Recently, I made a set of peg princesses for a friend. I used female doll pegs from the craft store and acrylic paint. I’d like to make more of these, but here are a few notes:
- Yellow was the only color I had trouble with coverage so, for example, with Rapunzel’s hair, I painted it white first.
- I like gloss acrylic spray for finishing as opposed to matte. It seems to keep the paint from chipping better.
- Hair is hard but acrylic paint is cheap and easy to cover up!
Generally when I want to make something, I go to Etsy first. There are plenty of talented people out there who have taken the time to make all sorts of beautiful PDF patterns that I can just download and use. But when Little Bear started collecting all sorts of small animals and people, the site was uncharacteristically unhelpful. Some of my crafty friends have made little crayon and car rolls lately so I turned to pictures of those to try and brainstorm an idea of my own.
Of course, it’s worth mentioning that I got this idea at 8pm and didn’t make it to my local fabric store until 8:30, so my fabric selection was a bit hurried. Also, I then stayed up until 3:45 in the morning working on this. And that is important because visualizing how I was going to piece this together was probably much hampered by my lack of sleep. However, it would have been more hampered by two awake children so I did what I could.
Originally the pockets were going to be much more elaborate and actually look like little dresses. Well, first of all, that was going to be too hard. And second, I wanted this to be of use beyond her (hopefully short-lived) interest in Disney Princesses. The fabric does sort of coordinate with their dresses, though, which makes me unreasonably happy!
So, I didn’t make a fancy PDF pattern, but for those of you who are interested, here’s what I did.
After figuring out how big I wanted my pockets (this was sort of trial and error), I pieced them together like quilt squares. I then sewed some coordinating fabric on the back.
Then I figured how long I wanted the entire roll to be, did some fancy math, and decided how much each pocket would have to be gathered at the bottom to fit. This also involved a lot of pinning, seeing if a princess would fit, and adjusting. I used a disappearing ink pen (so cool!) to mark where each pocket should end. Plus I left about 2 inches of blue on each side.
I then pinned the pockets, hand gathered them and ironed the gathers in place. I did pin them at first but I got lazy.
You can see how much longer the pockets started out than when they were finished.
I sewed the gathers, then put iron on fleece backing on the purple (outside) fabric to give it a little bit of weight.
After that (I’m making this sound much easier than it was), I set the top and bottom pieces together and rolled it up to see where to sew tabs and Velcro. A lot of the rolls on Etsy have ribbon tying them up but I was hoping Little Bear would be able to do this without much assistance! (More disappearing ink in the picture below).
I added some ribbons and embroidery to the purple piece for embellishment. The words didn’t turn out as bold as I wanted but whatever.
This was all rolling/unrolling, trial and error. Finally, I sewed the purple to the blue and it was done! I can’t wait to show it to her!
(A final note, for those of you with sharp eyes… We do have two Aurora’s. One has the soft dress and one has the MagiClip dress. I imagine if she keeps liking them we’ll transition fully to MagiClip so I made the pockets big enough to compensate. Also, we don’t have Mulan or Jasmine, hence the light pink and teal pockets. And finally, yes, Rapunzel’s hair is too long and the wrong color to be in her wedding dress. Talk to Disney about it.)
Lately, well, for the past year and a half, Little Bear has been really into playing with little people and animals. I have it on good authority that I was very similar at this age so maybe that’s why I find her play now to be so cute. Because of this, she has collected herself quite an array of doll and animal houses. Mine from when I was little, a Calico Critters manor, a cardboard beach house… the list goes on. In preparing for our summer downsizing, we’ve been trying to figure out how we can get this neighborhood down to just a few living spaces. What does she like about each house? How does she play with each of them? What aspects do we, as parents, like? And of course, the very important question: How does the size of each house fit with the scale of all of the little animals and people that we have amassed?
While at Learning Palace the other day (a dangerous place to take your two year old and, as it turns out, your husband) we saw a really cool Melissa and Doug castle. It came in a “Princess” option and a “Medieval” option. Papa and Little Bear both liked the former but I get more votes than they do, so the Medieval castle it was.
And holy cow, did we pick right. I am the first to admit when we buy a toy that flops (Stride-To-Ride Dino, anyone?) but this has been a total hit. Not only did it stop the tears at Grandma and Grandpa’s this afternoon, but she bypassed Papa to play with it once she got home. And papa has pretty much been at the top of her list lately. Anyway, true to form, the castle was shared by many friends: My Little Pony, Tangled dolls, Calico Critters, Playmobil princesses, a large stuffed dog, a plastic bear, and what I’m pretty sure is a Little People air traffic controller (though you could convince me otherwise). The bear attacked the princess (who was in the bathtub), the elephant mama carried the mouse baby up and down the stairs several times, Flynn Rider spent his time falling into the dungeon, and there was constant inter-species bedsharing.
So what is to become of the rest of the dwellings? I think we might put the Calico Critter house on the market. It’s spacious and the correct scale, but it doesn’t have a trapdoor. And everyone knows you need a trapdoor.
Inspired by a “Memory” game at an overpriced toy store, I came up with this craft idea for Little Bear. I took 3x2 inch balsa wood squares from a craft store, 3x2 inch wallet prints of our close friends and family, and 3x2 inch scrapbook paper that I cut, Modge Podged them all together, and got these:
She is just at the age where she loves finding matches and identifying her favorite people:
I just feel like I have trading cards of my parents, etc. It’s pretty fun!
