Mermaid Dioramas -- Crafty Weekends Craft & Link Party

Mermaids seem to be everywhere this year. Of course with a young daughter mermaids are always in at our house. We have had a lot of fun with mermaids over the years. I bought her the mermaid Valentine kit at Paper Source this year and put it away. I liked the Valentine kit versus their every day mermaid craft kit because of the colors. Of course it is no longer available, so if you want to make these buy the every day one. We had fun putting together a few of them.

Spring Cards with Origami -- Crafty Weekends Tutorial and Link Party

I have had an itch to do something creative on my own. Then I fell in love with a sample card at work which featured an origami dress made with a mint green flowered wrapping paper. I bought a sheet and got the instructions for the dress. I also have been wanting to make a bunny card with Easter approaching. Let's start with the origami dress. After finding a few tutorials because I found one step of the instructions confusing, I decided I liked this one the best. It made the confusing v-neckline the easiest.

Valentine's Day Crafts & More from Oriental Trading with Free Printable Valentine Cards -- Crafty Weekends Review & Link Party

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 each item for your convenience but do not receive anything if you purchase them.

Are you ready for Valentine's Day? We are, thanks to Oriental Trading. Now Hazel's school has a Father/Daughter Snow Ball the Saturday before Valentine's Day every year and this year I am co-chairing it. As a result I had even more Valentine's Day stuff to get than normal. I got the tablecloths we need for the Snow Ball.

Pumpkins and Potters Wheel -- Crafty Weekends Crafts & Link Party

This has been a bit of a crazy week and weekend. Last weekend we met my sister at Old Sturbridge Village and discovered our admission fee got us a second trip within ten days, so we went back today. Hazel was very excited when we discovered that one of the hands-on crafts that you could pay to do was making a bowl on a potters wheel. She always wanted to use a potters wheel, so we splurged and let her make a bowl today. I had wanted to have her use a potters wheel back when we looked at Juan Quezada, but didn't find a good option. You can see some of the photos above of her dish and her making it.

Crafty Weekends

This week I am not ready to write a review of one of the craft books. Most of my crafting this week happened at work, and I did not get a chance to get a picture. So this week we are going straight to the party!!

Thank you to everyone who shared with us at last party!! It was full of creations and inspiring ideas!! Below are some features from the party, but this is just a small sample of great ideas shared! This week the features are in three groups: Decorative & Useful, Fabric Crafts and Paper Crafts. 

Also remember for your child-oriented crafts, activities, lessons, etc. Sharing Saturday is going on!! For any cultural related posts (diversity and/or multicultural as well) be sure to share at the month long Creative Kids Creative Blog Hop. 

Crafty Weekends: Half Yard Christmas Review & Craft Link Party

Disclosure: I was sent this book to review free of charge from Search Press. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. I am including links to each item for your convenience but do not receive anything if you purchase them.

For this weekend's Crafty Weekend we are sharing the start of our Christmas crafts. Today I am sharing ones I made with instructions and patterns from Half Yard Christmas by Debbie Shore. We started sharing our Christmas posts this week so you will have time to get and enjoy some of the great finds we have made this year. 

Sharing Saturday 15-17

Thank  you to everyone who shared last week!! Once again I am amazed by all the great ideas! These features are just a sampling of the posts shared. I hope you will go and check them all out! This week our features consist of  Gardening and Bees, Booking Across America, and Some Favorites. 

Fairy Tales in Different Cultures--Little Sister and the Month Brothers

Today we are going to discuss a wonderful Cinderella story called Little Sister and the Month Brothers. From the research I have done it looks like this story is from Czechoslovakia. There are also other versions around, but I have not checked them out yet. In the collage below are the other two versions as well as both the paperback and hard cover of our featured book.  I also found another version on-line here.

Before going into the story a little history on Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was a sovereign state from 1918 to 1993. On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia split into two countries: Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Source

From 1939 to 1945 Czechoslovakia was under Nazi Germany rule, however its government was still operation in the United Kingdom. In 1945 the Soviet Union took over the eastern part of the country.(Source)

Now onto our story. I found the full text available here.

In this story, there is Little Sister. No one knows her name and everyone calls her Little Sister. She lives in a cottage with her stepmother and stepsister. Little Sister is an orphan and her stepmother makes her do all the work. However Little Sister is always singing or humming to herself and always pleasant. Each day she grows more beautiful and kinder. One day the stepmother realizes that if a suitor was to come to the house he may choose Little Sister over her own daughter. The stepmother and stepsister plot to rid themselves of Little Sister. They decide to send her out in the cold winter weather to look for violets. They lock the door behind her and tell her not to return without the violets.

Little Sister knows she will not find violets in the winter, but searches for them anyway. She walks without a coat through the fierce wind and snow. Finally when she feels she cannot take another step she sees a light high above her. She goes towards and and uses all her courage and energy to climb a tall rock mountain. At the top of it she finds twelve men around a fire. She knows at once that they must be the Month Brothers. She approaches them politely and January asks her what she needs. She asks politely to warm near the fire and then explains about needing violets to return home. Since she is so polite, January tells his brothers they must help Little Sister, so he passes the staff to Brother February. February passes it to March  who passes it to April saying April is the only one who can give violets. Sure enough with each pass of the staff, the weather and trees change like the seasons. When April has the staff the grass grows and the violets grow. April tells Little Sister to pick as many as she would like. She uses her dress to hold them and fills it and runs home.

