Embroidery and needle felting, Nature walk and craft, and Dying Pysansky

I am a bit behind in my posts...It's been a busy week with work! So here is the catch up post in a whirl wind!

Sierra has been working on her first embroidery. She started it the other night, and every so often picks it up and and does a couple more stitches. A lot of the time she just pretends to sew even, so it is progressing slowly but she is having lots of fun sewing while I needlefelt. (the mushrooms in the eggs photos at the end of this post and a gift for mom for Easter which I will post later)


Spending time in nature has lots of benefits, one of which is having children who are worn out from all the fresh air, excitement and exercise, which leaves them ready for bed and out like a light quickly; therefore leaving me with time to visit other blogs and catch up on posts.

Today we had a day packed full with fun! We went to Tynehead Park (where we collected moss for our terrariums) But today we went for a walk around the whole park. It really is a wonderful walk. We saw many squirrels, who were all too fast for any good pictures, but we got one at least that wasn'y blurry.
It was so much fun to watch Sierra trying to find the squirrels as they ran away to the safety of the thickets. She was so excited when she found one that was hiding. She had a lot of fun looking for fairies today too. We spotted lots of trees that looked like they could be fairy homes, but didn't see any fairies. Maybe next time.... We did see the skunkweed coming to life....such a pretty yellow colour but boy do they stink when they are in full bloom. If you've never smelt these before, their name tells it all about their scent!We also saw some new little ferns popping out of the earth,
Some beautiful moss
An interestingly carved tree stump,
The tiniest mushrooms ever....I can never pass up an oppourtunity to take a picture of mushrooms, of any size or kind. The biggest one here was about the size of a quater.
Aayla loves the woods. She could sit and play in the soil for hours. She is really developing her own personality and it is a joy to watch her develop.
As I was taking this next photo of the little snowdrops, I held it down to the ground and just snapped the picture...we may not have seen fairies but I captured a giant in this photo!
And the Chickadees were very friendly today. Coming within a couple feet from Sierra as she stood with her hands outstretched hoping ever so hard that one would jump up on her hand and eat the pine cone snack she was offering.

While on our walk we gathered a few pine cones, moss bits that fell from the trees, some fern leaves and other interesting bits from the forest floor. We took them home to make nature prints with them. I just gave Sierra the natural items on a tray, some paint on plates, and a cardboard tray from a case lot pack of corn. We put the paper in the tray and then Sierra could allow the pine cones to roll around and make trails. She also made prints with the ferns, and branches. It was such a beautiful day that we were able to do the art outside too. I love it when we can take art outside! Yeah for fantastic weather!
And if that wasn't enough excitement for one day...we made our Pasansky (Ukrainian Easter Eggs) today too! Well they weren't traditional Pysansky but they were fun. It was very time consuming to use the wax to make each layer of colour. We got all the supplies from Micheals but there must be better tools out there then the ones we used as it was very hard to draw a nice line with the ones we were using, so the lines aren't perfect and there are blotchy spots, but hey, we had fun creating them and that is all that matters!
Sierra made hers by colouring on the eggs with crayons and then dipping them in the ink. Mom made the two toned egg in the top right corner, I made the polka dot egg, the mushroom egg and the snail egg. (see my needle felted mushrooms in the background with mamakopps snail and mouse. I think they look so sweet together!)

A long day full of fresh air, exercise, creativity, imagination, play...who could ask for anything more!