home made {ballerina} bird feeder
We spent our holidays visiting family on the east coast; there were festivities, friends, merriment, and germs. The little miss picked up a virus which made for a very sad new year's celebration. It's amazing to think that something so cute can be so germy and contagious. The cold has spread to everyone and we are a bit house bound at the moment. I'm going a little stir crazy.
It's been difficult mustering up the energy to play house with Clementine, which is what she always wants to do. "Be the mama!" she insists. "Okay," I respond picking up the mama doll, "Mama is very tired and she's going to lie down in bed."
"No! Be the mama!" she demands again.
I needed to find an alternative that didn't involve lying on the floor which made me want to sleep.
What to do, what to do?
A bird feeder!
The old fashioned kind with a pine cone and peanut butter (ah, enter a nostalgic sigh!) would be a fun activity and then we could watch for birds after; bird watching is one of my favorite things to do upstate.
I googled and found all sorts of home made bird feeder ideas. Stringing cheerios on a pipe cleaner was the easiest option, but then I found the recycled toilet paper roll. Hmmm, maybe we could combine all three.
So we did.
It didn't start out with the intention of being a ballerina. I had grabbed a roll of pink crepe paper and once we strung our cheerios on the pipe cleaner, an activity that was VERY fun for the little miss and she thought it was really cool that birds would enjoy eating the same cereal as she did, and kind of assembled all of the things together I realized that it looked a lot like a ballerina; a very tall, long waisted, dangly, skinny legged ballerina. Blame it on the cold medicine, but it's pretty darn funny.
The heart was a last minute addition, maybe it would make a good home made valentine gift!
Click on the pictures below to see the step by step. It's really simple. You could adjust it to fit the needs of whatever supplies you happen to have on hand. If you have peanut allergies you can use crisco or some other vegetable shortening. I used both just to see, and they both worked great.
We used:
empty toilet paper roll
pine cone that we found in the yard
4 pipe cleaners
hole puncher
crepe paper
scissors
hot glue (for the crepe paper skirt and to hold the pine cone in place inside the tube)
peanut butter/ crisco
bird seed
construction paper heart
The birds seem to like it and Clementine squealed with delight to see them eating the seeds off our creation!
