Ornament bird feeder

I have been slacking in the blogging department lately.
Pickles will be the big three soon, and I have been spending
alot of my free time working on some exciting things for that.

Continuing with our bird theme, Nik felt it was necessary to feed
the birds as well as housing them.
So we decided to make bird feeders.

My original plan was the pine cone peanut butter route,
but I deviated from that plan.
As I was standing in the bird seed section reviewing my options I saw
 containers of bird suet.
Apparently there is fat in suet which is good for fattening up winter birds,
but no so good for bird bikini season.



Materials:

bird suet
string or jute

Tools:
cookie cutter
straw


I bought two different kinds of suet.
We wanted to attract a variety of birds.




I provided Nik with a straw to punch a hole in the form after it was complete,
 but he insisted on doing that part first. 



I explained to Nik that we were going to break up the suet cake, and smoosh it into the candy corn shaped cookie cutter.
Why a candy corn shaped cutter?
We like to mix things up sometimes,
and use Halloween candy corn cutters in March.
 



Nik discovered the suet was crumbly,
but the fat allowed it to smoosh together.This was his favorite part.




We also learned two additional facts
about suet while doing this project. 

The fat in this stuff is like crack to dogs and cats.
They tried to pin Pickles to the ground so they could lick his hands.

And, this stuff is like magic on dry winter hands.
My skin felt fabulous after this. Greasy, but fabulous.

We poked a hole in the mold with a straw, right in the middle.
I find a straw works better as it sucks up excess suet.
We pushed the ornament out of the mold and placed it in the freezer for a few hours to set. 


Jute was used to string the ornaments onto the tree's. 



The snow started to pick up substantially so we hung
 the bird seed molds in trees and ran back into the house.

A lot of birds stopped by.
It was nice to see the large variety and Nik thought the birds were cool.
But you won't be able to see the cool birds
 as the pictures below are horrible.


A white and black bird stopped in to eat.

This guy was large. He had a beautiful red splotch on his head.

Citrus Lane review Feb 2014

If you are generally amazed by the professional quality and sheer awesomeness of my pics, I'm sorry to say you will be disappointed today.
The pics are less than stellar. 

Pickles had been waiting all day for me to
get home from work to open his "Lane" box;
he could have just burst with excitement.
To make the poor child wait for me to take
pictures of everything was just cruel and unusual punishment.

February's box had great stuff in it.

The first item was a gift for mom. Very cool.
Green Apple Age Defy Hand Cream.
The hand cream is lovely and smells more citrus to me than apple.
And if there is one thing I need to do more of, it's defy my age.

Next we have the Tie-Up Shoe.
This was the star of the show.

It's a little wooden shoe with shoelace holes to thread through.
Nikolas had to stop and focus on this one. 

It did not take long before Pickles
realized the shoe could be used as a melee weapon.

I took the shoe away and handed Nik the Storage bin.
It didn't look like something that could be played with, so Nik had that disappointed look on his face

I explained that the storage bin could hold
Hot Wheels, dinosaurs etc, and then he was hooked.
He wanted to fill it with treasures right away.I personally have my own love affair with containers, so I can fully understand Nik's excitement when discovering the monkey could actually hold his stuff.

It's quite sturdy.
Handles on both sides, cute ears and a lined inside. 

The box also contained another Barefoot book.
Skip through the Seasons.
Nik loves searching puzzles so this was right up his alley.
Not sure why Citrus Lane is only focusing on Barefoot in the last few boxes.
Disappoint. 



Overall, two thumbs up.

Do you want to try Citrus Lane for yourself?  Link here

 Get a surprise box of the best products for your child every month

Valentine's mantel piece

Pickles and I stumbled upon this project
while making a Valentines window piece with contact paper.
One project morphed into another awesome project and I love the final result.

Materials:

Valentines-esque paper
Contact paper
Jute

Tools:

Scissors
Tape
Hole punch

The initial idea was contact paper on the window.
I cut out a bunch of heart shapes, give Nik some feathers
 and let him go to town.

