Happy Chinese New Year!!

Gung hay fat choy. (I wish you good luck and happiness.) Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year. 2013 is the year of the snake. Here are some ideas that we are doing to celebrate.

Dragon Parade by Steven A. Chin is a wonderful picture book about a Chinese man who moves to San Francisco and opens a grocery store. It is based on a true story about how he brought San Francisco a large celebration for the Chinese New Year including the first dragon parade in the Land of the Golden Mountain (America).

I posted earlier in the week about the Chinese instruments we made. With these instruments we will make some noise to scare away the evil spirits and parade around the house. There is also a link to Daria's giveaway of beautiful tingsha hand bells.

We will also have a dragon parade and lion dancers at our parade with our homemade puppets. The top one is the dragon and the bottom three are the lion dancer (each view).  The dragon puppet idea came from Enchanted Learning. The lion dancer puppet came from Activity Village. I wish I had used larger pieces of construction paper for the middle part of this one. Hazel loves them. She gave the lion dancer orange eyes, so they are a bit hard to see on the front.

Then we decorated the dining room. I saw the snake cut-out at Activity Village (the snake coloring page next to it is from there as well since it was the model of the snake for the cut-out). The dragon is also from that page since they used it as a pattern for a paper cut craft. I decided after doing my snake, to stop there with the cut crafts. The other snake coloring page is also from Activity Village but a different page. The snake mobile which we used as a decoration for our chandelier instead of being a mobile also came from Activity Village.

Then we made a Chinese themed dinner. We used the two Chinese recipes from The Kids Multicultural Cookbook. We made a ginger honey chicken wings recipe and a peanut noodle recipe. Then of course we ate them with some green beans with soy sauce on them and ate with chopsticks. We are hoping to make some fortune cookies later today or this week. The snow removal has taken up much of our time so we have not gotten to as much as we hoped.

Finally, I made Hazel some simple felt dumplings and felt fortune cookies. I found some simple fortunes on-line and printed them out and then followed the tutorials on Kaboose. I did not use hot glue for either and did not find they took long. In fact I'm hoping to have Hazel make a few herself. For the dumplings I gathered them up for a minute or two to make the fluted edge. I used a clothespin for the fortune cookies to get their shape. If we make more, I'll take some pictures and provide you a bit of a tutorial on how we did it.

How are you celebrating the Chinese New Year?

Sharing Saturday 13-6

Another amazing week of things shared!! Thank you to all who shared with us. If you have not had a chance to check out the 85 wonderful ideas, please go visit them. And now for my features!! Please remember to visit Having Fun at Chelle's House for her features as well!!

1) From Buggy and Buddy: Butterfly Pencil Valentines
2) From Little Wonders' Day: Valentine's Day Family Fun Night
3) From Seeking Shade: The Teddy Bear Book Inspired Giving to Homeless
4) From S.O.S. Mom: Personalized Candy Hearts
5) From An Idea on Tuesday: Bringing Nature Inside
6) From Life on the Gravelly Road: Watercolor Thank You Notes


Thank you to everyone who shared last week!! If you were one of the ones picked as a feature here, please feel free to grab a featured button to display proudly on your blog.

Button Code:

<a href="http://craftymomsshare.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i1101.photobucket.com/albums/g424/cpericola/SharingSaturdayoption2-002.jpg" /></a>

From Your Hostess: This week I shared an African Cinderella book and activity, some peg dolls after being inspired by a new book, some Chinese instruments to use at our Chinese New Year celebration (thanks Daria!!), and a strawberry heart muffin experiment.

 

 

Now for This Week's Party 
 
A Few Simple Guidelines:
1)  Please follow Crafty Moms Share and Having Fun at Chelle's House via GFC (or one of the other ways that work for you).  

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 newly updated button on your sidebar or somewhere on your blog to help spread the word.

Button Code:

<a href="http://craftymomsshare.blogspot.com/search/label/Sharing%20Saturday" target="_blank"><img alt="NewSharingSaturdayresized_zps6f405a2b" border="0" src="http://i1101.photobucket.com/albums/g424/cpericola/NewSharingSaturdayresized_zps6f405a2b.jpg" /></a>

4) I would love it if you would follow me on Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest as well as Having Fun at Chelle's House at Facebook and Pinterest

Disclaimer: By sharing here, you are giving Crafty Moms Share and Having Fun at Chelle's House permission to use your photos for features and to pin your craft at Pinterest. 

