Cloth Diaper Cake Tutorial

This has been a week full of baby stuff! How fun...and I don't even have a baby! Today, I'm going to show how I made this gorgeous baby shower diaper cake out of all cloth baby necessities. It is very eco-friendly and any friend who is a mom-to-be would love it as a gift...I know I would have when I was expecting my babies.

 

Here is what you need to make your own eco-friendly cloth diaper cake:

- Muslin Cloths, Baby Bath Towels, Burp Cloths, Baby Wash Cloths, Baby Prefolds (Cloth Diapers)

- Ribbon (I replaced the one in this picture with a prettier ribbon when I made the cake)

- Scissors

- Chopsticks or something similar

- Cake Stand or another base on which to display your cake

- Baby Bibs

Here is how you make a cloth diaper cake:

1. Place baby bibs on cake stand.

2. Fold baby bath towels to the desired width that will end up being the height of the first layer (I folded the baby bath towels in thirds lengthwise). Roll them up. Carefully wrap muslins or prefolds or burp cloths around the outside of the rolled towels. This is the bottom layer of the cake.

3. Tie a decorative ribbon around the rolled bath towels to hold them together. Some people use a rubber band to hold everything together. I used my hands and legs and carefully tied the ribbon. I didn't want an ugly rubber band to show through since my ribbon was transparent.

4. Stick a couple of chopsticks between the gaps in your rolled towels. Be very careful and gentle so that you don't accidentally snag the towels.

5. Roll burp cloths, muslins, prefolds the same way you did the towels, but make the width of the roll slightly smaller. This is the middle layer of the cake. Again, tie a ribbon around the roll to hold it together.

6. Very carefully, place the second layer on the bottom layer so that the chopsticks stick up into the gaps of the rolled cloths. The chopsticks will hold your second layer in place.

7. Roll washcloths or burpcloths, muslins, etc. in a similar way as the other two layers. I overlapped the washcloths in a line on the floor and then rolled them. This helped create a nice, even roll. Tie a ribbon around the roll. This is the top layer. You can end here or continue with a muslin rose on top.

8. Follow my tutorial to make a muslin rose. Then carefully and gently place a chopstick through the rose so that the rose is at the top like a lollipop.

9. Gently stick the chopstick into the center of the top layer until the rose is resting on top.

You now have a gorgeous cake that will make a lovely gift for any mum-to-be.

Besides making a lovely gift, they add a special touch to the decor at a baby shower. Here is mine on the food table among a tasty assortment of snacks and sweets...

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Cress Egg Heads

Make your own cress egg heads! We picked up a packet of cress seeds when we were shopping for our Easter Garden. It was the perfect activity to do today with my little girl who's been ill and resting on the couch and my little guy who's been seeking extra attention due to his sister getting more attention while being sick. Anyway, it was an easy activity to do on the couch. We brought all the supplies over to her so she could enjoy making cress egg heads, too.

If you want to make cress egg heads, here is what you will need:

Cress Seeds

Cotton Wool (Cotton Balls/Kitchen Paper)

Eggs Shells with the top cracked off

Egg Carton to hold egg shells

Sharpie to draw egg face

Water

Once you've gathered all your materials, follow the steps below...

1) Place cotton wool into egg shells until there are a couple centimeters left at the top of the egg shells.

2) Draw faces on your egg shells...very carefully so they don't crack.

3) Pour water over the cotton until it is damp.

4) Sprinkle seeds on top of the cotton...as many as you want. The more seeds there are, the more hair your cress egg head will have.

Place the egg shells back in the egg carton and near sunlight. Watch them grow over the next week. Keep an eye on the growth and water if necessary.

We can't wait to see what our egg heads will look like with their fluffy green hair...hopefully as fluffy as these mustached egg heads! ;-)

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Easter Tree

After putting together our Thankful Tree, and then our Christmas Tree, why not make an Easter Tree, too? So my kids and I decided to brighten up our days and to celebrate spring and Easter by, yes, making an Easter Tree. 

If you would like to know how to make an Easter tree, you can take a look at my tutorial here. It's one I wrote for our Thankful tree and we used the same tutorial for our Easter tree. I had kept the can to store various objects. Since it was already painted, we decided to use it again. We spruced it up a bit by hot gluing loads of foam flowers and butterflies to cover the can. I bought them at Poundland over a year ago and have been desperate to use them...to get rid of them...for a long time! I don't know why I bought them in the first place because I'm not a huge fan of foamy crafts. After decorating the can, gathering sticks, arranging sticks, and stabilising them with gravel from our drive, the kids hung our colorful eggs from the branches. I'm hoping to decorate it a bit more in the days to come....perhaps with these butterflies.

And now we have another burst of color in our house!

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Easter Garden

Easter is one of the most significant holidays and it has been a joy lately to teach my children that it is about more than bunnies, eggs, and chocolate. To help them experience the true reason we celebrate Easter, we made an Easter Garden. I was inspired by this Easter Garden tutorial on A Holy Experience.

Our Initial Supplies: 

Large Plant Pot, Plants, Compost, Small Plant Pot, Stones, Candles, Small Candle Holder

Supplies for Later in the Week:

Wax

Small Piece of Cloth

Butterfly

I took my little girl and boy to the garden centre and let them choose plants for our garden. We also bought a large plant pot and compost. We found all the other supplies in and around our house.

It was such fun to arrange and plant the plants together. I let the kids decide where they wanted everything. We put the small pot on its side and partially filled it with compost. Ann (A Holy Experience) suggested writing the words Grace, Resurrection, or Joy on a stone near the 'tomb' and my kids chose Joy. I'm pretty sure it's because being 3 and 4 years old, they understand what Joy is but are still trying to grasp the concepts of Grace and Resurrection.

