Elephant Pendant Tutorial

Let me show you how to make this little chunky guy:)

Let’s make this chunky little pendant, perfect for summer days! It’s quick and easy to make and very suited for summer evenings:).

Summer inspiration

Seaside inspires not just with its landscape but with small details as well… Who doesn’t collect shells when they get a chance?

Here’s a quick inspiration from my favorite time of the year. I love everything about the summer and especially everything to do with the sea, beach, and nature there. I even love the seaside in winter but in summer, oh my… There are so many little gems right beneath our feet…

Tutorial – DIY postcards

Let’s make a postcard together!

As promised – a tutorial on how to make this postcard. It’s very easy, beginner friendly, and can be quite cute:) Of course, you can make it in any theme you’d like: seashells, ships, sea, and fish would be nice for a vacation card but I chose a flower for our gardening granny;). You can make these with kids because they are so easy to make and only use non-toxic materials:). Nothing fancy but so much fun! Enoy in sprinkling joy over the world;).

Watercolour Postcards

Every year we make postcards when we’re at the seaside. When we were kids we were sending postcards from wherever we traveled – everybody did it: kids, teens, and adults. We all signed each other’s postcards and had great fun reading and writing them. And it was always nice to come home to a mailbox full of postcards or get them waiting on your desk because parents were home earlier or get them in the middle of the school year sometimes since they traveled so long from far away lands. “Have you gotten my card yet?” was the usual conversation starter back in the day…

Let’s use some of the papers we created last week to make some cute postcards!

While I love email and it’s the practicality of immediate response, there is something magical about slow mail. I love the tactile quality of it and the hidden messages – the shaky handwriting when we wrote it on the boat or on the train, the quick signing of some friends, and the shy small signage, squeezed in the corners of others… The faded lines of pens on their last breath, the different colours of signage when everybody wrote cards together… There are so many things hiding in those few words that fit onto a card (or many words – I always ran out of space:D)

Handmade postcards are always appreciated:) With all the shaky lines, all the scrunched pieces,… people can somehow see past that:).

So I invite you to send a card to a friend – they will love it, I can guarantee:) If the cards are not very appealing where you live or where you are on holiday or if you want to change things up – make the cards yourself – I will show you how to do that tomorrow so come back:). It’s easy and it’s free:).

Handmade giftwrap

I’ve been absent this last week but for a good reason – we had family vaccination and celebrated 2 birthdays! We usually celebrate their birthdays at the seaside where a single grocery store carries no paper whatsoever, no notebooks, not even copy paper, let alone wrapping paper. You can only dream of a craft store here – it’s remote so you can buy about 10 basic cooking ingredients here (and they are priced 10x :D) but that’s it :D. So my DIY watercolour collage paper came to the rescue.

Eco-friendly gift wrap made from recycled brown paper and natural materials.

I always wrap their presents at home beforehand – this has the added benefit that the recipients can’t accidentally see what’s inside the gift while I pack and unpack;). I usually use simple brown paper because it takes traveling the best and is the most versatile to decorate later on (and I can draw on it or use it in collage afterward ;). It’s also recycled, recyclable and inexpensive (as well as biodegradable) which is also nice:).

You can add just a small little bird from black paper with some white ornaments and the gift becomes so much more precious – my kiddo always keeps these ornaments.

I wrap the gifts but I don’t decorate them at home. If I was to add anything on top before the travel the little decorations would get smushed and peeled off or the gifts would take up much more space – none of that is acceptable when we travel with 3 kids;). So I wrap the gifts in brown paper, put them in a suitcase and that’s it.

The big bird is painted on some plain paper and decorated with the simplest black pen and the legs are the strings that hold the paper. You don’t need much to make a gift feel special.

But plain brown paper wouldn’t cut it for the gift wrap, right? We have to decorate it a bit – especially for the kiddo;) She loves birds so I decided to go with the bird theme.

Collage is so much fun but it can be intimidating at first. So start slow – with one simple bird on a gift wrap – it is sure to bring a smile to someone’s face:).

