Upcycled Play Kitchen

I have been wanting to make a play kitchen for my kids for quite a while now. My friend saw that her neighbor was getting rid of an old entertainment center and called to see if I wanted it. Yes, please!!

First I sanded the whole thing down with a belt sander. The kids thought it was awesome that I was using a power tool (I was pretty impressed myself). Then I used a blue paint that we had for our house for the whole kitchen base. I took the doors off and painted them and removed the glass doors that were on the electronics side of the center. I took the plastic dvd organizers off of the shelves in the narrow cabinet and painted the fronts of the pull-out shelves blue.

My husband used a piece of mdf and cut and routered it to look like a fridge/freezer combo. It's just one piece though because I didn't want it to wear out or get pulled off the hinges because it would have been tool lightweight in my opinion.

I didn't want to use a traditional faucet for the sink so I got a p-trap and my husband drilled a hole and used construction adhesive to adhere it to the base of the cabinet. I got the knobs for the stove top and the faucet knobs from a hardware store - they're sprinkler knobs! I love them. I used a dog dish for the sink. I got a light for over the sink from Dollar Tree. It turns on and off by pressing it and I adhered it to the cabinet using sticky-backed velcro.

I made the "window" picture of the owls, the curtain over the window, and the curtain under the sink with Riley Blake Hooty Hoot fabric that I had left over from another project. I cut the owls in the "window" out using my Slice Fabrique and the Making Memories Animal Frenzy design card. The big owl on the fridge is a vinyl decal and so is the tree on the pantry door.

The utensil hangers to the side of the stove and sink are drawer pulls and hooks from IKEA. I made the burners on the stove out of round cork trivets from IKEA covered in fire fabric. I just hot-glued the fabric to the trivets and the trivets to the base cabinet.

My husband did a lot of work on the kitchen as well. He screwed the knobs down for me and cut all of the holes for the pulls and sink and faucet and installed them all. He also screwed the beadboard onto the back behind the sink. Then he caulked around the beadboard to seal it to the cabinet. He figured out how to mount the curtain for under the sink so that the kids could still open and close it - it was tricky, believe me! He hung the curtains and the "window" over the sink for me as well. He was a good sport for helping me out so much with my project.

The kids love playing with it and didn't wait for it to be finished before the loaded it full of their play food and little pot and pan. We saved some plastic Easter eggs and filled up some clean egg cartons. We also cleaned some strawberry containers and we're using those for the play food storage.

 I'm glad I didn't get a plastic play kitchen at a yard sale even though it would have been much cheaper to have done that. I love that there is no other play kitchen out there that is exactly like ours. And I love that it's not going to fall apart anytime soon and I especially love that my kids love it as much as I do.

Dinosaur Week

During Dinosaur Week, we went to my son's favorite park, the Dinosaur Park that is near our home. We have a local membership to a few parks and it includes the Dino Park and we go there at least every other month. It has a museum and an actual playground. On top of that it has many model/replicas of dinosaurs placed throughout walking paths. Some of them even roar. It's pretty awesome. For our picnic lunch, we took dinosaur pb&js.

We also went to the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point. We loooove that place and if we lived closer we'd definately have a membership there. They even do sleepovers!

We watched a few of the dinosaur "documentaries" on Netflix. My son could watch those over and over and over again. Fun week!!

Animal Week Recap

Last week we had Animal Week from our Summer Fun Weeks plan.

We got lots of animal books from the library and we also got a dvd of Little Peep, which my son thinks is hilarious. I love to hear him giggle. We got some tiny 3D animals to put together (btw-they don't stay together very well but he didn't care). I also saved one of his favorite shirts from going into the garbage. Every year I buy him some white t shirts for the Summer but he almost always stains them within the first few times of wearing them and then they become sleeping shirts for him. This crocodile shirt had a few chocolate milk stains on it and he was sad that he wasn't allowed to wear it out anymore. So I bought a navy blue t shirt from the dollar store, I ironed double sided fusible web onto the back of the crocodile, and then I cut it out. Then I ironed the croc onto the front of the blue shirt and sewed around it. Jacob loved it so much that he put it on immediately. I might add words to it later but for now he's just happy to have his croc shirt back. I think this would be a good option for shirts that kids outgrow too-just cut out the part that they love and sew it onto a bigger shirt.