We made a path of stones leading to the tomb and our freedom from death. I love this imagery. We filled a small candle holder with water and sunk it into the dirt to be our small pond. We then placed candles around the garden which we will light one each night leading up to Easter. Making this Easter Garden with my children was such a joy and a really special way to inspire conversation about Christ's great sacrifice and resurrection.

In the days to come, we'll do the other things suggested in the tutorial: 1) Planting seeds on Palm Sunday to represent the hope that is coming soon. 2) On Good Friday, make a wax caterpillar and cover it with cloth and place it on the tomb. 3) On Sunday, there will be a butterfly in place of the caterpillar to represent new life.

After making this, I've also realized that I love having live plants in the house. It relaxes me to glance over and see lovely green growth, such a contrast from the grey misery outside the windows. 

If you have a moment, please take a look at the tutorial on A Holy Experience. Ann uses her words in such a magical way and the symbolism of the Easter Garden may become clearer from reading her original tutorial.

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Doily Spider & Mouse

Since our watercolor Valentine Card making craft was so successful, we did another kids craft today. After opening a package of doilies that Grandma sent to us, my little creative geniuses got to work. My little girl knew right away she wanted to make a mouse. And there's no surprise when my little guy wanted to make a doily Spiderman spider. They chose their supplies, decorated the doilies, and turned them into two new creatures.

Miss Doily Mouse...

...watch her crawl away.

Mr. Doily Spiderman... 

...watch him crawl away.

Yay!

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Watercolor Valentines

Today we finished our Valentine's Day cards. I recently saw this tutorial for watercolor resist cards on Grow Creative that shows how to make homemade Valentine's Day cards. My kids loved it, even my little guy who isn't usually that interested in the creative projects I plan for him and his sister. Now we have another way to make homemade Valentines for my kids to give their friends, teachers, and loved ones!

I usually do involved projects like this in stages with my kids. So, on Friday the kids used white crayons and stencils to create a variety of designs. Today, Saturday, we pulled out the paints and they added beautiful colors to the cards.

After painting the first few Valentines, we started to wonder why the crayons weren't resisting the paint as much as they should. We could barely see the hearts on the one above...or the sun and kitten in the other. At first I thought our crayons weren't quality enough, but then we tried using the crayon on a new card and painting it right after.

This worked much better! So I strained to see the shapes and designs on the unpainted-but-already-designed-cards and traced over the work my children had done the day before.

I love the effect. I love that my kids didn't stick with only the traditional hearts for their Valentine's Day cards, but used a variety of shapes from our stencils...circles, stars, squiggles, even a Christmas holly leaf to make a shooting star!

They did some Valentine hearts, too. This one looks like a bleeding heart...unintentional, of course.

My kids really enjoyed watching the colors mix, watching the shapes emerge, and making the Valentines special for each person!

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Pinned It & Did It - Christmas Tree Skirt

My Christmas tree skirt...

Christmas tree skirt that I pinned...

Pinned via pinmarklet from curbly.com

I pinned a few Christmas tree skirts on my Christmas board because I knew I wanted to make one this year. The last few years, I've wrapped random pieces of fabric or table cloths around the skirt, but I really wanted a Christmas skirt that was special, festive, and one that we can use each Christmas to come. 

So, I followed this tutorial by CraftMel on Curbly. It was very clear and easy to follow. The most difficult part in making this Christmas tree skirt was choosing a snowflake design. I took about three days looking at differenty types of snowflake designs, and then cut out about ten (from our recycle paper) before finally settling on this one...

Cutting it out of the large piece of felt wasn't too bad and would have been much easier if I hadn't had four three-to-five-year-olds playing in the room, me constantly saying, "Remember, don't step in the hot lava!!" lava=felt 

I made one small, time consuming change to the method of making the Christmas tree skirt. Since I really want to use it year after year, and also because I have children running & playing around the tree from time to time, I decided to sew the white snowflake to the red circle. Lots of pins and three days of sewing for short periods of time and I finally finished!

We had our tree for two days without a skirt. It's much warmer now...and prettier.

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thankful tree made for free

I've seen thankful trees all on more than a few blogs that I follow, all over pinterest, and even have a friend or two with some sort of thankful tree in their home. At first, I must admit that I found the idea a little silly. Do we really need to have a tree for every holiday?? But after thinking about the real purpose of the tree and how it can be used to remind ourselves and our children to be thankful on a daily basis, and not just one day, I decided to get my kids involved and make our own thankful tree. 

I thought about different ones I've seen online, but really didn't want to spend any money on decorative crafting supplies, so I took a quick look around the kitchen and spotted an empty protein powder can. I've been making smoothies for breakfast since summer and have gone through quite a few cans. Some have been transformed into marraccas, some into drums, one stores my little boy's dinosaurs, and I was delighted to use another for the thankful tree. The whole method of making the thankful tree was so easy, kid friendly, and didn't cost a penny. If you'd like to make your own (it's not too late!) take a look around your own living space and see what you can upcycle. Here's how we did ours...

Supplies:

paint

empty can/container

sticks from the back garden

small rocks from our gravel driveway

packing paper or any other paper ready to be upcycled

paper clips from or other bendy wire for hanging leaves

(my other idea was to modpodge with packing paper, but decided on paint in the end because it's more fun for my kids)

Easy Peasy Steps:

(1) Find a can/container.  (2) Arrange sticks & fill with small stones/rocks.  (3) Paint the can.

(4) Cut leaves out of paper.  (5) Write things you are thankful for on the paper.  (6) Poke a paperclip through the top of the leaves and hang them from the tree.

We are cutting out leaves and hanging them each night with something new for which we are thankful. It's nice to watch our little thankful tree grow leaves while the leaves outside continue to fall. 

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