Felted play mat fun

It's cold outside and we made the most delicious egg noodle soup today. Cleo mixed the eggs and flour and rolled the noodles out all by herself. She cut them too, which is why we had a big mix of sizes and shapes. While the soup was cooking, we worked on our felted play mats. I have been really inspired by the recent issue of Living Crafts but we made our play mats using the pre-made felt sheets and the Clover needle felting tools.

You can see we did tiny streams, bushes and bridges. Trolls can live under the bridges and we even put a few fish in one of the streams. Cleo did a lot of felting on hers, Nora did too but I took all the needles out of the Clover tool and she just went crazy pressing it into the felt mat, the floor, her sister. She loved it. My husband walked into the room and said "Um, I am pretty sure you did something to that to make it o.k. for my nineteen-month-old to use it on the couch, right?" He's come a long way.

When you felt images like this onto a sheet you use just little bits of the roving. It is very economical. Also, as a good friend told me you just can't make anything ugly with wool. It somehow always looks good when you are done.


































How did we make those fabulous egg noodles? Here's the recipe. No measurements, don't freak out, you just can't mess these up.

beat two eggs until mixed

add enough flour to make a ball of dough (stir it with a big wooden spoon and if you want to be just like Cleo talk a lot about how we don't eat raw eggs but raccoons do)

divide the ball into four equal dough balls, roll in flour

put a dough ball onto a floured table, roll out until it's about 1/4 an inch thick and cut into strips with a table knife

put all the cut noodles into some broth cooked with celery, carrots, corn, spinach, onions and lots of garlic, add salt to taste and cook for 10 minutes

YUM!

NOTE: as of 12/20/2008 we no longer sell these felt sheets. Sorry, they were swell but we had to import them in giant quantities from the Kingdom of Nepal and they just didn't sell very well. We no longer have any in stock. Try sheet felt from high-quality upholstery stores.