Toddler Tuesdays--and My First Cricut Project Share!

Welcome to Toddler Tuesday!

We were past the toddler stage. Our kids were seven and five and we were confidently moving forward into the world of big kids... and then we found out we were adding a new member to our family. And so when the big kids were eight and almost six, a new little guy joined our family and now we are starting all over!

We have found that homeschooling with a toddler in the house is a serious challenge. He doesn't want to be left alone. He is very confused and jealous when the rest of us have things to do other than entertain him! He is a true baby of the family, and he thinks the rest of us live to entertain him.

I have started putting together toddler games for him to play during school time. Some of them are my own creations and some are the result of too many hours on Pinterest. I plan to share a new idea every Tuesday. Follow along and grow your collection of quiet activities for your toddler. We personally use ours during school time but there are so many uses! I know some people who need to keep kids in church use them to keep kids quiet during the service (thankfully my church has a nursery and kids classes during adult service so I have never had to face this challenge!). Others use them in waiting rooms or at restaurants. Of course, you can use them any time you need your toddler to be quiet and somewhat still!

My first Toddler Tuesday Project was made using the Cricut.

The two images I purchased were:


Crayon #M3AAD1

and

Card Holder Tag #M3AA2B

Each image was $0.99 so you can make this project for $1.98 plus four pieces of card stock.

If you have a Cricut Explore and have Design Space installed on your computer, you can easily cut this project using this link:  Crayon Toddler Busy Bag Game. I designed it to fit 8.5x11 card stock so that you don't need 12x12 to get it done. You will also need a Cricut scoring tool to make the fold lines and a pen that fits the Cricut machine. Personally, I use regular Crayola skinny markers. The plain old white ones you probably have around the house. The washable ones don't fit right but the regular ones work fabulous, write better than the Cricut pens, are so much cheaper and come in more colors!

To make the crayons last longer, I also laminated them. I couldn't laminate the pouches because then you wouldn't be able to slide the crayons inside. They seem to be holding up OK.

To play, just mix up all the crayons and have your toddler try to put them away in the correct pouches. My toddler likes to pretend they need to go to bed and put them to sleep!

If you don't have a Cricut, don't fret! A quick google search for "card holder template" and "crayon template" brought up tons of images to print and color. You can print them on color card stock (so much cheaper than printing in color!) and get the same finished product.

Perfect Pretzel Dough

I love soft pretzels. They just put an Auntie Anne's in my local grocery store and it's a battle week after week to avoid going! Luckily, I have an amazing recipe for soft pretzels at home and honestly, it's better than anything my grocery store can offer.

I tried a bunch of recipes that were miserable failures and then I came across this one. I used it for a long time and it got rave reviews but I still felt like something was missing. Then one day on a road trip, we stopped at an adorable little place called Grandpa's Cheesebarn. They sold pretzel dough mix and I noticed that one of the ingredients was brown sugar. AH HA!

So I reworked my recipe to add in the brown sugar. At first I replaced the white sugar with brown but that turned out really... blah. So next I tried adding a half cup of brown sugar and deducting a half cup of flour. BINGO! We had a winner! I made a few other small changes along the way as well so my official recipe now is...

PERFECT PRETZEL DOUGH

I broke the ingredients down by the order that they are used.

4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 1/3 cup of warm water

***

4 1/2 cups All-Purpose Flour
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil

