11th June 2010

  Springy and I went on 2 small bicycle rides today, 2 walks with our lovely dog Lily and we also did some wet felting for a small project we are making. I also did some needle felting and did not jab my fingers once - hooray. :)

Two birthdays and a funny egg

We've got 2 birthday parties this weekend. We made a felted playscape as one gift and for the other we have some Hama beads.

Our little bantam keeps laying strange eggs. She stopped laying eggs when we started the worming food. The "chicken expert" said it is because she is a natural bantam so she won't lay at this time of year but...she is still laying. It's just the eggs are not viable. I am wondering whether it is because the temperature is dropping a lot at night. This morning, walking into the shed felt like walking into a refrigerator room, so I think I am going to pop on the little electric radiator at a very low setting and see if that makes a difference.

This was put up on the list as a useful curriculum resource:

http://www.winterpromise.com/animals_worlds.html

I must admit I really like the sound of some of the sections.

Waldorf Veil Painting and Needle Felting

This seems to be a fascinating site on Waldorf art for the older classes:

http://www.outofthecolor.com/index.html

Also, this link was given out today on needle felting:

http://www.kimchatel.com/Felt_Album.html

I've ordered the book on rainbow sheep because it looks really sweet and I know Springy will love it.

Needle felting - play food

We made 2 items of play food today. Springy loves playing with her basket of pinecones, conkers and the sausage stone (it's a stone that looks exactly like a sausage). I got the needle felting stuff out, blended the regular wool with some yellow merino to make the base for a pizza and topped it with some very yellow wool (melted cheese) , some red wool (using a tiny circular pastry cutter) to make tomatoes and some green wool as the peppers on top. We also made a cake together - again did some fibre blending with some yellow and ordinary wool (the ordinary wool is coarser and better for needle felting and gives the coloured merino some body and grip). I used a circular cookie cutter (the same as for the pizza) to use as a template to needle felt into. Then we built up a layer of 'jam' by using some red and pink blended wool (Springy helped with this), added another layer of cake (ordinary washed fleece with yellow mixed in to give it a sponge cake look) and then some pink icing (again using the ordinary blended with some pastel pink merino). Springy wet-felted (with soap/warm water) a tiny ball to represent a cherry on top. The cake looks delicious and so does the mini pizza - they are perfect as playfood for Springy.

I would like to make vegetables but I seem to better at needle felting using cookie cutters on a 2-d basis and then adding layers (it avoids finger damage - I reckon if Sleeping Beauty was rewritten her father would have removed felting needles from his kingdom!).