Friday Finds

This week has been a huge score of great books about Nature! They all ranged in price from .69 cents to $3.99. Even at $3.99 they were a steal! I Love the Rocky Mountain Nature Guide and Nature BC, both are full of native plants, animals and birds to BC and the West Coast. The Field Guide for Mammals has some of the cutest illustrations in it too. I can envision some copies being made and used in projects.
The little house is a sewing kit $1.99
The two gnome candle holders .99 cents each
The test tubes $3.99
Owl pepper shaker and wooden doll in bag for $1.99
I can't wait for our walk tomorrow with our new guides. We'll have to get our field pack together!

Today Sierra and I made a cool butterfly activity but I'll have to post it later, Have to run, as it's play off time!

A fairy for Sierra

I have to just show a sneak peek of what I ordered (click here) from Fig & me for Sierra for her 3rd birthday in June. I know June is awhile away but when I saw her previously sold fairy I knew I had to have one for her. Sierra has been having so much fun searching for fairies on our walks.

I wasn't in a hurry as we had time but this little beauty is almost ready already! Now I just have to decide which to get Aayla for her birthday in October! I love the Viking but is that fitting for a little girl?

I chose the fairy because Sierra has been enjoying searching for fairies on our walks. Mom bought us this book to share for Easter as Sierra is too young to read it by herself, and really it's me who loves the fairies! But when she saw this page

she was so excited as she told me "look mommy it's the house for lots of fairies we saw!" as pictured below and posted on this blog entry.
I have to hand it to her, they do look very similar :)

Hope you have a magical day filled with love and some good old imaginative fun! Maybe if your really lucky you'll find a fairy home too!

Shop update

I recently purchased a green play silk that I had been putting off buying in hopes of finding white scarves to make my own. Then after purchasing it, I found a place locally that sold white silks, so I bought a few to try out with our natural dyes left over from our egg dying. We made a bunch.

Some of the new colours we are keeping, and some are in the shop. I figured with the name Imagination Station, what better item to have in the shop. Playsilks are the best! They can be a cape, a sling, a crown, used for dancing, easily packed up for a car trip and brought out anywhere. They are asy to use, all you need is your child's imagination, and the possibilities are endless! I have a few more to add to the shop too in the next day or two. It was hard to get individual photos that show the colours accurately, so they are all group photos. Each one of the scarves will be photo'd and posted, for quick mailing abilities.

My personal favourite is the charcoal grey play silk. I think it would be perfect for all those dragon slaying knights out there!

We hope you all had a Happy Easter

Our weekend flew by! Before Easter we were busy making our gifts, then we had Easter dinner at our place on Sunday afternoon and today has been one of those lazy days.

Here's a few of our Easter pics:

Mom's gift-the needle felted duckie in an egg cart
Needle felted "when pigs fly" for Meadow
Sierra making her Easter gifts-she added collage materials to clear contact paper which I precut in an egg shape. After she added some glitter, we stuck another piece ontop of it, pressed it together and cut it out. We hung them in the window until family took them home after Easter dinner
Some Easter goodies by mamakopp and Jalu Toys which all made it into their wet felted eggs and into the girls baskets.
The girls opening their baskets
She hasn't even bitten the chocolate bunny and you can see the sugar glaze over her eyes already!
Aayla playing with the egg rattle I felted for her. (To be honest, she liked the plastic eggs the best! Go figure!)
Aayla feeding her bunny a carrot. I have some wooden carrots on the way from mamaroots but they didn't get odered in time to arrive for Easter.
Sierra hunting for Easter Eggs. She got her own basket this year. I simply made it by wrapping the edge of a thrifted basket with ribbon, and sewed together a cute flower in daffodil colours for each side. This year Aayla used Meadow basket I painted her when she was little. Next year Aayla will be old enough for an egg hunt and she'll get her own basket then.
Finding an egg in her flowers. This was one of the only pics with some expression when finding the eggs. usually I was behind her!
Aayla got into Sierras basket of chocolates when no one was looking! She doesn't know she is caught yet, and is trying to get yet another egg!
And then Aayla topped off her day with her very first jello. I think she had more fun playing in it then eating it. Isn't she a cutie!
And that's how we spent our Easter weekend. I hope you all had a wonderful celebration with your families too!

Natural dyed Easter Eggs

Yesterday we dyed some Easter Eggs and silkies with Natural Dyes.

Some of the colours surprised me! We followed this post from Syrendell, as well as trying some other foods to experiment with since we could not find blackberries or blueberries anywhere!

From top to bottom, left to right:
1) Eggs in Turmeric
2) Eggs in Purple Cabbage
3) Eggs in Beets
4) Eggs in Strawberries
5) Silkie in Turmeric
6)Silkie in Purple Cabbage
7)Silkie in Beets
8) Dinosaur Eggs

We tried boiling some carrots too but there was hardly any colour to the water so we didn't try dying in the carrot water. The beets was a bit of a disappointment as I expected that gorgeous colour that shows above (in picture 3) to remain. However it really just made the eggs look like they were brown eggs and the silkie like a really really pastel pink. The strawberry dyed ones weren't much different from the beets, however that dye did smell the best! We did not dye a silkie in the strawberry after seeing how pale the beets were.

I'm all about the drastic change like the yellow eggs in the turmeric, and the blue eggs from the purple cabbage. I find it very puzzling that the purple cabbage dyed the eggs blue, but the silkie a lavendar colour (see photo 2).
Edited to add: the pink egg above Sierra made at daycare and I will ask them how they made the speckles as iremembersleep inquired and maybe others would like to know too. If you'd like to know, leave me a comment about it and I will send you the details. The eggs with the leaves on them are onion skin dyed eggs.

The Dinosaur eggs in picture 8, were made by using the eggs that cracked in the initial boiling. We cracked them some more and then left them in the dye to set. When the shells are peeled they leave a neat cracked design, which makes hard boiled eggs all that much more fun to eat!

We also dyed some more silkie with some other dye and now have a whole rainbow of silkies. We did a few for the shop too which will be posted when the rain stops so I can get a more accurate photo of the colours.

Overall we really had fun with these and the cabbage afterwards was a yummy treat! There are more pics on my flickr photostream if you'd like to see them.