Dol towers

Throwback Thursday

With BBC's dohl to plan, I thought I'd write a post about Koala's dohl preparations.

For her dohl, I wanted to have dohl towers for the pictures. But since we don't live in a city with a large Korean population, there's nowhere nearby where we can rent or buy the towers. So I had to make them. 

I found a couple websites on Pinterest that showed how to make the towers. Some used paper towel rolls but I didn't really like that because 1) I thought it was a waste of paper towels and 2) I thought it was too skinny for the tower. I ended up finding this website that used a concrete pouring tube. The tube is about 4 feet tall. I used a knife to cut it down into four towers (so about 1 foot each.) 

I printed in out a paper that said '축돌' and glued it to the first tower. 

Then I started the process of gluing beans onto the tower with a glue gun. 

Work in progress 

One side done: the rest of the tower was just white beans 

The finished product: front and back

Second tower: Year of the black Dragon 

Koala was born the year of the black dragon so I wanted to have one tower that had a dragon on it. I saw towers on Etsy and Google that were different colors that looked nice. But they sold for over $80 which I thought was pretty expensive (little did I know!) 

lol here's my hand drawn template of what I wanted the tower to look like using white beans, black beans, and pink jelly belly's that I picked up at a local candy store. 

Experimenting with the eyes

The tail 

The finished front and back 

On the top I put a small heart

Third tower: 

Chevron was big back then so I decided to make a chevron tower. I used white mentos and pink ones from their tropical flavor pack.

Three finished towers 

Fourth tower: Bubblegum tower

I bought white gumballs and dark pink and light pink ones and made a striped bubble gum tower. 

My advice is to start from the bottom and go up. Somehow the gumballs don't line up at the top so if you try to stand the tower on it, it wobbles (if that makes sense). 

For the last row you kind of have to squish the gumballs in to fit.

The top isn't as pretty but looks ok.

In the end, the towers were not at all cheap! The gumballs, pink mentos and the jelly bellys cost a lot! I guess if you're only doing black and white, the beans aren't that expensive but if you want to have color, it can get costly. It was definitely my labor of love for the party! 

Setting up the table (this isn't everything but is the best pic I have of the towers). 

Snowman Kit

A while ago, I found this snowman making kit at Bed Bath and Beyond. It had all the pieces for a snowman- scarf, wood pegs for buttons, a nose, eyes, and mouth and it came in a cute wooden box. 

After the first snowfall, Koala had been asking to make a snowman but we didn't get enough snow.
I wanted her to have a snowman kit since it was cute and had everything needed but I couldn't find it in the store. I found some kits on Amazon but none of them came in a cute wooden box. I ended up getting this one. There were cheaper ones made of plastic but I liked this one because it was wood. 

I still wanted a box to store it in so I decided to make one. I searched 'wooden box' on Amazon and found this one. 

 I checked the measurements of the box to the measurements of the snowman kit and it was a perfect match. 

I went to Michael's and bought blue and white acrylic paint and a paintbrush kit (seemed a better deal than buying two paintbrushes separately). 

The wooden box and paints 

Originally, I was going to paint it myself and surprise Koala with it when we went to make a snowman. But then I decided that she would have a lot of fun decorating the box. 

I mixed some white and blue paint together to get a lighter blue and spread out the splat mat and put a painting smock on Koala. She was so excited to get to work on a project with me. 

I let her start off painting the box and I helped her with the sides. 

I wanted to have a snowman on the top of the box & was going to draw it. But when I saw how much fun she was having, I thought maybe she could draw a snowman. While the box dried, we practiced drawing snowmen and I realized it would be too hard for her to paint one on such a small area. 

I thought maybe an alternative could be a handprint snowman so I searched Pinterest for inspiration. There were some ideas where each finger on the handprint was a snowman but I didn't really like the way it looked. Then I came across a couple pins where the footprint was made into a snowman and it seemed like a perfect idea for the box. 

When the blue paint dried, I had Koala and BBC put their footprints on the box. 

When that dried, I took sharpies and drew on the details of the snowmen and wrote 'Snowman Kit' on it along with their names, age and the date under their footprint. 

It came out even cuter than I expected!

And everything from the kit fit perfectly in the box. 

Now we're all set to play in the snow and make a snowman!

***edit***

We finally got to use our snowman kit!

Quiet book: Do you wanna build a snowman?

Koala loves her Hello Kitty dress up page so much that I wanted to make her another page that was similar. 

Since it was cold and Koala loves snowmen, I looked up some snowman quiet book pages. There were a couple pages I modeled this 'build a snowman' page from but this was the only link that still worked. 

I wanted to add Olaf from Frozen to the page so it could be a 'Do you wanna build a snowman?' page. 

