Stop #1: Heaven on earth. Mmmmm, coffee.

And look what just went in across the street! Now Milwaukee just needs to get an Anthropologie to make me a happy girl. I love the texture of snow on trees:

And I LOVE these old homes. Just had to snap a quick picture.
See what I mean about the fire hydrants? This shows the massive amount of snow quite well and the stick will come in handy very soon. And yes, it is still snowing outside! Make.It.Stop.
Then we went to the winery and discovered these ducks. Obviously they missed the memo to fly south for the winter. Right next to a near-frozen waterfall, you'd think they'd take a hint.Do we look cold? I admit, I'm probably a little colder than the ducks.

"Alright honey, that's enough of the outside pictures. Now get into the car and take me home!" I'm giving a thumbs up sign while running back to the car. So now that we've stocked up on wine and coffee we can settle in for the long haul. Well, except for our venture out to the holiday party. But that will also involve wine and coffee. And food. Lots and lots of food.

I FINALLY finished the daily calendar project that I started almost 2 months ago. Geesh. Remind me never to take on DIY projects that last more than one week, okay?

I didn't really think it would take me this long, and it probably wouldn't have----but I kept getting distracted, doing other projects instead of this one. Nate is really really happy I finished this beast so that we can have the top of our built-in buffet back now;)

Ta Da!



So I was just going to buy a felt calendar that I saw on Pinterest, but then I realized that it had features I didn't really want or need (ie 'feelings', activities, etc). And I wanted this to be mostly focused on the idea of a time concept: something to help Truman with figuring out which days he will go to Lori's, and what day of the week it is. Hoping this helps him understand when mommy and daddy are working and when we get to be home together as a family, but we will see.

So I figured I would use felt for something fun and different, since I've never worked with it before. I found a big poster board at Michaels, a bunch of felt, a fabric pen, and some ribbon with a dowel rod. I already had pipe cleaners, so I chose to use those instead of popsicle sticks (but maybe someday I will have to upgrade). I do not sew but if I did I'm sure this would look a lot more professional. But my hot glue gun worked just fine for what I wanted to accomplish.

The hardest part was covering my poster board with felt. I wanted it to be two colors and not just plain white, so I did it in blue and gray, with a ribbon dividing the two. Then I added the dowel rod on the top using ribbon, so I could hang it up.

I made my days of the week into little pockets, wrote the names with my fabric pen, and then created my 'sticks' for Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow....plus three 'Lori days' in there, too. It's been fun having T move the days around and he already kind of understood that 'today isn't a Lori day' but was able to point to Monday as the day we go back to work. It's hard to figure out sometimes, buddy--my days blend together, too.





Then after my days of the week, I didn't really care which topics we covered. I found some really cute cheap wooden shapes at Michaels and decided to do weather, seasons, and the date. Truman has been into telling me if it's nice outside, or cold, or sunny so I figured he would like the weather and seasons.

For the date I wrote on a wooden shape and hot glued that to a pocket I created, where I will keep all of the months, dates, and years. I wanted to just stick those felt pieces directly onto the yellow felt square but they didn't stick as well as I'd hoped. So I just used a little bit of velcro on the square to hold the tiny guys on there. Did NOT go through the trouble of adding the velcro backing to each of the dates. No way, man.




For the weather pocket, I found cute shapes at Michaels again--a snowflake for when it's (always) snowing that I had to paint, then an umbrella that was painted already for rainy days, a painted cloud for overcast days, and a painted sun for sunshiny days. Come on sun, let's see you again!


I added velcro to the square and also to the backs of each wooden piece for this one.




Then came the seasons---just four wooden circles that I painted and wrote the names on with my fabric pen. These are also velcro'd on to the felt square.




Seems simple enough, I suppose. All of the cutting of the felt was tedious, as was the enormous amount of hot glueing. I didn't mind the painting and using the fabric pen but when you put it all together, it was a lot of work! I hope it holds up for us and I hope Truman enjoys using it each morning with me. I made years '2014' and '2015' for our dates---hope we need to use them someday! ;)


Since I couldn't get enough of that awesome feeling felt gives when it sticks to my horribly dry hands (gag), I decided to do another felt project. This one is for a blogger busy bag swap, which maybe will get it's own blog post in the future.

If you haven't heard of a 'busy bag' project, the basic concept is that you have a ziplock bag that contains an activity for your child to do on their own. You will have to show them how to do the project the first time but then after that, they should be able to play independently with the activity to keep them busy. Genius. Pinterest has about a billion ideas for busy bags and I feel like it's almost overwhelming to even look at all of the busy bag boards!

After pinning tons of ideas for this project, I settled for this Butterfly Symmetry busy bag activity because I knew I wanted to use up the rest of my felt and it seemed pretty fun.



There are a few ways to do this project with your preschooler, and I wrote out instructions in each ziplock bag that contains the butterfly activity. The original link says to build the right half of the felt butterfly to mirror the left half 'template' on a sheet of paper. But that seemed pretty advanced to me, so I just made the whole butterfly with a whole template. I thought that the first 'level' could be the child creating the butterfly right on top of the printout template, like a puzzle. The second level, once the first gets too easy, would be to move the template off to the side and build the butterfly on top of the large piece of felt by glancing at the template but not putting the pieces directly on top of it. Still kind of like a puzzle but maybe a little bit harder? Then once that is too easy, the third level would be cutting the butterfly in half, and cutting the template in half. Then the child can build a symmetrical butterfly using that half of a template. The link said a 4 years old could do the half of a butterfly, and a 2 year old can just build the whole thing without worrying about symmetry.




Here is how I made these babies:

1. I made my own butterfly template out of paper, after looking around online for inspiration.


2. Then I cut out each piece using different colors of felt.










3. I added a little face on the body with my fabric paint after Truman requested that the butterfly have a smile;)


4. Then I scanned each completed butterfly on our scanner and printed out that image onto photo paper. I know this part isn't really necessary and I think the original link even has a template to use and print. But for some reason I thought this would be easier in the long run.


And ta da! 8 little butterflies ready to go to their homes.


I'm excited to get different busy bag projects back in the mail, too---and Truman already enjoyed playing with the butterfly in his own way (ie creating his own butterfly that was anything but symmetrical).

And that is how I spent the last 2 months working with felt. Whew.