Caftan cool
Caftan-lover like myself? Well… look no further than Australian bohemian-inspired webshop Rock My Horse because their caftans are AMAZINGLY gorgeous! At this time of the year (it’s Summer here folks) my kids are in and out of pools and sprinkler systems every 2 minutes and running around in next to nothing. Caftans are the coolest, most versatile piece of summer clothing to throw on in between swimming sessions, for any activity. And trust me, these are the coolest I have ever seen… especially if you are partial to paisley prints (which I adore). They are all hand embroidered, made of the finest, softest cotton and their lovely range extends to include boys, girls, babies and even us ladies. So do have a look… even if it is snowing outside and you are shivering to the bone because before you know it the sun will be shining and you will be bikini-clad and heading off to the beach!!
ps. Rock My Horse is now having a Christmas sale with 25% off. They will ship world-wide. Don’t you just love the internet?
- Sara
Happy 2011!
Can you believe it’s 2011? It sounds like the future!
We wish you a very happy and healthy New Year…
Love, the girls from Babyccino Kids
Image from here
Merry Christmas!
Hope you all have a wonderful and warm Christmas…
Love,
the girls from Babyccino Kids
Last Minute Christmas Craft — wall panels
These wall panels were quickly made with my kids — just using pieces of an old sheet, some fabric scraps and Fabric Mod Podge. I did the cutting for my 3-year old, but my 5-year-old was able to do everything herself! After drying we glued the sheet around a piece of cardboard and voila, some stylish Christmas deco for on the sideboard! Of course a similar thing can be made with pieces of paper…
xxx Esther
Meileg Advent Calendar
I saw this Maileg Advent Calendar in Elias & Grace the other day and I just couldn’t resist. It’s so cute! I love that each day has a little pocket for a tiny treat to go inside. And I also love the idea of using the same advent calendar year after year — it will become one of those things the kids will remember forever. Maileg also makes the most beautiful Christmas decorations — their ornaments are my favourite!
-Courtney
p.s. I’m also planning on doing Mo’s Christmas Book Advent Calendar idea as well! Bring on the holidays!
ONE YEAR AGO WE WROTE ABOUT:
• Free Download from Homemade Happiness — for all of you!• Ver de Terre outdoor wear
Bloesem Gift Guide 2010
Irene, the creative wonder-woman behind one of our favourite stops on the web, Bloesem Kids, asked us to contribute to her yearly Gift Guide. Check out nine of our favourite ideas for fun gifts!!
ONE YEAR AGO WE WROTE ABOUT:
• Cute candle holders• Babyccino Birthday – Michela’s Top 5
• Babyccino 2nd birthday!
Weekend get-away: Berlin
This week’s get-away is from one of my favourite cities, Berlin, which I cannot wait to go visit with my kids. Rumour has it that it is one of the most child-friendly cities in Europe. Judith is a freelance writer who loves to travel. She is also a mother of two (a 5 and a 3-year-old) and long time resident of Berlin. She has become an expert in seeking out Berlin’s child-friendly hotspots and was kind enough to share her tips with us. (more…)
Personalized Halloween party bags
I can’t believe we’re well into October already! And Halloween is around the corner… Here in the UK, Halloween gets nowhere near the amount of attention as it does in America, and a ‘Halloween party’ is a bit of a novelty… but the American in me loves the idea (the costumes, the candy, the pumpkins!).
If you do happen to be planning a festive party, check out these personalized Halloween drawstring bags and party invitations from Perideau Designs. How cute are they?!
-Courtney
ONE YEAR AGO WE WROTE ABOUT:
• Parlour and board games — endless family fun!• Turn an old shirt into a girl’s tunic
• Eating seasonally and simply
I-Escape
I-Escape is is my absolute favourite hotel website. It has a great selections of hotels, apartments and guest houses all over the world. I love the fact that the hotels are not chosen on the basis of luxury and price, but solely on the basis of charm. Browsing through the accomodation pages makes me want to literally pack up our bags and jet off to an idylic retreat somewhere on a beach.
