The Librarian and The Soldier

Creativity strikes whenever it wants, like when you are sitting at lunch and see silicon cupcake liners and then your coworker mentions cupcakes as a prop for a puppet play.  At that moment everything fell together.  I decided then and there that I would find a way to use the silicone cupcake liners to make felt cupcakes. I already had all the felt and sewing thread I could want.  All I needed was a pattern and that was so difficult to find online.  So I made my own!   To make the pattern I took a paper cupcake liner and traced the top of it onto cardboard, then I cut down the side to the bottom and cut the bottom out and traced the side (it will be an arch) and the bottom also on cardboard.  Now I had the pattern I wanted. I LOVE double sided tape.  I used that to keep the cardboard on the felt as I cut it out.  You can use any color you can dream of for the cupcake, orange, cream, red, brown, pink.  All the popular flavor colors!  After everything was cut out I sewed the side togethe

Puppet shows are a wonderful way to add a little fun to any Story Time.  My library has a wonderful collection of puppets but we have to make our own props which can be so very much fun to do!  The first puppet props that I made were pies to go with the wonderful story "Ugly Pie" by Lisa Wheeler .   I looked all over Pinterest and the Internet to find a pattern for pie props and just could not find the right pattern so I made my own.  I started with a wide mouth jar lid and hot glued the lid to the ring.   I then cut strips of crust colored (tan) felt in various shapes, such as a scalloped edge or a straight edge.  I then hot glued those strips to the rim of the ring gathering the felt a bit to make it more crust like.   Then I cut a circle of felt in the color of my pie; orange for pumpkin, mauve for rhubarb, golden-yellow for honey, and brown for ugly pie.  These circles need to be a little bigger than the size of the lid.  I then stretched and rounded the center of

     One of the most important aspects of working in the Children's Department is Story Time!  Story Time is not just about reading stories to children, it is so very much more.  One of my favorite aspects is Flannel Stories!  My first flannel story pieces I made were community helper vehicles.         To start I found clip art of vehicles and printed them out in the sizes that I wanted.  Many of them I did freehand.  To cut them out, I used double sided tape to keep the template on the felt.  After the initial shape was cut out, I added the embellishments to each.  These embellishments can be made with smaller pieces of felt, beads, buttons, ribbon, fabric paint, really anything you can think of.  During this process I learned that children's scissors are really good at cutting felt, much better than adult scissors!      After everything was cut out and glued together with tacky glue (that stuff is AMAZING) I had to figure out rhymes to use with them.  I pieced a few rhy