Goodbye Subbing, Back to Stay-at-Home Mom

Yep, today was my last day subbing.  I might sub now and then for particular teachers (like for Hubby or Firrecracker's kindergarten teacher...or...probably no one else.), but by and large I am done.  Yeah!  YEAH!!  Double YEAH!

Most of the time when I was teaching full-time before the kiddos I liked teaching.  Some of the time I loved teaching, and on a few bad days (but not many) I hated it.

I have never loved subbing.  Occassionally I've liked it.  Most days I've endured it, and some days I've hated it.  Between Hubby and I we've subbed just about every subject and grade from kindergarten through high school.  The only subject we can think of that we haven't subbed is Horticulture.  (Yep, home ec, shop, special ed, science, math, English, Spanish, you name it.)  And now I'm DONE!!! 

Felt-Food Cook-Along Readers' Showcase #2

This post is long overdue.  I was surprised when I did the first one at just how long it took to put together a "highlights" post, what with clicking on all the links, downloading and then uploading the pictures and attaching the links (especially since our computer is on the slow side.)  Anyway, there were a lot of deserving projects that were linked up, and I wanted to highlight some of them.  If you have a felt food project of your own you'd like to share, add it to our linky list at the bottom!

Shelley Inspired shared her loaf of bread and a tutorial for it.  This reminds me that I really should make one of these, especially since we make so much homemade bread around here. 

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich, Felt Style- Felt Food Cook-Along Day 24

This is the last of the tutorials for the felt food that I have made so far.  I still want to make some frosting for the mini-cupcakes, little tarts, a pie, cake, and some other things...but since I've got a few other projects I'm working on, I make no promises about when they will get made.  When I do get around to them, though, I promise to share the tutorials and patterns!

Anyone care for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?  You can see how I made the bread here and download the printable pattern.

The Coolest Thing Since Sliced Bread...(Felt-Food Cook-Along) - Day 24

...is FELT sliced bread for your kids to make sandwiches with.  Again, there are a ton of ideas out there on blogs for making sliced bread.  You can go even simpler and just have it square shaped.  I made mine with a curved top since that's more like what my kids are used to eating.

I started this post over a month ago, and then realized that I hadn't taken very many pictures of the process, so it's taken me this long to get around to making another one.  The upside is now you can have a printable version. :)

Felt Peelable Banana with Printable Pattern- Felt Food Cook-Along Day 23

My kids love, LOVE, LOVE bananas, so they were pretty high on my list of felt food to make.  I thought a pealable one would be a lot of fun.  I found a great tutorial on Just Stuff via Felt-O-Rama's felt food tutorials links (on the left sidebar of her blog.)  While you're at Just Stuff be sure to check out the way she modifies this pattern for a corn in it's husk, and she also has some other great looking felt food to inspire you.

Felt Orange Peel - (Oranges Part 2) - Felt Food Cook-Along Day 22

This tutorial is just for the orange peel, so if you want to know how to make the wedges, yo'll need to click here.  For the peel, I thought of using a ball pattern, lining it, and then leaving one side open.  I saw a link on Homemade by Jill to this fabric ball pattern from Grand Revival Design and thought I'd try it out for making my orange.  I used the smallest of the three sizes in the pattern for making the peel.

Materials: orange and white felt, pattern from Grand Revival Design at link above, and all the regular sewing stuff...sewing machine highly recommended.

Felt Orange Sections - (Oranges Part 1) - Felt Food Cook-Along Day 21

We love oranges at our house any way you slice them.  I made a peelable banana...which I still need to share with you...and that got me thinking it would be fun to attempt a pealable orange with sections.  I haven't seen a peelable orange like this (although I'm guessing there may be some out there), so this was a bit of an experiment for me. 

I also really liked the orange slices on Thinking Mama, so that's the vision I had going into this.  Doing it this way, the orange slices come out of the peel...with a peel.  I wanted them to work both with the peel and on their own, though.

Let Us Eat Lettuce (Romaine Lettuce) - Felt Food Cook-Along - Day 20

Lettuce is another one of those things that is pretty easy to figure out, but I figured if I'd done a tutorial on everything else, I'd do one for this one.

Materials:  Green felt, general sewing stuff

Chocolate Mini-Cupcakes with Printable Pattern

Finally some printable patterns!  A big thank you to SpartanGirl on Camp Slop for pointing me in the right direction for uploading PDF's so these patterns will stay true to size.  I've been meaning to get this up for a while.  One of these days I'll get around to following her recommendation for making a three column blog.  Here is a printable version of the mini-cupcake/muffin pattern I made.  I'm also adding it to the original tutorial for my blueberry muffins.

