery rhyme books, make more paper hats from old books, finish our banners, make some play dough for the pat-a-cake station, make some different level "candles" from cardboard for the Jack Be Nimble contest and if I have time finish the cross stitched towel for the bathroom (with the cat and fiddle on it). Plus of course the cooking and baking. My parents arrive tomorrow so hopefully I'll have some help. Well I'm off to sew...hopefully I can finish the sewing today so I can move onto other things.

Hope you are having a great day!