Back To Basics~Homemade Happiness

{I am a woman on a mission. A mission to declutter our home and our lives. To make more and buy less. To find the things we truly love in life and hold onto them. A mission to get back to basics. The progress is slow as I work full time (at home) and have a husband and baby to care for. However, what we have accomplished has made a great improvement in our lives.}

Mushroom Seats~

One of the main reasons I love doing daycare and being a mama is because, at times, I myself still feel like a child. I feel the magic and sense the wonder and I long for them to also. It is because of this that I try to make life enchanting, in every way possible. From the books we read, to the walks we take, to the toys with which we play. My mama and I are always coming up with new ways to make things more enchanting. We sometimes come up with these ideas together and sometimes we come up with them on our own. Either way, we almost always agree with each other's ideas and try our best to implement them into our life.

While building a set of bunk beds (another post for another time), I realized that the large foam mattress pad would make our mattress too tall for the top bunk and would have to be taken off. Now I had a huge foam mattress pad just siting in my hall, waiting for me to do something with it. I ended up cutting about four feet off and using it underneath Bunny's bed to raise it up to the same level as our bed (once again, another post for another time). Then I had about two by four feet of thick foam pad and nothing to do with it.

Then one day on a nature walk, we were looking at some mushrooms.  I was pointing out that they looked like little stools. I began to imagine fairies sitting on them (part of the whole feeling like a child thing). Suddenly I knew how I would use the foam. I decided to make mushroom seats.

1. I bought one yard of yellow and one yard of red fleece and 1/2 yard of white felt (I ended up with some of each left over). I cut the foam pad into three different sized circles, and covered them with the fleece (pinning it to the back). Then I cut out small circles of felt using cups for a template. I stitched the felt onto the fleece and now had the tops of my mushroom seats.

2. The next part I had Hubs' help for the design and labor. Looking back, I should have done this step first. He cut three circles of scrap plywood to fit one inch smaller than the three mushroom tops (so there was a little over hang). We then glued the plywood to the bottom of the foam (after removing the pins and fabric). And re-streatched the fleece over the foam and the wood and glued and stapled it to the bottom.

  

You could choose to leave your mushroom

seats this way and use tham as floor pillows.

3. For the bottoms Hubs found a branch/log wide enough to fit about even with the plywood circles. He cut them in three different thicknesses 4, 5, and 6 inches (to staggar the heights). He then drilled about half way through the wood with a large driil bit (this made it thin enough for screws to go through). Next, he attached the stump part to the mushroom's top using wood glue and screws. We set them upright, gave them a quick clean up and fluff, and we had three little mushroom seats for the children.

 

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Eco-Kids Tuesday