Jennifer Casa, from the fabulous blog Jcasa handmade, has written a very nice kid’s craft book called Teach Yourself VISUALLY Crafting with Kids and it is jam packed with projects for all your kids. I asked my daughter to look through the book and see which project she’d like to make. The answer turned out to be every single one.

So, I sat down with her and we leafed through the book together.  When we got to the Daily Docket project, I knew this was the one. Perpetual calendars are one of my very favorite things and as an added bonus we had almost all the materials on hand to make it.

Well, we didn’t have alphabet stamps, or rather we had L, Q, H, B and R, but we weren’t  playing Wheel of Fortune so it didn’t help us much. So instead of stamping the months and days on fabric I had my daughter write them on with a fabric pen. When she was finished we cut them out and glued them onto felt. I knew I was going to regret the glue I used and I did, because bleh, it shows through.  I should have sewed them or rustled up some fabric glue, but whatever.

For all the letters and numbers and clouds and things, I had my daughter draw them and then I made patterns from her drawings. This was a totally unnecessary step, but I think it made the project more hers than mine (which is was supposed to be, right?). The weather bit isn’t in the directions, but I had just seen Abby’s felt weather board and I thought it would be perfect with this project.

Because there were more little bits now with the weather forecast and because my children love to organize things, I sewed four pockets instead of making one big one. O.K. maybe I should stop, because wow, Meg, you sure are taking a lot of liberties with this project. I mean this is a review of a book, right?  I did make changes here and there while we were making the calendar, but that’s what is so great about this book. There are so many simple projects in this book that you can use them as jumping off points for your children’s crazy creativity. It’s nice to have tutorials and books that teach us to make something just so, but it’s also lovely to have open ended projects that your kids can enjoy over and over again, each time in a new way.

I made one more little change to Jennifer’s awesome project, one that I was kinda sad about. I used a stick (straight from the yard) to hang the calendar instead of grommets. The grommets are one of the coolest bits of this project, but sadly,  I am not cool enough to own a grommet setter. So a stick and some loops and ta da! a fantastically homemade perpetual calendar. So many good things rolled up into one!

Thank you Jennifer, for including me on your blog tour for your wonderful book! Would you like to own your very own copy? Jennifer has kindly offered a signed copy shipped to the door to one of my dear readers. Leave a comment on this post and I’ll pick a winner on Wednesday! Good Luck!

There are a few more stops on the bloggy book tour and some more chances to win a copy too:

• Wednesday, April 20 – Maya*Made
• Friday, April 22 – Stitches in Play
• Tuesday, April 26- Aesthetic Outburst
• Thursday, April 28 – Artsy Crafty Babe

THE GIVEAWAY IS CLOSED! KRISTA, #7 WON! YAY KRISTA!

Spring is here and my kids have no clothes to wear. Well not really, but definitely not enough cute, springtime ones. KCWC to the rescue! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that is completely understandable. KCWC stands for Kids Clothes Week Challenge. It’s one week (I’m sure you figured that out) where we commit to sew one hour a day for 7 days. Sewing clothes, of course, for our kids!  Or other people’s kids, but not your inner child and absolutely not your canine child.

Sound good? Want to make a big pile of little skirts and dresses and shorts and bow ties? Because a lot can happen in a week if you put in a little time each day. And with hundreds of people sewing along with you and cheering you on, well, you can’t help but make great stuff! So leave a comment on this post to tell me you are in! Then grab a button and post it on your blog (if you’ve got one) to spread the word. You can even head over to the elsiemarley flickr group to check out past KCWC and join so you can post for this one.

If you’d like to know a little more about KCWC, hop on over to the FAQ page. Then hop back here and sign up!

kcwc buttons:

(copy and paste the code under the buttons)

<a href="http://www.elsiemarley.com/kids-clothes-week-spring-2011.html">
   <img src="http://d1yops4utenhgf.cloudfront.net/kcwc_spring_2011_button1.jpg">
</a>

<a href="http://www.elsiemarley.com/kids-clothes-week-spring-2011.html">
    <img src="http://d1yops4utenhgf.cloudfront.net/kcwc_spring_2011_button2.jpg">
</a>

So this is where we’re at with the room so far (here are all the before pictures). I told you my brother built a bunk bed, but I didn’t tell you it was a cloud bed! He built the loft bit and then we cut out clouds from some scrap wood. I made patterns out of paper first to make sure it was randomy and to see if the clouds would be high enough to function as a guard rail. When I was about half way through cutting them out, I freaked out and thought it might look too dorky theme-y, but I think it turned out okay. What do you think? Now the big question is whether or not to paint them. I think maybe I’ll paint some white, but not all. And maybe one striped like this awesomeness.

