All Very Mysterious

With the Bunny Party barely over, we're already done prepping for the next birthday bash.

Here's a clue:

(Yes - after our unforgivable omission at the last party, we made sure to invite Bunny to this one).

Time Waster

So just to avoid going to bed last night, I was on FB. And found this test for right- and left- brainedness that one of my friends took. So I took it, too. Very silly, especially when one is already half asleep and cannot follow instructions. 

Apparently, I am not very creative, imaginative or artistic. Instead, I am, according to this 30 second test, rational and logical. And all you people (including me) who thought I was insane were wrong. Maybe I should shut down this craft blog forever and start one all about Pythagoras theorem discussions and fractals and matrices and vectors and stuff like that.

Or I could launch my own theory: the human brain has four lobes:

And anyone can utilize any or all of their lobes at any time they like, and any combination thereof counts as equal lunacy superior.

Ridiculously Teeny Wooden Treats

It all started when we got our windows replaced.

You know how it is with home improvement phases, right? It's never just the garage door, or the siding, or the windows, or whatever. I mean, for years, the house stays in exactly the same state of derelict (but blissful) status quo, and then one day, the furnace dies or something equally innocuous and you have it repaired and immediately, the scales fall from your eyes as the proverbial can of worms gets violently wrenched open. How did you never notice the foyer chandelier was so totally last century? Or that the deck boards need staining? Or that the backyard should've been relandscaped four summers ago? And that it's about time to also repave the front path, or also need to remodel the kitchen, or also makeover the entire house, really?

Or maybe it's just me.

So, as I was saying, we had some home improvement work done this past fortnight. Which involved the necessary but low-key moving of furniture from the affected sites to temporary holding areas. Which suddenly inspired me to paint the guest room. Which required a visit (or five) to the Home Depot to investigate paint colors. Which led to the children wandering the aisles, looking for craft supplies (they believe there is no store on the planet in which they cannot find craft supplies).

Which they found

and begged me to purchase, since (in Kate's words), "They're so cute 

and look like cakes 

and can we paint them 

for the Barbies?"

And we also dug into my Wooden Bits And Bobs stash, left over from my wooden confectionery days, and found discs to make pies,

(clockwise from top right: cherry, cinnamon cream, blueberry, cinnamon chocolate, and lemon)

plates and platters.

And then, an hour into the painting, Emily came to me, saying she wanted to make a cake stand with a wooden disc and some ball feet.

Which spun some mental gears to produce, in addition to her stand, a tiered display thingy, using more discs, a couple of dowel pins and nails.

Which caused someone (can't remember who) to suggest a muffin baking tray.

Which seemed completely do-able even though we have only the most rustic of tools.

Which continued as the Next Day's Follow-Up Project, wherein a(nother) trip to T.H.D. was needed to buy some flat trim into which holes were drilled with a 1/2" spade bit.

Which we cut into short pieces and glued together

to make a muffin tin.

Which, along with the tiered stand, 

 we then painted on Day #3.

Which all then became props 

in a photoshoot on the deck, as our obligatory Outdoor Time for the day, since up till that point, we'd been holed indoors, hunched over the kitchen table, painting.

I never got around to painting the guest room, incidentally.

(C'mon - admit it: you saw that coming.)

Bunny Party: Hutches

I am ashamed to say that, again, we had no cardboard at this party :( 
It is very sad. 
However, I used its closest substitute: poster board, out of which we made these little gabled houses for our party guests to transport their bunnies home in.

I'd have preferred to have been able to buy them instead of making them, just to save the time, but there were none to buy in the size and limited quantity that I wanted. So I bought poster board for 50 cents apiece and cut each into house parts as shown.

The windows were cut out with my old Fiskars freehand cutting tool and accompanying templates.

Then the assembling began.
First, the roofless house was put together. The necessary fold lines were scored, and the sides and flaps folded and glued.

One half of the roof went on next.

This roof-half was glued in place to the upper flaps of the house.

The other roof-half was only attached at its bottom edge, 

so that it could open 

and close for a cover.

The little half-moon cutaway flap folds over to hold it shut,

creating handles in the process, for carrying. 

I spent a day or two leisurely cutting out and assembling more of these little houses. A little time-consuming (hence my preference to always buy over making) but nowhere as insane as, say, mass-sewing for parties, which almost always takes weeks. 

They look like birdhouses in this view! Hm. Must file idea away for future bird-watching-type party themes.

We made these houses in white posterboard so the guests could decorate them on the party day. For today's pre-party photoshoot, the kids and I used washi tape and pens to pretty up one of the houses, 

and invited one of the bunnies to check it out.

On the day of the party, we supplied markers and stickers,

and the kids spent a long time personalizing their bunny hutches, 

while visiting with each other. 

Here are the ones my kids did. I found it hilarious that the names they - and the other girl guests - picked were variants of Fluff, Snow, and Rose,

whereas the boys in attendance picked names like "Blood" and "Rage" (if I remember right). The incongruence cracks me up. Is this how boys think? I've been a mom of daughters for so long that I automatically assume everyone lives in a pink-purple-sparkle-rainbow world like we do. 

And that rounds up the Bunny Party Behind-the-Scenes tour. I'll update the original Bunny Party post with links to all these individual-elements posts so you can get to them from that one place.