Play Eats: Make some food

These cherries are super easy to make. The original idea is courtesy of Catherine Hug of Hyggelig. Instead of the rope, we used brown pipe cleaners, cut them to size and sealed them in the holes of the wood beads with some hot glue. To make painting the beads easier, we stuck them on the ends of chopsticks and just painted half at a time. The tin is from Michael's and those are just stick-on letters. Super quick and easy project. My sister-in-law helped with making most of the play foods so the other part of that "we" is her. I do recommend tackling these projects with a friend, you'll get a lot more done and it's a fun way to spend the day.

Now these strawberries were a lot more difficult. The pattern can be found here. I was not about to do any hand-stitching out of sheer laziness so I added a seam allowance to the whole thing and used the sewing machine to create the shape. My sister-in-law and I both stuffed them and closed up the top (by hand, there was no other way) and I hot glued on the leafy top.

I think the tiny polka dot print is what really makes these work. It's from Jo Ann's. Oh, and we just cut the tops freehand so they would look more realistic. That's green fleece.

And don't forget, you can reuse your container from the grocery store for some realism (although I think blueberries or tomatoes came in this). Now, if only we can find the rogue strawberry that's been missing since Christmas...

These tea bags were one of the most difficult play foods to make but certainly worth the effort. I stole the idea from my amazing friend Nikole of A Happy Nest.

I used some muslin I keep around for well, muslins (test garments), and cut up some Beatrix Potter scrapbook paper to make the tags. What was difficult was folding the tops in and stitching them up so they look nice and neat. We filled them with quinoa but I think lentils would work better. They are bigger so you won't have to worry about them spilling out if your sewing is crap. We were thinking it would be nice and fragrant to put some actual tea in each bag but I had already finished them by then.

The little tin is something my sister in law picked up at Ikea and more sticker letters for the top.

Finally for today, some peanut butter and jelly. My mother in law made these. She said they are just a simple single crochet and she reduced and increased whenever it felt right. Each one takes less than 20 minutes. I just traced a piece of our play bread and asked her to do whatever she wanted. These have yet to be used as peanut butter or jelly though. Z likes to put them in the blender, in her tea cups, on the pizza...