Crochet Eggs April 11, 2012

Lion Brand Yarn has some wonderful free patterns for knit and crochet on their website.  I love looking through the website for project ideas and the amigurumi patterns are great for using up yarn leftovers.  I made these little eggs for my 6 month old niece for Easter.  Each egg took about 30 minutes to make, or 45 minutes if my kids were distracting me. The best part is that I was able to make some of them out of yarn leftover from when I made my niece a baby blanket.

I’m now working on an assortment of eggs for my sister-in-law to decorate the dorm she manages next year.  So far I have found that Caron Simply Soft with a size F hook and Naturally Caron Spa Yarn with a size E hook make the best eggs.  Normally I prefer to work with Peaches ‘n’ Creme yarn but it came out too stiff for my liking.  However it does make a very nice basket (but I’ll save that for another post).

Easter Bunny Pops

I came across these Easter Bunny Pops and had to try my hand at making them.  But as with anything I did things a little bit in my own way.  Instead of buying wooden hearts and beads, then painting them white,  I just cut hearts and 3/4″ circles from some white craft foam.  Then I drew on the eyes, mouths, noses, whiskers and toes with craft foam markers.  I also used glue dots instead of hot glue since I knew that I would have little hands trying to help me and cut up some cotton balls when I ran out of white pompoms for the hands and tail.

After about 8 bunnies, I got tired of struggling to tie tiny bows so later bunnies were bow-less.  Bowed or not, these little dum bunnies were a hit at our breakfast potluck at church on Easter.

Easter Egg Bath Bombs March 30, 2012

We’re coming up on Easter and that means filling plastic eggs with goodies for our kids to hunt.  But my husband and I are not too thrilled with the idea of just giving our kids a ton of sugar for each holiday, so we always look for some alternative ideas for them to get goodies that are not all sweet.  Through a roundabout way I came across a recipe for homemade bath bombs.  My friend, Laura, from Heavenly Homemakers, found it first, but instead of making bath bombs, she made tootsie pop bombs for her boys Valentine Party.  I went back to the original idea and decided to make some Easter Egg Bath Bombs.

The directions at Skip to my Lou are great to follow, but it can be hard to find the citric acid.  I went to my local Walmart, because, hey, that’s what we’ve got in small town Nebraska and I don’t like paying shipping fees if I can help it.  When I got there, I could not find “citric acid” but fortunately I had looked it up before I went to the store and I knew to look in the canning and preserving sections, both in general merchandise and in grocery.  The product I found was called Fruit Fresh, and it is right next to the Pectin.  It is a non-gelatinous fruit preservative.  Among other ingredients, it has citric acid in it.

I also made two changes to the directions at StmL.  Instead of massage oil, since I was making this for my kids, I went to the baby section and got myself a bottle of baby oil.  And instead of a two-part, plastic ball, I got 12 large, plastic Easter eggs to make my bath bombs in.

My Recipe:

16 oz baking soda

5 oz Fruit Fresh

4 teaspoons baby oil

fine mist spray bottle of water

Mix the baking soda and Fruit Fresh very well, then stir in the baby oil.  Once well blended, spriz water onto the mix until it clumps easily when squeezed in your hand.  Pack into the plastic eggs, and close.  Hide in grass, trees, bushes, and Tonka Trucks for your kids to find.

The baby oil substitution worked great.  But the plastic eggs, not so great.  I was unable to remove the finished bath bombs from the eggs and to get the two halves to stick together.  So this means there will be another slight modification.  When the kids want to use their bath bombs we can either open the eggs and use one half at a time, thereby increasing the number of bath bombs to 24, or we can try dropping the bath bombs, eggs and all, into the bath tub.  Since there are 2 – 3 little holes at each end of the egg, we should be able to achieve fizziness, and possibly prolong the fizzies.  We will see.

When it came to quantities, I was able to fill 5 eggs with one batch of the mix.  So to make all 12 eggs, it took 3 batches of mix, and then I had enough leftover to fill the 3 empty Fruit Fresh bottles for my own use.

Here is the cost breakdown for my egg bombs.

Great Value Baking Soda (16 oz) – $0.54 * 3 boxes = $1.62

Ball’s Fruit Fresh (5 oz) – $3.58 * 3 bottles = $10.74

Equate Baby Oil – $2.47

6 large plastic eggs – $0.97 * 2 = $1.94

Total Cost – $16.77

The cost is a little deceptive as there was quite a bit more baby oil in the bottle than was needed for this project and I had a lot of fizzy mix leftover.