****

4 or 5 cups of hot water
1 cup of baking soda

***

1 stick of butter (real is best but margarine will do the trick)
Kosher salt

***

1. Mix water, yeast, and 1 tsp sugar together. Let sit a few minutes to activate yeast.
2. Add flour, white and brown sugar, salt, and oil. Knead until a dough forms. (Alternately, you can be like me and dump it all into the bread machine and put it on the dough setting and let the machine do the work). If you knead it by hand, coat it with some oil to keep it from drying out, cover and let rise for at least an hour.
3. Form pretzels. Cut the dough into long strips and twist into pretzel shapes. We watched YouTube videos to learn how but it's not too hard to figure out. But lately we prefer to make pretzel bites. Roll out the whole ball of dough and use a pizza roller to cut it strips, then cut the strips into smaller pieces.
4. Fill a medium mixing bowl with warm water and baking soda. Whisk it together to mix it up. The baking soda settles quickly so you will need to remix it every few minutes. Lay out a hand or kitchen towel next to the bowl.
5. Dip your pretzels or bites quickly into the water/baking soda mix. Lay them on the towel to dry.
6. Spray a cookie sheet GENEROUSLY with cooking spray.
7. Lay your pretzels or bites on the cookie sheet and bake at 425 degrees for 8 minutes.
8. While the pretzels bake, melt your butter and pour it into a shallow pan, like a cake pan.* When the pretzels come out of the oven, dip them face down in the butter while they are still hot. Lay them back on the sheet or on a cooling rack. Then sprinkle with kosher salt and ENJOY!

*Or, if you are in a rush or don't feel like dealing with extra dishes, skip this step. Just take the stick of butter and rub it all over the tops of the pretzels immediately after taking them out of the oven. I often do this to save myself a little trouble! Don't forget the salt!

Colorful Textured Cowl

I'm back! I missed writing this blog so much but life really just got in the way for awhile. Nothing bad happened but life got really busy for awhile. We were making some big changes in our home school life, my littlest had some health issues, and thanks to some success with my Etsy shop, we got to take a bonus trip to Disney World! Anyway, on with the fun...


I bought a skein of Red Heart Soft Deep Sea without a particular project in mind. It was on sale and the color just really struck me. I've had it for several months, but with fulfilling Christmas orders for customers, I just didn't have time to create anything new. Today I finally had time to sit down and play with it and came up with a quick and easy textured cowl. I used a J hook because honestly, I'm impatient and a J hook just gets the job done a little faster than the H or I... Plus with the texture of this, I thought making the stitches a little bigger was a good thing.

Getting Back To It!

I am planning on getting this blog back up and running for the new year. Things have been really crazy around here and the blog fell to the bottom of my to do list for a long time.  But I miss it and I have so much to share!

Some of the plans I have for the future include Cricut tutorials, lots of Crochet patterns, ideas for homemade gifts for Operation Christmas Child boxes, some favorite recipes, reviews of patterns I have purchased, toddler busy bag ideas, Classical Conversations review game ideas, and so much more.


See you in the new year! Have a great Christmas!

MineCraft Creeper Hat Free Pattern

If your kids are as into Minecraft as mine, they will love this hat! And the best news is that at the end of the week, I will be sharing another Minecraft pattern (for the Steve character)! When I opened my Toluver's Creations Shop, my very first order was for a minecraft hat. The funny thing was, at the time, I didn't feel confidenet in pattern writing so I just made up a pattern without writing anything down. Now that I actually want the pattern, I'm looking at the pictures I took and trying to remember what I did! I've learned my lesson and now I ALWAYS jot down the steps as I make up something new.

MINECRAFT CREEPER HAT 

Printable versions!

I am not the most computer literate person in the world but I try my best to learn what I can. Blogging is a fairly new realm for me and there's a lot I do NOT know how to do just yet. I desperately wanted to offer a way to print my blog posts easily so that you can take the patterns with you on the go and work on your projects anywhere.

It seemed so complicated. I thought I would have to make my own PDFs of the posts, find a site to host them, create links to them and share the links on the page.

And then one of my friends who is so much smarter than I am found me a website. I clicked through and signed into my blogger account and it said "do you want to add a print function to your posts?" I said yes and that was that.

you will now find a print button on each of my posts. Once you click on it, it will pull up a printable version that you can either print or email to yourself. You also have the option to open it as a PDF and save it to your computer.

Happy crafting!

Lalala... A rag doll hat inspired by Lalaloopsy

My daughter has been pretty into watching Lalaloopsy cartoons on Netflix recently. To be honest, so has my son! Haha! One day recently I watched a little bit with them and decided that I absolutely needed to make a hat inspired by Lalaloopsy. The characters are just begging to be recreated in yarn, don't ya think???