I found a picture of Olaf to trace and made this felt version that I sewed down. I put a little stuffing in between the background and Olaf's belly to make him look a little plump. 

I originally thought of making the pieces for Olaf for Koala to build but decided against that since it wouldn't give much of a variety. 

Instead, I put Olaf on the left side of the page and left space to build the snowman. 

For the background, I used blue stuff felt that I had bought and white regular felt for the back hill. 

I made the front hill into pockets to hold the snowman pieces and put pellon to reinforce the white felt so that it would be sturdier. I sewed it to the page leaving the top open and putting two vertical lines to create 3 pockets. Then I started stitching the words on the hill. In retrospect, I should have sewn the words on the front pocket BEFORE sewing it to the page lol! And I probably should have used a template or written it on first. It came out kinda crooked. 

I added three snaps for the snowman. This time I opted to use snaps instead of Velcro because it looked nicer and also because I've seen how Velcro can wear out the background felt. The snaps are still hard for Koala to put on by herself but it works. 

I contemplated making different noses, eyes etc for the face but decided against it because the pieces would be too small. Instead, I glued two googly eyes, made a carrot nose from felt and stitched a smile onto a small circle

I made two different bodies. 

One short body on the left and two circles on the right.

For the accessories, there are:

1 set of arms with blue mittens

2 scarves- a red scarf and a blue bandana

3 hats- top hat, beanie and a cowboy hat

The finished product:

So, do YOU wanna build a snowman?

Blog hiatus

It's been a while since my last blog post. I had a blog post started about my latest project- a playmat for Koala to play on that makes for easy clean up but have been hesitant to post it. 

Some of you may have remembered that I recently chronicled how I made a sleep sack for BBC in one of my last blog posts. 

Recently, I was contacted by the owner of the product and was told to take my blog post down because my blog post 'more importantly, does not comply with the CPSC standards and testing for baby sleepwear.' In not so many words she stated that she would pursue legal action and contact the CPSC if I did not take my blog post down (which I did take down). 

Honestly, I would have taken my blog post down if she had asked me nicely and didn't threaten legal action and I probably would have stayed a fan of the company (no longer a fan- I will never buy or promote this product ever again. I used to tell my new mommy friends about it and how I saw it on TV but I won't be doing that anymore.) 

After deleting the post, I thought it was ridiculous that she tried to act as if her main concern was child safety and that she threatened to contact the CPSC about it. It's not like I'm reproducing the sleep sack and selling them to people. I just made my own version for my own personal use at home.

In reality, she was upset that rather than buy her product, I made my own and the thought that my blog post gave the few people the idea of making their own rather than buying her product made her upset. I get it- she's protecting her company and I don't blame her. I just think she shouldn't have tried to play it off as though her main concern was that I'm not CPSC compliant rather than her loss of potential profits. 

Happy Baekil BBC!

Recently, we celebrated BBC's Baekil (백일-100 day). 

A Baekil is a Korean tradition celebrating the 100th day of a newborn's life. Back in the day when the survival rate was low, they celebrated a baby's birth after 100 days. I also heard that the time in the womb +100 days is roughly a year. (If the baby is not early or late).

When I was searching Pinterest for party theme ideas, a mustache & bow tie themes kept popping up for boy themes. I thought it was cute so I decided to do a mustache/bow tie theme with navy and orange colors. 

I went to Tiny Prints where I found the perfect invitation for a mustache themed party. It was for a 1st birthday so I had to adjust the picture so that it said '100 days' instead of 'one.'

The original picture and the edited version

Since it was a bow tie/mustache theme, I made BBC an orange bow tie.

I don't know if it was the material or because I've made a couple, but this bow tie was a lot easier to make than the previous ones. 

To go with the mustache theme, I made mustache shaped brownies, mini mustache shaped brownie bites (brownies dipped in chocolate), and crunchy Buckeyes (pictured below on the top left).

This was the Baekil table.

My friend made the banner and the bunting for the cake and we ordered the dduk (rice cake).

I had waited until the last minute to put together the party so the final products didn't come out as nicely as they could have if I hadn't been rushing. 

The colors of the party were blue and orange so I made a blue velvet cake as well as blue velvet cake pops with orange chocolate and blue velvet mini cupcakes with a mustache sprinkle on top. I wanted to decorate the cake pops but ran out of time. 

Pictured above: drink containers with straws and mustaches, the dduk cake, some of the desserts, the food table and the cake.

I also made fruit skewers that had '100' as well as a couple with rose strawberries and mustaches. I didn't get a good picture of the roses or mustaches but you get the idea from the picture below. 

This was the drink table with plates and the napkins/forks.

My sister printed up vinyl mustaches to put on the drink containers. 

Detailed pics

I like how everything turned out considering I felt like the party was just thrown together! Maybe I'll consider the mustache theme for BBC's dohl too!