something i made (finally!)

this year for christmas, my sister suggested that her son might enjoy having a play kitchen.  their house is very small, so whatever kitchen he got needed to be very small, compact, and easy to put away or get out to play with.  i sent her a few ideas i’d found online and she showed them to my nephew.  he chose this one.  she bemoaned the fact that it didn’t even have knobs (which is, apparently to her, the most fun part of a stove!), so this is what i came up with:

i filled it with cooking toys from the dig & save (i think some of them were actually cooking pots, but they were very tiny!), the co-op (cute tiny wooden utensils!), and a set of wooden food from cost plus.  my mom contributed some play-size tupperware she had in the gift stash at her house and we’ve got a pretty well-stocked “kitchen” that can be added to over the years if his interest in it continues.

the knobs were wooden wheels from the hardware store, attached with wooden pegs (from the same display of pre-cut wood shapes at the hardware store) and another smaller wheel on the inside.  i melted the holes in the plastic with a flame-heated nail and made the holes just barely big enough to accommodate the peg so that the knob wouldn’t be too wobbly.  the burners were cut from red paper and secured to the inside bottom of the box with a layer of clear contact paper.

the red drawstring bag was added later to hold all of the little wooden food pieces after it became apparent that they might be the weakest link in getting the kitchen all cleaned up and tidy.  i made it there from some fabric in my mom’s stash.  my nephew helped me pick out the fabric and watched me sew it.  all-in-all, an easy-peasy, very inexpensive gift that he seemed to enjoy playing with while we were there.

but i still think that he liked the shirt i made for him even more.  i made monster t-shirts for all of my family members and he just loooooved his.

although for some unknown reason, he insisted on calling is his “baseball shirt.”  such a cutie.