Sliced Cheese - Felt Food Cook Along - Day 18

From here on out, the felt food may be in a somewhat random order.  Sorry about that.  I wanted to do sandwiches next starting with sliced bread...but when I made the sliced bread, I didn't take very good pictures...so I need to make some more before I can do a tutorial for it.  Hopefully I'll get that done soon. 

Felt Strawberries - Felt Food Cook-Along - Day 17

Don't these look good enough to eat!?!  My two-year-old certainly thinks so...he's popped a whole one in his mouth several times to show off.  (He knows better...he just thinks it's funny.)

I couldn't help but make these felt strawberries, when I saw them.  The tutorial is awesome, so I won't go through the whole thing again here.

Carrots - Felt Food Cook-Along - Day 16

This tutorial for felt carrots from "i make stuff" was linked up to our Felt Food Share a while back.  As soon as I saw it, I knew I would be making these!  They're super easy and her directions are GREAT!  There's even a printable pattern.

Sunny Side Up Eggs - Felt-Food Cook-Along Day 15

Scrambled eggs not your style?  You want that cheery sunny-side-up egg to greet you in the morning?  Here's now I made mine.

Mini-Canned Food - Looks Real! - Felt Food Cook-Along Day 14

I know, I know...I promised sunny-side up eggs today...and this is not sunny-side up eggs.  I'm tired, though, and realized I didn't get enough pictures...like the ones of the finished product...and I'm too lazy to go find it in the kids room, take more pics, and upload them.

It's okay though, because these mini-canned food cans are SO much cooler anyway and you can find plenty of links to sunny-side up eggs in our MckLinky here.  This is something I thought up myself, although it's brilliant and easy enough, that I'm sure a ton of other people out there have done something similar.  This is technically not felt food...as in there is no felt or sewing of any kind involved, but somet things are better made from other materials.

Felt Scrambled Eggs - Felt-Food Cook-Along - Day 13

I made the typical sunny-side-up eggs for the kids.  You see a lot of them on felt food posts.  As I was making them, Boy was interested in them and asked what they were.  I turned the question back to him and asked him what he thought.  He said, "A sun!"  We don't really eat sunny-side-up eggs at our house...around here they're all scrambled, so he didn't recognize them.  I figured we better whip up a scrambled version.  I didn't do a super exhaustive search for scrambled eggs, but in the searching I did do, I never found any...so as far as I know, this is a Helping Little Hands original.  If you'd rather have sunny-side-up eggs, there are a bunch of terrific people who linked up to our share MckLinky...or I'll be doing my own tutorial for them tomorrow.

So here we go for scrambled eggs...

What are pancakes without plenty of butter and syrup? - Felt-Food Cook-Along Day 12

Okay, this is one of those posts where it almost doesn't deserve it's own.  You all could figure out the butter and syrup yourself...but here they are anyway.  (At least I didn't give them each their own post, eh?)

For the butter, my original thought was to sew a square and turn it inside out, so the ends would be smooth.  The square was small enough, though, that I had to leave an entire side open, and it just wasn't going to work out so sew the fourth side and have it look right and still be square too.  Then I though, "It's butter...it's not worth this much  work."  So then I cut some squares, sewed around them, and called it good.

What's for Breakfast? Pancakes! - Felt Food Cook-Along - Day 11

(Be sure to check out the full list of felt food tutorials in the right sidebar. --------------------->

Every kid loves pancakes, right?  My kids ask for them for breakfast everyday (but most days they get oatmeal.)  Of course one of the fun things about making pancakes is making them in different shapes.  Dinosaurs are one of the favorites around here.

So when I made the kids' felt pancakes, I made some the traditinal circle shape, but then we had to make a snowman and dinosaur pancake too. (And let me tell you...the felt dinosaur looks worlds better than any "real" pancake dinosaurs that ever graced our griddle.)

Materials: light brown and/or cream felt, batting or fleece for filler, sewing machine, thread, scissors, needle

Muffin! Muffin! Who Wants a Muffin? - Felt-Food Cook-Along Day 10

I was going to do sliced bread next, but when I went back and looked there were very few pics.  So I'll need to make another one...and I kind of want to try out a machine version.  Anyway...today you get blueberry muffins (which I secretly feel pretty tricky for figuring out the blueberry part...the credit for the muffin part goes to Maggie at Smashed Peas and Carrots.