If you’ve seen my last video on watercolour exercises I made quite a few collage papers I could use to play around. So I did. I cut out primitive birds from this painted copy paper, from an old book no one needs and added some natural material found on the floor (literally:D), some doodles with a black and white pen, and a string from a big bag of flour that we carried with us and that was it.

This bird was cut from a bookpage and the rest are seaside gatherings. The string was unraveled from the top of a flour bag – look around for the little treasures in your surrounding – there are so many!

The reason I’m writing this is to encourage you to see things differently – little things on the floor can be beautiful ornaments, a plain brown paper can be the best background to play with, and gift wrapping can be fun and very inexpensive – tailored to the recipient and made from solely recycled and natural materials – and it will still look good! You don’t need to sacrifice the beauty and joy of kids’ unwrapping gifts if you don’t want to buy fancy and often unrecyclable papers;) – gift wrap is often plastic coated.

Love is in the hair… quite literally, hihi;). Not my original idea but I really like it and so did she:). You could also make a postcard like this or a teacher’s gift.

The last gift was a scrunchie and I found this gift wrap idea on Pinterest (where else;) – so I just painted a girl on a piece of card from pasta (yes, we eat A LOT of pasta, I always have cards from boxes of pasta – Barilla has nice white or recycled brown inside – very useful bytheway:). And she was so happy! This was all literally made from scraps – we don’t need that much to be happy – not even teenagers;). Everyone says teens just want money but my teens said they would be so disappointed if they got money from me. They are strange creatures and prefer old pasta boxes and scraps of fabric I guess :D. Maybe you have some strange creatures in your life – who knows – try it with a brown paper bag and some natural materials;).

Octopus Bujo Tutorial

Here’s my bullet journal full of octopuses and mistakes;) Check out the video to see how I tried to remedy it…

This is the page where the paint massacre happened;)

Gnome Day

Yesterday it was gnome day – as any of you, returning readers, probably already know – we’re quite into gnomes here – especially the middle one, she has always been crazy about gnomes.
*Apologies to all the linguists – I will talk abound gnomes and elves because our language doesn’t know the difference that well.

If you want to make a gnome like this, here is the tutorial.

So, naturally, I draw a lot of gnomes… Especially the red ones (her favourite;). This one was from Inktober.

A baby elf from Inktober challenge.

But I turn other creatures into gnomes as well;).

Gnome tooth mouse from another challenge.

Gnomes also fill my bujo a lot – I did a gnome theme for quite some months in a row…

Gnomes on my happy page in bullet journal.

Every month they were in different colour…

Gnomes on my weeklies – a few months in a row…

But we don’t just draw gnomes – we also make them – kids have a rainbow of them but we always make more…

How to make a gnome on an advent calendar.

Here are the first gnomes I ever made – when my middle one was 2 years old – and the love hasn’t died – I think the last gnomes just like these I made her last year (she’s 14 now;). We have made so many nature corners with gnomes…

Gnomes in our very first nature corner – this is how it all started…

What do we do with gnomes? Well, when kids were little they played with them. Now, they make stop motion some times and we put them into nature corner – here’s the whole family: one is made from wool rowing, felt and wire, one from pine cone and the little ones have wooden bases.

Gnomes in our recent nature corner… More shapes, more styles of gnomes…

Gnomes are very related to flower fairies and flower children and these are hollow, like finger puppets – that’s another way you could make and use gnomes.

Flower children can be used as puppets – and are closely related to gnomes.

If you make gnomes, make them some things for their house – like a well for water;).

I filmed a tutorial how to make a well and ladder for gnomes or fairies if you’d like to make.

If you have little kids in your life, make them a gnome sensory box – this was happiness overload!

Gnome sensory box – a big hit with very little effort!

And if you have a gnome lover in your life, make some gnome tags to embelish the gifts…

Gnome gift tags – cute and quick to make.

Speaking of gifts, these were gnomes that we made for the school fair – the kids sell them their and the money goes to school fund for unprivileged kids. They were all sold immediately:).

Gnomes for school charity fair.

Speaking of sewing gnomes – I made our gnome lover a gnome outfit – that she loved so much that I had to patch and elongate so that it still fits her! I thought by now, she wouldn’t want to be seen in this but this child is special like that and she still loves it – go figure!