I think we’ve chosen a color for the wall–those are all paint chips taped the wall. It’s called cotton balls, really it’s just white. Not that exciting, I know. But I am excited about that big board up there. It’s a quilting board (or something like that, I don’t know, it’s got a graph on the back) that my neighbor gave me a looong time ago. It folds out one more on each side, so it’s pretty big–maybe too big? Anyway, I’m going to paint a map of our neighborhood on it. I grew up “out the back road” so there wasn’t a lot I needed to know to get around. But we live on an actual block! So I thought the kids might like to see the way we go to the library and the store and their friends’ houses on a big map. I’m thinking I need some sort of projector for this project. And I haven’t decided what to do about the places: pushpins? polaroids? have my kids draw pictures? shrinky dinks? Any ideas you have would be fantastic. The baby’s crib will be under it eventually, so pushpins might be out.

This is the closet, or was the closet. Now it is my daughter’s desk (my son got the bunk bed, she got a desk, even steven). I’ve got a few ideas for this, one of them being paint the entire sucker white.  I’m sure there will be more ideas in the future, because I’m taking a class for this very purpose. It’s called Playful Learning Spaces.  It’s an e-course designed to guide you through creating thoughtful spaces for your children to play in and learn. It sounds like the perfect class and comes just at the perfect time for me.

And now for the surprise: the creator of this wonderful class, Mariah Bruehl, has kindly offered to give away a spot in her class to one of my readers! But you have to be snappy, because class starts tomorrow! You have until 5pm central time to drop your name in the hat (that is, leave a comment–sharing some input on the room if you’d like). Good luck and I’ll see one of you in class!

THE GIVEAWAY IS CLOSED!

Celeste from on-hand modern is the winner! Congratulations Celeste!

This bag is truly awesome. It’s a messenger bag, a shoulder bag, a completely reversible bag…it’s so many different bags in one you have to make one just so you can discover how awesome it really is. And you can! Because I wrote an awesome pattern for it.

Shannon from luvinthemommyhood is encouraging the sewers and the knitters to duke it out finally and see who is left standing. So this is my little one-two for the sewing side.  No, it’s not foxy boxing, but it is one month full of super fantastic knitting and sewing tutorials with some friendly competition thrown in for good measure.  Sounds awesome, right? Head over to her blog for The Awesome Bag tutorial!

Once more for no good reason: awesome.

The spring rain in these parts has been turning to snow more often than not. And I’ve been trying to celebrate the good bits of winter before they are gone for good. Granted sometimes it’s done with gritted teeth, like when I’m putting on my coat and hat and scarf and mittens for the bajillionth time, but hot chocolate is still delicious even if it is April. Baking a batch of these nutty, jammy bars warms up the house, makes it smell delicious and they are just right with coffee.  All the good, cozy things about winter and they taste pretty damn good too.

I combined a few different recipes to make these bars–one called them breakfast another dessert, so feel free to eat them all day. The biggest change I made was to brown the butter before I added it to the rest of the ingredients. If you’ve never done this before you will soon find yourself searching out ways to add brown butter to everything. Seriously, it’s like butter only better. To make it, put the butter in a light colored pan (so you can see it brown) and wait, stirring now and then, until it melts, then stops spitting and sputtering and turns a lovely dark shade of brown–about the color of maple syrup. Then take it off the heat right away so your lovely butter doesn’t turn black.

You can have your kids mix up all the dry ingredients while you cook the butter, then pour the butter in, scraping all those good browned bits off the bottom of the pan and into the bowl.  Actually your kids could probably do most everything. It’s dead easy: press two thirds of the dough in a pan, slap some jam on top and crumble the rest of the dough on top. It’s the perfect recipe to play around with too. You could use apricot jam and a little cardamom, or grind up pecans instead of almond flour and maybe even find some peach jam. Whatever you have in your cupboard is going to make these delicious, so you don’t really have much of an excuse to not make them right now. Unless it’s summer where you are right now, in which case poo on you.

brown butter bars

• 1 1/4 cups oatmeal
• 1 cup almond flour (or whichever nut you’d like, ground up fine)
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tea salt
• zest of one orange
• 1 1/2 sticks butter, browned
• 1 cup jam

Combine all of the ingredients except the butter and jam in a large bowl. Brown the butter: cut butter in pieces and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the milk solids (the little bits at the bottom) turn a deep brown color.  Quickly take it off the heat and pour it into the dry ingredients, scraping the pan into the bowl. Mix. Press two thirds of the dough into an 8×8 pan lined with parchment paper. Spread the jam on top and crumble the rest of the dough over it. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 25-30 minutes or until nicely browned. Cool and cut into squares.

This recipe can easily be doubled and baked in a 13×9 cake pan. It’s pretty much my go to “shit! I need to bring a snack for preschool tomorrow!” recipe.