An Easter treat (made by the kids!)

Chickie's school had a carnival last week, and one of the events was a "Kinder Cake Auction." Kindergarten kids were invited to decorate a "cake, cupcake, or anything in between" for auction. Proceeds benefited the PTA.

I stretched the definition of "cake" a bit when I decided to make dipped Easter Eggs made out of crispy rice cereal. (Yes, I did use the generic brand of Rice Krispies!) There's a basic recipe on the Rice Krispies website, but we changed it a bit. We used melted Almond Bark instead of chocolate chips with shortening (easier, and it "set" very quickly); and instead of dipping the eggs in sprinkles, the kids just shook the sprinkles on.



One thing I love about this treat is that even a four-year-old and a six-year-old can decorate the "eggs" and they still turn out really cute! No "adult expertise" required.


Caught you eating a sprinkle, Zoodle!

One recipe made about 30 eggs. I made sure that Chickie decorated a dozen for the auction. (We kept Zoodle's eggs for ourselves!)



Chickie's eggs went in a cute basket.



They didn't sell for much. They were sold at the beginning of the auction when things were "ramping up," and I didn't drive the bid up like a lot of other parents ended up doing--oops! But the person who bought them seemed to really want them, and I hope she enjoyed hers as much as we enjoyed ours.

I highly recommend this as a great kid activity for Easter--an activity that results in snacks that Mom and Dad want to eat too! (I mixed and formed the eggs by myself while Chickie was at school, but that's something she would have been old enough to help with too.)

Happy birthday, Zoodle

Oh, my sweet boy. Four years ago you made our family complete (barring any surprises in the future, anyway!) I'm so glad you made me the mommy of a son.

We had Zoodle's party Saturday. (And try explaining to a four-year-old that it is indeed his "real" and "actual" birthday party even when it's not on his birthday. And that he doesn't get a second party on the day of his birthday.)

He wanted a Spider-Man cake. I haven't had the motivation for five-hour decorating jobs lately, so I bought a plastic cake topper off Amazon. (It even says, "Happy birthday from your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man!" when you push a button on it.) Knowing that a Spider-Man cake should have lots of red on it...and knowing how awful homemade red frosting tastes...I used white buttercream with lots of red sugar sprinkles. Cute, easy, and still tasty.



Here's my boy this morning...officially four years old!



I fully expect him to have a happy birthday. He's pretty good at bringing happiness to every day!

Evolution of a hat

I really love designing crocheted items. If I didn't design most of my own projects, I might have gotten bored by now! I'm so glad there are free patterns online. They were so useful to me when I started out, and I sometimes still use someone else's pattern. But in general, I find the creative process so much more gratifying when I'm designing my own pieces.

I thought I'd share my two most recent hats with you, and explain how the design process worked.

The Engineer's niece just had her first baby, a little girl. I wanted to make a hat for her. I had an idea of the types of stitches I wanted to put together so the hat would have a particular "look" and texture. But as I sat down and began working, what was in my head just wasn't working. I pulled out many rounds of stitches and adjusted what I was doing...and pulled them out again, and adjusted more.... I'm not sure how many stitches I ended up pulling out, but this was one hat that required a lot of "re-doing" before I was happy with it!

It did turn out cute...



...but it also turned out big! I didn't want the baby to have to wait years before she wore it, so I gave it to Chickie. I must say, I think she looks adorable in it.





Once it was done, I decided I really liked how the main stitch pattern looked. It's easier to see details in person, but in addition to the "shell" stitches, there are cute little "bumps" around the hat, under each shell row. But I wasn't crazy about the crown of the hat--solid stitches without the open look of the hat body. I thought it would be nice for the baby's hat to have more of a "spring" feel.

So when I sat down to work on the baby hat, I chose yarns that were much lighter-weight than the yarn I originally chose. I also used a net-like stitch pattern for the crown of the hat so it would be nice and open like the rest of the hat. I made other adjustments...pulled out a bunch when I didn't like the result...and finally came up with something I really liked.



Knowing how unlikely my babies were to keep hats on (once they figured out how to take them off), I added an adjustable chin strap and a cute button.



It took a lot of work (and a lot of re-working!) but I love the final product--a cute little bonnet to dress up a baby in the spring! I think it will be a little big for a newborn, but hopefully it will fit The Engineer's great-niece perfectly next year.

There's no magic to crochet design...just lots of trial and error! And it's so fun to see how it all comes together in the end.