A famous blue bird!

...well only a little famous. One of my needle felted blue birds was used as a prop in the late winter Pottery Barn kids catalog. Below is the online photo and the bird is really tiny and on the left near the bedside lamp. In the paper catalog I received today, the image is flipped (mirror image) and my bird is just a little bit more recognizable.



I guess thats a bird-sized 15-minutes of fame!

Long winter...

On Monday I took advantage of the warm sun to rinse out the maple buckets. We wont tap the trees until the weekend though. This is certainly the latest we have ever started with our maple sugaring.

Here are a few photos of my latest projects...

A whole flock!

Happy belated Valentines Day!

I hope everyone enjoyed a nice Valentines. The girls came home loaded with bags of Valentines and candy.

I finished up my little chicks for easter too!



And a few panda bean bags and a finger puppet ...

Panda - monium

Another snow day for us. The girls will probably be going to school until July with all the snow days this winter.

We used the opportunity to make our "sushi" for the birthday part. It was fun, yummy, and surprisingly not too messy. Our "sushi" isn't quite as neat but looks colorful and yummy. We used gummy worms and fish.



I spent the morning printing out little panda coloring books for the kids. Next is to make a few little panda finger puppets and maybe a few bean bag pandas for a toss game.

Birthday countdown ...

Just a few more days to fit in some time to get the last things together. I am going to make these rice crispy "sushi" as we did a few years ago at another party. There is a recipe at FamilyFun which I will probably use.


I love these candy sushi ideas at notmartha too.



We have dragged out all the little panda bear stuffed animals. And we have two little bears made from a pattern by mollychicken.I made one of these for each child for Family/Adoption day several years ago.


These are two of the ones I made for my daughters based on her pattern.

A little cold out there!

Yes, I'm glad to stay in today and work on my art/custom orders. With wind chill making it feel like -10 F I have no interest in braving that kind of cold.

I am finding it difficult to keep up with all the daily activities, working, and trying to get my daughter's birthday party worked out for this week. Not to mention Valentines day and two sets of class cards to print out. I have the girls draw a Valentine picture then I scan it and resize it and usually add a photo of them. These make cute personalized little cards which everyone usually enjoys.

I found these adorable panda cupcakes from blempgorf which I may try for the party.





My daughter hates cakes and cupcakes and has requested cheese cake for her party. But I wonder how many kids will go for this and thought cupcakes would be a good alternative. These look perfect too!

More birthday planning ...

I am still trying to pull together a few things for the party next week. This is a little panda mask I made for the kids - I still have to adjust the sizing for the kids head's though.



The activities for the party will be:

1. Musical "panda footprints" : Instead of chairs I just print/paint a themed picture on about 8 pieces of paper/cardboard. They are easy to move around and less bulky and dangerous than chairs.
2. Pin the bamboo on the Panda
3. Craft: TBD
4. Spin the bottle "Panda/Chinese" charades where the kids spin the bottle. The person whom the bottle points pulls out a little rolled up paper out of the bottle. They read this and act out the word while the other children guess.
5. Tossing game: TBD

Pandas

Yes, that is the theme chosen by my soon to be 7 year old for her birthday party. So I am finally getting around to making up the invitations.

The pandas, bamboo, and footprints were drawn in photoshop with basic ellipse/round tool. My daughter loved it and had a lot of fun making the bamboo. Now I just have to find the time and energy to make up a few games, decorations, and a craft to do.

Here are two pretty treasuries from Etsy to share ... The first has one of my needle felted nests of eggs and the second a pair of my red love birds.