Strawberry Heartish Muffins

Hazel and I are enjoying a snowy day today. Winter Storm Nemo has begun to hit New England. So far it is flurries, but they are saying it will be much worse. As a result everything is closed or closing early. All the schools, dance class, etc. They are even closing public transportation at 1 p.m. To entertain ourselves we decided to make some strawberry muffins. I looked on line to find a recipe, however I didn't find one I liked, so I combined a few and added my own twists and came up with this:

	1 1/4 cup(s) whole wheat flour
	1/2 cup(s) all-purpose flour
	1/2 cup(s) sugar
	2 tsp baking powder
	1/4 tsp table salt    1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
	2 item(s) egg(s)
	1/4 cup(s) canola oil
	1/2 cup(s) fat-free skim milk
	1 tsp vanilla extract
	10 oz unsweetened frozen strawberries, I chopped them in my food processor after they had thawed

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

We combined the dry ingredients in a large bowl and Hazel mixed it.

We beat the eggs and added the oil, milk and vanilla and Hazel beat that together. Then we poured it into the dry ingredients and mixed. Then we added the strawberries.

Then we scooped them into papers. A few things learned--if using liners, use foil!! I probably would not use liners with these next time. They stuck to the paper. We used liners because we wanted to try to make them heart shaped. (See below)

Now my goal was to make a pinkish muffin and to try the heart shaped muffin trick I saw on Pinterest using a marble. I figured they would be cute for Valentine's Day morning. However, I am going to stick to using my small heart silicone muffin pan next time. I did not like the marble trick at all.

I baked them for about 25 minutes and then took them out, but they were not quite done. I adjusted the marbles and put them in for another 5 minutes.

They are moist and tasty. However I would probably up the nutmeg in the recipe and might add some cinnamon. Hazel is excited to have them at her dance party that she is throwing for her baby dolls. Oh, it is going to be a fun few days without my dear husband. He is going to sleep at work tonight since the worst travel time would be when he would come home and go back. I hope you will join us for Sharing Saturday later tonight!

Chinese New Year Instruments

We have been reading some books about the Chinese New Year. Hazel is rather excited. In fact her favorite activity is to pull out musical instruments and practice marching for a parade. The books we have read so far are Dragon Parade by Steven A. Chin and A World of Holidays: Chinese New Year by Catherine Chambers. We also have been playing the dragon race game that was in her High Five Magazine which was her first introduction to the Chinese New Year.

Fairies and Love Bug Dolls

So yesterday I was considering posting some of our crafts for the Chinese New Year or Valentine's Day, but when I came home from my Christian Education meeting at church, I didn't feel like formatting pictures and doing it, so I put it off until today. Then I was checking out some of my favorite blogs (which I have not been doing as regularly as I would like) and noticed that The Magic Onions is holding a giveaway of Margaret Bloom's new book, Making Peg Dolls. 

Source

Now I remember awhile back when Margaret mentioned to me in email that she had just gotten the deal for the book, but she was still keeping it low key. I am so excited for her and am so inspired for her. So my next stop of course was to check out we bloom here (Margaret's blog). Well on Monday, she kicked off her blog book tour and the post on The Craft Crow included a book review and a tutorial on love-bugs. I felt inspired, so I went and found some peg dolls and some clothespins as well as my paint markers and some flowers I had been saving for making flower fairies, felt and a few of our leftovers from different Valentine's Day crafts. I made two peg dolls--one a love-bug inspired by The Craft Crow's and a little flower fairy that I'm calling a snow drop fairy.

For the love-bug I painted the body red and cut pink felt stripes. I used a pink felt heart for wings. Then I cut a sparkly pink pom pom in half and it sort of fell apart, but I used it to cover the head. I painted a face on making the mouth heart shaped and then used a pipe cleaner as antennae.

For my little snow drop fairy, I painted the body light blue. Then used a fabric white flower (probably a daisy) as a skirt. I thought the light blue did not show up well so I went over the part showing with a more turquoise color. I used a white felt heart for the wings and painted on a face and hair. Then glued the same type of white flower together to form a hat. 

From the clothespins I made a chrysanthemum fairy and a queen of the flower fairies.

For the chrysanthemum fairy, I had flowers that were almost the same in two sizes. I used two large flowers on the bottom for the skirt and then used about five small ones for the top of her dress. I cut a pink felt heart in half and glued them together point to point for wings. I gave her a face and hair with paint markers and then put a sparkly plastic flower sticker for a hat.

For my queen of the flower fairies, I used a large felt flower for her dress and a small fabric flower for the collar. I gave her a green heart for wings and painted on her face and yellow hair. Then for her crown I used zig zag decoration and wrapped it around to be a rosebud. It takes quite a bit of glue and holding to get it to stay but you can also just pass a few stitches through it. My sewing stuff was not near me and I was being lazy. Then I just glued it on.

It was so fun to be inspired to craft again. Hazel is very excited to have some surprises this morning as well. How have you been inspired by something lately?