I especially like that there is a child-friendly search option, with great recommendations for places all over the world, be it a beautiful appartment in the centre of Paris, a farm in Portugal or a beach bungalow in Sri Lanka.
- Emilie
Summer Holidays Must-Haves
I am just about to go away on holiday for the next few weeks. I read this article in the Guardian and had to laugh… a lot of it rang so true. I thought I was the only person in the whole world who got disproportionately annoyed by my fellow passengers resting their elbows on “my” armrest on a plane. Summer holidays are so much fun but I am not a big fan of the packing, preparation and traveling, especially with kids. This time I am going away by car which is bliss. I get to take so many more extras…
So my main must-have holiday items this year are: (more…)
Weekend Get-away: Barcelona
To introduce our new weekend getaway feature, here is our first post from Marta in Barcelona. Barcelona is one of my favourite Mediterranean cities. It has the perfect mixture of culture, beauty, beach life and beautiful weather. It always strikes me as such a relaxed city that is easy to explore and perfect to visit ‘en famille’.
Whilst searching for someone with inside info about visiting Barcelona with kids I remembered Marta. Marta lives with her husband and little son in the wonderful Gracia part of Barcelona. She is a professional translator and also a blogger. Her blog English in Barna, is about life in Barcelona, her blog A Bilingual Bébé gives tips to Spanish speaking parents on how to raise their child bilingually, and finally she also blogs for the international organisation Pocket Cultures. All in all Marta is the perfect person to start off our new feature. I do hope you enjoy discovering Barcelona through her post. And please do leave us any comments or recommendations you have about Barcelona. The more ideas the merrier… (more…)
The Golden Egg Book
The Golden Egg Book was only recently translated to Dutch and I picked it up from the bookshop the other day as a nice Easter present for my kids. It’s about a little bunny who finds an egg and wonders what’s inside…
Written by the famous Margareth Wise Brown with beautiful illustrations from the equally famous Leonard Wisegard, it’s a typical ‘Golden Book’. (Available at Amazon US or UK.)
I love Golden Books. I still have my own old copies — my favourite was ‘Katie the Kitten’ about a little cat who slept in a hat in the hallway. I think it’s out of print in English now, but in Dutch it’s still available.
Unfortunately most of my old Golden Books are falling apart — does anyone have a tip for how to repair them without using ugly duct tape?
And tell me — what was, or is, your favourite Golden Book?
xxx Esther
Bunny Finger Puppets
Aren’t these bunny finger puppets just darling? Cute for your kids’ Easter basket, or just for a bit of creative springtime play. And easy to make too… even for sewing novices like myself (no sewing machine required).
Molly at The Purl Bee gives a step-by-step tutorial on how to make these little felt bunnies, including a printable pdf of the bunny template. How easy is that?
I think I’m going to give it a go. Just have to pick up some cute felt…
-Courtney
p.s. Thanks to Sarah for the tip.
Decorating Easter Eggs
Last week I got inspired by the lovely hand-painted Easter eggs by Laikonik that I saw on the Famile Summerbelle website. I had visions of sitting around the kitchen table with my kids producing one egg gem after another and hanging them all over the flat… But turns out fantasy and reality could not have been any different — our egg painting experience was a complete bust!
Right from the start I came across some barriers: most eggs in France are not white but brown, so it is really hard to paint them and get a nice colour. It is also impossible to find those little tablets you dye eggs with over here! But I was not going to be deterred but such minor details, so I started looking up natural ways of dying eggs. I came across loads of different suggestions, including: onion peel, rose petals and spinach which, according to the internet, all give eggs wonderful, delicate colours. I got very excited and raided my vegetable box. (more…)
Egg Heads
Last Easter we decided to make some Egg Heads with the mustard & cress seeds we got in our lunchbox from Kew Gardens. Now I’m not in any way saying this was an innovative idea — most of you probably grew some of these little men/women yourself as children. But for some reason my childhood missed this particular activity… something I now plan to take up with my Mum and Dad as it is a reaallllllly cool thing to do!
