The long awaited robot

I know I said I would post this yesterday, but I managed to get completely sidetracked (no surprises there) and I do get there in the end. Hopefully you'll forgive me.

Anyway, here's a little photo of the long awaited robot from last week. He was, quite obviously, chucked together in about half an hour but Chloe loves him and so did all of her friends. He spent a long weekend in school and came home again on Tuesday.


He's quite cute, though is it just me, or maybe the way he's standing, but doesn't he look like he's bursting for a wee. Kind of like he's really having to squeeze his legs together for some reason.....

So it is only me then, fair enough.

And the reason for my sidetrack...ed....ness can be blamed on Jenn of Frugal Upstate. She posted a link on twitter a couple of days ago to The Idea Room and a great tutorial on making those glass tile necklaces. Lovely though the necklaces are, they weren't what caught my eye.

What caught my eye was a big felt sandwich, and a plan developed. I now know what to make Chloe for her birthday. She has a play kitchen in her bedroom, though admittedly it mostly goes unused because, and I quote "the food is wick", and it really is wick. The food that came with the kitchen was a handful of miniature empty cardboard food boxes, a plastic chicken drumstick, a plastic egg and a purple plastic aubergine. I'm pretty sure even Cooking by Numbers would have trouble coming up with a recipe to use that lot.

So I've started making felt food.



I know her birthday isn't until the start of April, but I want to get a wiggle on and try and make loads of food for her. Ideally a want to be able to fill a picnic basket, but not a regular boring picnic basket, I want a pic-a-nic basket like Yogi Bear would want and I want a red and white check blanket to go over the top of everything.

Surely that isn't asking too much.



These are the types of things I really enjoy making for Chloe. Most of the templates for making the food are intuitive and more often than not, unnecessary. They're the perfect mindless, half concentrating, half watching tv, type of sewing that fits perfectly into the last half hour of a day.



Plus they're really, really quick and really cheap to make. I mean a square of good quality felt will run you about 50p in the UK and you'll easily get a dozen strawbs from that one piece of felt, probably more like 15 if you're very economical when cutting and they take a grand total of about four minutes to make, the orange slices take more like two!

Now I'm back off to my little corner for some more sewing. I've three tomatoes in need of their tops, another slice of white needs stuffing and I feel a rumbly in my tummy for some bacon and eggs.

I should also mention that felt food is highly addictive and should only be taken in moderation and in conjunction with a healthy and balanced diet.

Bullet Points

Thanks everyone for the suggestions last week for Chloe's homework. In the end we went for the robot, I read out a list of the suggestions (apart from the rhino and the red wine because she might have just have picked one of those and even I couldn't figure how to make a rhino) and she chose the robot, luckily for me because what's easier than a bunch of cubes. I'll post a photo of him tomorrow, its dark at the minute and my camera doesn't play the game unless there's some form of daylight.

I still haven't got around to making the light box that I've been talking about since last year!

It's snowing, again, and in bucketfuls. At the minute I'm enjoying it because I didn't really get to appreciate the snow after Christmas. We'll see how long my appreciation lasts, probably until I fall on my bum, again.

Chloe is back to loving school again today, having hated it for the last two days. She lost her sweatshirt in school on Wednesday and too much of a big deal was made of it. Sometimes Chloe loves being the centre of attention, this was not one of those times and she broke her heart all Wednesday evening. The slightest thing set her off crying and she was tearful for the remainder of the day, evening carrying through to Thursday morning. Then in school yesterday she was running too fast through one of the classrooms during playtime with one of her friends and they were told off, due to her already "delicate" state, she decided she hated school. Luckily a visit from the dentist today and the gift of a new pink toothbrush, blue sparkly toothpaste and a gold star sticker have changed her mind about school. She is very easily swayed.

And last, but by no means least;

Craft Blog UK has now launched. It's a showcase (big bundling together) of UK craft blogs and it has been painstakingly put together by the very wonderful Haptree. If that isn't enough to get you over there for a look at the loveliness, yours truly is very proud to be the first featured blog. You can stop over and have a read and don't forget to subscribe while you're there. There are already some great tutorials with much more to come and a blog list over flowing with great crafty goodness.