There are a lot of different felt cupcakes out there.  What really drew me to this method is that it used a cupcake paper as the pattern.  For the original, you can go see Maggie at Smashed Peas and Carrots. We were given a minature cupcake/muffin tin a while ago that I almost threw out because we don't usually cook on that scale.  It went into the growing pile of stuff to go into the kids' play kitchen though, and I thought I'd custom make the muffins to fit inside the tin.

If you're looking for a less real looking, but more educational version of cupcakes, be sure to check out my letter and number-matching cupcakes/muffins.

Felt Food Cook-Along Readers Showcase

Thanks so much to everyone who has linked up to share your fel food creations!  They're so great, I thought I'd take a break from showing off myself to show of your stuff...because it's even better.  Then to let you know what's coming, I'll share my secret to the blueberry muffins and later we'll be doing some bread and sandwich fixings, minature canned food (not felt, but sooo cool), bananas, carrots, strawberries, pancakes and fixings, and more (but not necessarily in that order.)  Please keep linking up your awesome projects down below!

I love how Miss Muffin on Muffins and More made these felt Valentines cookies.  She did some great detail work including using French knots for sprinkles.

Jamie at Pure Joy made a pizza with a ton of cool accessories.

Counting Coconuts has a great idea for combining felt cookies with numbers.

Angie on Treasures for Tots as a lot of great ideas for felt food...and a lot of them are No-Sew versions if you want something super simple.  I've successfully used instructions for several kinds of pasta and she makes some really awesome Pop Tarts.  I love how she used the beads for the sprinkles.  Be sure to check out all her links!

If you're looking for more no-sew options, Pink and Green Mama has a no-sew pizza to share...

MiaMoo Designs has a fun idea for Valentine's Day candy hearts.

You should also check out the cupcake on Camp Slop made to go with her daughter's Pinkalicious costume.  (You've got to click to see the costume.)  We love Pinkalicious around here and have done our own activities with it after being introduced to it by Christianne on Little Page Turners.

And last, but certainly not least..."i make stuff" has an awesome felt carrot tutorial. So awesome in fact, I'm almost done with four carrots made using her printable free pattern with detailed instructions, so they'll be getting their own post sometime soon.  If you go to her actual blog post, it has links to some other awesome felt food she's made.  Definitely worth looking around. 

Finally, keep those links coming!  If you've got felt food to share, we want to see it.  I'm reposting the same MckLinky here, so just keep adding links and when we have enough, I'll do another highlights post.

If you're looking for other places for felt food inspiration, Keeper of the Cheerios has a great list of free felt food patterns.  Felt-o-rama also has a great list, and One Pretty Thing just had a Felt Food Round-Up (featuring some of my stuff...wow!  I feel so famous. :)  Rachel on One Pretty Thing has also done some felt food round-ups in the past, so be sure to look back at her archives.

Moving on to Fajitas - Chicken Pieces/Nuggets - Felt-Food Cook-Along Day 8

If you're baking along with us, we finished our pizzas yesterday, so now we'll move on to fajitas. 

The good news is you're mostly done because we'll use a lot of our red and green bell peppers, shredded cheese, and onions from the pizza, and since we added that wire to the pizza crust, you've already got your tortilla.  What are we missing? Chicken pieces!  Even though I made these be to chicken pieces for fajitas, everyone who sees them thinks they're chicken nuggets, so they can do double duty.

These are really easy...and you could probably figure them out yourself, but here are the directions anyway.

Materials: Brown felt, needle and thread, sewing machine optional, stuffing or felt scraps cut up.

Cut out a brown blob shape free-hand.  I just cut out one side, sewed around the edges, leaving an opening, and trimmed the second side.

Then, I turned them inside out.  Stuffed them with snipped up felt scraps, and hand-sewed the opening shut.

If you want to use them as chicken nuggets, you can make ketchup, mustard or other dipping sauce the same way we made the pizza sauce, but on a smaller scale.

Fajitas sound good for dinner?  Check out my mom's recipe for my favorite (and low-fat) fajitas from my Frugal Food Friday Post on The Skinny.

If you're just now joining us, the links to other felt food tutorials I've done are at the top of the right side bar.  Also, if you've made some felt food of your own, be sure to share your link here, and grab a button to let other people join in on the fun!

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