A gnome-like outfit she still uses to this day!

And this was a toy elf (he has a hat and boots, too) – sewn like a Waldorf doll and quite a big toy – she wished for that for a while before the elves from grandpa Frost had the time to make it…

The second gnome toy she got – this one is much better than the first attempt:).

Speaking of grandpa Frost – he has elves that help him – and we have elves that come alive in December if they are placed on their advent calendar truck…

Kindness elves – our variation of elf on the shelf.

Than they hide and do all kind of stuff – from baking cookies to writing to grandpa Frost their wishes…

Elf writing to grandpa Frost.

I wonder when those traditions fade away… I thought we’d be over by now:D

Elves making envelopes.

And here’s one of the best gnome “activities” we do – although it’s not an activity at all – it’s like a meditation for kids – and because the story of the guided meditation includes a gnome, the kids say “let’s make a gnome”.

Elf that brings peace to kids minds.

Based on all the gnomy stuff I see around I think we’re not the only gnome-loving family so I hope somebody will benefit from any of these ideas:). Have a nice gnome day!

Gnomes on the wreath (not ours).

Labour Day

In our country, labour day has a long tradition and we all celebrate it still to this day. We have 2 days off and there are many ways in which people do that – from celebrations and speeches to more primal festivals that have their roots in antient pagan traditions – like maypoles and bonfires.

Bonfire on the eve of Labour day is our tradition since forever…

My favourite is bonfire (of course, I love fire) and we have one in every city. This year our kids were big enough that we could go to the traditional bonfire on the hill in our capital. It’s a nice walk – less than an hour from our home since we live just at the foot of said hill. We did not know when the bonfire starts so we waited for quite a while (more than an hour) but it was so worth it! Even the little one extatically claimed “It was worth the wait!” when they burned it (he hates waiting and it was late – the bonfire started at 10 pm – so that says a lot!)

Fire just evokes something so primal in us that we are unable to resist its enchantment…

But it’s something so primal in staring at the fire, looking at the flames and I could see myself drifting into another world and had to make an effort to stay here… I can easily imagine how some drums and dance would make this really ecstatic experience – even without any psychedelic drugs – I guess some of us don’t need those to fall into trans :D. It’s hard to explain but it really has this special power that was engrained in us for thousands of years – fire kept us safe and gave us warmth and easily digestible food – we can’t erase that – we’ll always keep a special place in our hearts for fire… I’m glad we still have those traditions – the music changed and the dancing happens bellow the stage – not around the fire but the essence is left…
How do you celebrate May day in your country?

Spring equinox

I have written about fall equinox in September but I like spring equinox even better, of course – because now the days are getting longer and it’s getting warmer,… and I love that!

One of the ways to celebrate equinox is by making a spring nature corner…

There are many ways to celebrate equinox – from self care routines or cleanses that some people do and modern pagans and witches celebrate it with pagan rituals as a time of fertility, creativity, and renewal.

Equinox is a time for balance…

Since equinox is a symbol of balance between the dark and the light, it might be a good time to re-evaluate our balance – wherever you need it – work-life balance, family-personal space balance, money-time balance, whatever is your challenge at the moment.
Or you can set up a spring nature corner (you can find a tutorial here) or bake something special, like bread shaped as birds… You can learn about the path of the sun, calculate the routs and angles, whatever is your jam;). What is your favourite way to welcome spring into your home?

Bird shaped bread – nothing makes home feel more homely like freshly baked bread…

Patrick’s day

The funny thing is I learned about Patrick’s day from mommy’s blog back in the day when my kids were little. But I was in Ireland before I had kids and I remembered their patron, their symbols etc… So I was quite confused thinking I remembered it all wrong (it has been more than a decade after all;) But then an Ireland comic cleared it all out for me – take a listen and you’ll see what I mean;).

Rainbows are one of the hallmarks of Patrick’s day…

More about Patrick’s day in my last year’s post but this time my yearly bujo is partially inspired by Patrick’s day… because I love green… and rainbows as you might have guessed by now… So let the Leprechaun pull some pranks on you, I hope your traps work great and I hope you all find the rainbow when you most need it:).