Birthday Season’s Begun

We attended two birthday parties this weekend. To help celebrate our little friend Clara turning one PZ and I made her these colorful beanbags. (PZ was in charge of the beans) If you are looking for a tutorial on these check out the one I made last year for another little friend’s birthday.

Ella was the second birthday girl with an extra special valentine’s day birthday. Lucky girl! I made her a little skirt using Oliver + S’s Lazy Day Skirt tutorial (look under the free patterns section for the tute). It was super easy! I ended up making one for each of my girls, too. I hope everyone had a good valentine’s. I’m full of chocolate and too much birthday cake. PZ’s birthday is this upcoming Saturday. I still haven’t figured out what exactly I’m making her. Ack!

Brown: the color of love

We made regular paper Valentines with catchy notes like, “Hello. How are you doing?” (my three year old’s version of a love note), but these heart shaped crayons were a big hit with the kids and the parents. I found a silicone muffin tin with heart shaped holes at our local Fred Meyer‘s and got a basket-full of old broken crayons at SCRAP. Then with the help of PZ and Hubby, we broke and sorted all the crayons, microwaved them, and poured them into the muffin tin. They popped right out after cooling and are totally cute!

Disclaimer: If you have an old microwave, like really on its last legs, this project could do it in. Um…and feel free to tell your Hubby I said so. It was REALLY old. And we needed a new one anyway. 🙂

Heartache

I had this really cute fabric from Cool Cottons and needed to make a birthday gift for a little girl in our playgroup. Since she is a Valentine’s baby, I thought this heart rice pillow would be a sweet present.

I came across the basic tutorial for a rice pillow on the blog, Wise Craft. I thought it would be a simple project, but the heart was a little harder then I expected. It took two tries, but it came out pretty well. I added lavender and brown rice to the pillow and used an old table linen for the inside liner. I like to think it will be a nice keepsake for her as she gets older.