Stepmother and stepsister are amazed to see her with the violets. They do not thank her, but try to come up with another scheme to get rid of Little Sister. The next night they send her out with a bucket telling her not to come home without fresh strawberries. Again she does not have a coat, but she knows where to go this time. She heads to the Month Brothers. Again she is polite and they help her. The staff is passed to June. June tells her she may pick only five strawberries, which she does and runs home. The stepmother and stepsister greedily eat the strawberries and find them to be the best thing they have ever tasted. They ask her where she got them. The next day the stepsister dresses in all her fur to go out and get more. She finds the Month Brothers and when January asks what she needs she says she will only talk to June and is very rude. The brothers do not like this so January bangs the staff on the ground and there is a blinding blizzard and stepsister cannot see. She tries to find her way home, but cannot. After waiting quite awhile for her daughter stepmother becomes worried and goes to look for her. They were never seen again. 

Little Sister still had to do all the work, but now there was no one to complain, yell or order her around. One day an honest farmer came and asked her to marry him. She did and they lived happily in the cottage sharing the work with  minimal complaining.

Our craft for this story was to color twelve outlines of men as the Month Brothers. Then we made them into a wreath. We used an embroidery hoop wrapped with  four seasons of ribbon.

We taped the men onto it and then added some tissue paper in the center to be their fire.

Sharing Saturday #33

Special announcement: I was quoted in an article at Ballooning Nest Eggs. Please go check it out!! I'm so excited!

I have spent the last two days in bed, but crawled out to check out last week's shared posts, and WOW is all I have to say. If you have not checked them out in awhile, definitely go visit some. There are so many great ideas!!

We had a tie for most clicked:

From April's Homemaking: Jonah and the Whale 

and From Happy Whimsical Hearts: Making Bells

Now a few of my favorites:

I always love to see new creative ways to color and paint! Check these out:

1) From Tutus and Tea Parties (with Megan from Posies to Petals Guest Posting): No Sew Busy Book

2) From Learn with Play @ Home: Painting with Seasoning & Spices

3) From Life with Moore Babies: Painting with Watercolors & Salt

Then with it being summer and the Olympics ending, these caught my eye:

1) From Taming the Goblin: Cardboard Crane (Oooh, Hazel would love one of these!)

2) From PlayDrMom: Mario Power Lemonade Stand (Such creativity and fun!)

3) From Brenna Phillips: The Three Little Pigs' Houses (Another one Hazel would love!)

4) From Learning To Be a Mom: Toddler Rhythmic Gymnastics-- Hoop (So fun and cute!)

5) From We Made That: DIY Sprinkler (So clever and looks refreshing!)

6) From JDaniel4's Mom: Olympic Values- Friendship (What great lessons tied to the Olympics!)

Thank you to everyone who shared last week!! I hope you will join us and share again!! If you are featured here, please feel free to grab a featured button to display proudly on your blog.

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From Your Hostess: Teddy Bear Picnic from 3 posts

  Ear Headband Tutorial, Food, And Activities

  Now for This Week's Party  

A Few Simple Guidelines:
1)  Please follow both hosts via GFC (or one of the other ways that work for you).  

Hosts are Crafty Moms Share and Mama Mia's Heart2Heart. A reminder: Mia is taking a blogging break. Hopefully she will be back soon to host again!!

2)  Link any kid-friendly, child-centered post. Please no etsy shops or giveaways, etc.  Remember to link to your actual post.

3) Post the button on your sidebar or somewhere on your blog to help spread the word.

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All right everyone...This is a PARTY!! Have Fun!!

Being Creative

Every once in awhile I feel the need to create. Does that ever happen to you? It happens when I have let life get in the way and I don't feel like I have had time to make something on my own or my own design. Tonight was one of those nights. As I was trying to create some order out of the chaos my craft area is right now, I came up with an idea this afternoon. And tonight I decided I wanted to take the time to do it.

Hazel has started asking us to tell her stories after we read some books to her. Sometimes I tell her a watered down version of a fairy tale and sometimes I make one up. The made up ones don't have to be anything to difficult or too long. In fact I like the made up ones since they are short. Lately I have been telling her one about a princess who lives in a pink castle surrounded by beautiful flowers and then there are dark woods. In the woods there are many creatures including unicorns. The story is about the first time the princess meets a unicorn. The princess always plays in the woods and brings food to feed all the animals. One day when she is playing hide and seek with a rabbit she ventures to a part of the woods she has never been and runs into a mother and baby unicorn by a small pond. She realizes she doesn't know the way home from where she is. She offers the unicorns some apples that she had in her pocket and the mother gives her a ride back to her castle. After that they play every day together.

So my creation (perhaps I've been inspired by April at April's Homemaking and her 52 Weeks of Fairy Tales and the craft to go with each one). I decided to needle felt a picture of the castle, gardens, woods and unicorns.

I needle felted it onto a piece of white wool felt just for stability. I also used a embroidery hoop for the frame and used it to size the picture.

So, what do you think?

Speaking of creativity, Sharing Saturday is still open through Wednesday and there are over 100 creative entries. Please go check them out!!

Hazel and I are off to visit my parents for a few days so my posts may be sporadic and without pictures. First we are stopping to visit my longest time friend since she brought her daughter (my goddaughter) to visit a nearby college.  We have been friends since we were 6-months-old!! It will be good to see her.