I am not the slightest bit green-fingered and manage to kill all plants/greenery in my care (even cacti have a hard time living in our house and my husband doesn’t understand why I still buy herbs in pots as they always die within days), but mustard and cress are stubborn little plants and grow despite a lack of due care and attention. And they grow very quickly so you see results on a daily basis — appealing to my impatient nature.
So if you never made egg-creatures as a child then I urge you to take this eggcellent (terrible – I know!) holiday as an opportunity to redeem your deprived childhood just as I did. Your kids will love it too! Here’s how to make them: (more…)
Personalised Party Bags
Another birthday party — I am feeling quite the party planner at the moment. My two favourite parts of the planning process are the cake (I love baking and eating!) and the party bags. I always set myself a budget per bag and try to stretch it as far as possible. My current thing is to try and make the bags themselves part of the gift, something to reuse. I was really lucky that I could utilise the post-Christmas sales to find sweet little wicker baskets for my daughter’s birthday but my son’s birthday required a bit more imagination.
In my search for inspiration I stumbled upon the Carrier Bag Shop and found these cotton shopping bags, which were less then 50p each (when buying 25). An idea was formed. Having fixed my printer the day before (it was broken for over a year and I finally found a small toy had been inserted deep into the feed tray – grrrrr!) I remembered some HP Iron-on Transfer printer paper I had bought ages ago and never tried out. I just chose a fun font (Rosewood std for any Mac users) and bright colours and typed the name of each child as big as I could so it would stretch across the length of the page. Then I flipped the image (it is important to do this so when it is transferred it reads the right way round) and printed. Then all that had to be done was to iron it on — as simple as that.
I was really pleased with the results and each child got their own personalised bag for under a £1.
p.s. Love these stripy bags from Carrier bag Shop — so chirpy to make up little treat bags!
Mo. x
House swapping
Over the summer break I spent a bit of time decorating my home. (No, the pic above is not of my place — but somewhere I might now be able to stay.) One of the reasons was that I wanted to take some photos so I could list it on a house swap website.
We featured an article on house swapping a couple of years ago in the magazine where I work. It seemed like a great idea. But I always wondered — is it too good to be true?
Well, I believe that you should “give it a go” — as Aussies like to say. So I took the plunge and listed with two sites. Creative Caravan tags itself as “Craiglist for Creatives” — the idea being that you can swap with like-minded people.
The other website is Homelink. I did a bit of research and was attracted to this one because there is strong membership within Australia so if I want to take a trip to Byron Bay or Tasmania then I can swap with people who live there… as well as people in Italy. And within a week of listing I got a message from someone wanting to swap in Martinique!
- Natalie
Some old Valentine favourites
Courtney gave us her recipe for sugar cookies a while ago, and it’s truly great. What else to make for Valentines Day than these beautiful, yummy, pink and red hearts? I’m surely making a batch today so the glazing will be perfectly dry tomorrow.
If you’re in the mood for a laugh, let me remind you of the ‘romantic evening‘ my husband and I hoped for two years ago. If you’re planning something similar for tomorrow, make sure you won’t be disturbed!
And do you remember the heart-shaped paper clips that we used to make as children and Michela wrote about last year? I think my daughter would love to make some to decorate her drawings…
xxx Esther
Easy and Sweet Valentines Decoration
If you have a sewing machine, this Valentines decoration is easily made, and my kids really liked the project!
Just potato-stamp hearts on paper; I used recycled paper but you can use any sort really, even newspaper. No need to be perfect here, my 2-year-old had quite some production going. Let the paint dry and cut the hearts out. Again, slightly outside the outline of the stamp is fine, my 4-year-old girl was perfectly capable of doing it all herself! How typical for this age…
My machine had black thread in it and I didn’t bother changing it. I think it actually looks quite nice like this. Make sure to leave some thread at the ends for attaching!
My daughter’s bed looked lovely instantaneously! (The wallpaper bird is from Inke, more about that later.)
xxx Esther
P.S. Inspiration for this project came from Maya*Made