The thing that we did that was the most fun was that we went to a baby animal petting farm with some friends of ours. This farm was the real deal. The family that runs it raises all of the animals and then they sell the babies to other farmers/ranchers. This cute little goat was only a week old, she lost her momma and sister during her birth so she was babied by the family and she ran around our feet like a little puppy. She was so cute!!! My daughter was terrified by her but my son loved her. They had all sorts of babies there; llama, sheep, horses, hogs, potbellied pigs, goats, and ducks. One of the baby goats had been born just an hour before we got there. They were all so cute! My son said that he loved the cats the most (they were not babies), that cracked me up. I think the week-old baby goat was my favorite. My daughter got brave and fed the goats! She is afraid of everything so that shocked me.

It was a fun week! This week we are having Dinosaur Week...should be lots of fun!!

Cousin's Week Recap

Last week was cousin's week. (See our Summer Fun schedule for more info.)
I have a sister and brother that live in the same state as me, about an hour away (the rest of my siblings live in Texas), so we only see them about once a month, if that. I thought it'd be fun for us to get together with them more often so I decided that one of our weeks should be cousin's week. These are the things we did for cousin fun;

We had one of the cousins over to spend the weekend with us. So fun!
Sunday; we went to a birthday party for one of our cousins.
Monday; we looked through our photo album of family members and talked about each of the cousins and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas
Tuesday; we went to spend the day one of the families.
Wednesday; we went shopping for our surprise package things
Thursday, Friday, & Saturday; we stuffed our surprise packages and went to the post office to mail them

This week was pretty low-key as far as activities go but it was fun and Jacob is excited to start Animal Week this week.

Here is the link to the directions for the fun packages that we sent. We ended up sending 5 of them. There is still one family that we didn't send them to but we will send it soon. We had a lot of fun shopping for the things to put in the bottles. Here are the pics of some of the things that we put into some of the bottles.

Dino-mite Tie T-Shirt

I made this fun tie t-shirt for my nephew. He is three and he's crazy about dinosaurs. His dad has to wear business attire for work so I thought it'd be fun for him to have his own pretend dressy shirt. I found the plain black t-shirt at Dollar Tree and I already had the fabric.

I ironed double-sided fusible web onto the back of the fabric scrap and traced around my son's clip-on tie. Then I cut that out and removed the paper backing. I centered the new tie on the black t-shirt and ironed it on. Then I cut a strip of fabric stabilizer and ironed that onto the inside of the shirt, directly behind the tie cut-out.

I used a straight stitch and sewed all the way around the tie and across the bottom of the triangle top of the tie. Then I tore off the paper fabric stabilizer from the inside of the shirt. So simple and so fun! I think I'll go whip out a bunch more of these cute t-shirts for my son's dino-loving buddies.

Playful Summer Dress

It has been really cold here for quite a while this Spring and we haven't been able to get out in the sunshine (because there hasn't been any - it rained for a couple of months straight), but now that the sunshine is here to stay I decided that my daughter needed a new fun dress. I think dresses are so much more comfortable to wear on hot sunshiney days.

I used this pattern from New Look. I really love their little girls patterns. They are pretty basic so they're easy to change up for different looks and embelishments. I found the fabric at Jo-Ann's last year and I didn't have any project in mind when I bought it, I just loved it so I bought a yard of it which turned out to be just enough fabric for this dress.

Summer Fun Banner

I made a banner for our living room wall to represent our Summer Fun Weeks. I used my awesome Slice Elite {which I LOVE because it cuts both fabric and paper} to cut out most of the shapes from scrapbooking paper and I sewed each of the banner pennants onto ric rack, using a contrasting thread. I used mounting putty to adhere the banner onto the wall so it will be removable at the end of the Summer. My son is very visual so I think this will help him to get the whole idea of our Summer Fun themes. For a detailed list of what we'll be doing each week, click here.

If you would like to know which Slice memory card I used for each shape, leave your email address in the comments and I'll reply with my list.