I find that masking tape works great on glass for projects like this.
It peels smooth off of the glass and contact paper.

As always, we had an audience of one
waiting under foot for a random feather to fall. 

 

Pickles insisted we take a break from Valentines 
to make a cat toy for our friend.
We tied and taped a few feathers onto some jute
 and a cat-toy was born. 

After the cat break, we moved on.

The grouping and placement of Nik's hearts and feathers
made me think of a heart swag, wreath or draping mantle piece. 

The next day we did the same thing but on the table. 

I think Nik had pink heart overload.
He ran to his workbench grabbed a wrench and advised me this
project needed more banging. 

 I threw a similar size piece of contact paper 

over the finished products.
Sticky sides together.


I cut out hearts and groups
of hearts from the Contact paper.

I let Pickles operate the hole punch. 

We punched a hole into every heart and group of hearts.

He loved that part.

 

We strung the hearts through jute and attached the piece to the mantle. 

Awesome!

Letter Fishing

Fishing!
Nik is not exactly sure what one does while fishing, but he does know he desperately wants to do it.
I decided to create an at-home fishing game. 

I picked out 7 different colors of thin foam and free-handed a fish template.
No worries, I won't quit my day job and try to
make a living making perfect fish templates.
My family would starve. 

Materials:

7 foam sheets
Googly eyes (2 for each fish)
Letter stickers
Large piece of paper

Wooden spool
Wooden dowel or rod
String/Jute
Magnets (1 for each fish, 1 large one with a hole in the middle as a "hook")
Hot glue sticks

Tools:

Hot glue gun
Scissors

Blue Crayon

I went through all of my different letter stickers
and located two N, I, K, O, L, A and S's.
What's that spell?!

Nikolas!
Front and back.

A little name fun.

I free-handed a pond as well and colored it

When the hubs heard I was making a fishing pole he insisted it be functional (which didn't turn out, unfortunately).
And that the fishing pole part be left up to a professional.
A professional fake-fishing-pole-maker, and he wanted the job.

The hubs hot glued a wooden spool and string to a
fishing pole to create the appearance of functionality.

A magnet was tied to the end of the string.

And of course I added some jute over the
hot glued spots to make it look neater.

We set the pond and fish at the bottom
of a staircase and handed Pickles the fishing pole.
He was so excited!

The cat started taking serious interest in our fishing game.
This just expanded Niks fun. 

Trying to catch the fish was fun enough,
but trying to catch fish during an enemy attack
is even more super awesome fun.

The fishing continued for over an hour.
Nik loved catching a fish and announcing the letter on each one.

This craft goes in the major success pile as
there were serious giggles and laughs.

This project is fun even without a cat of your own.
Try it!

Citrus Lane review Jan 2014

Citrus Lane's January box made Nikolas very happy. 

The shipping box had the same design on it as December's box. 

I love the white snowflake look. 

Nik grabbed for the markers first. 
These bad boys are double sided and major super awesome bonus, 
they are washable.

The box also contained an activity book.
Very age appropriate. We have not used this yet.

The upset tummy & nausea relief was my favorite item.
I just adore when Citrus Lane sends us things
Nik can use in the tub; lotions and herbal medicines,
their next addition should be kid lip-balm.

They also included a card for 20% off at Ruby Ribbon.
It appears to be another "start your own business" kit.
Buy-our-starter-bundle-and-sell-the-items-to-your-friends kind of thing. 

The best item in the entire box is a wooden assorted fruit 
set that can be cut into halves. 

This set comes with a wooden knife and bag to hold
all of your toddlers wooden fruit paraphernalia, 

as well as three pieces of fruit with very strong Velcro in the middle. 

Nik found the fruit-cutting to be extremely fascinating.
It kept him busy for quite some time.

The Velcro is strong so your toddler
will have to work to get that knife through. 

I explained to Pickles that he should not be cutting his fruits in his lap,
 as that showed a serious lack of basic knife safety and knife fundamentals.
His response "wha?".

Overall this box was loved by all.

 Do you want to try Citrus Lane for yourself?  Link here

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