You may remember Lou's little market: Sweet Lou's. She was pretty pleased with it, but she requested that we beef up our breakfast and special treat offerings. Current slogan: Sweet Lou's. Not just dinner. Also special treats.

Since doughnuts are the specialist breakfast treat, we started with those.

We obviously have two groups of doughnuts here. The bottoms ones, decorated by Miss Lou, are the "party" doughnuts. The others are mine, and are, sadly, not party doughnuts.

This was easy, takes up about a crafternoon, and can be turned into a fun kid-friendly project with a little prep work. Also, they're adorable.

Gather your Supplies

Yeah, it's pretty much that simple. And you may think we've jumped the shark with turning old socks into things, but hey, we wanted doughnuts. And I know from sock buns that socks make excellent doughnuts.

Also, we're green like that. So:

1. Unearth your collection of old or unmatched socks. Cut the toes off your sock, then roll the sock up - almost like you'd roll a pair, but just the one - until you have a doughnut shape. The longer athletic ones are best, because they're a bit thick, but even if you only have thin dress socks, you can make these by using two at a time. I found it best to make one thin dress sock into a doughnut, then thread another thin sock through the doughnut hole and roll it over the new doughnut. It created a nice, thick, delicious doughnutty shape.

2. Cover your doughnut socks with something more appealing. Ribbon, edging and yarn all worked well for us. Start off somewhere in the interior of your doughnut. You can either tie your material around the doughnut to get started - works best for yarn and thin ribbon - or you can hot glue the wider ribbon into place. Either way, once you have a stating point, wind your material around and around. Finish with another dab of hot glue to keep thing in place. (This actually isn't strictly necessary -- for one brown sock, we didn't cover it at all. But for the black socks, we did).

Note that the wider the material you use to wrap around the doughnut, the less of it, length-wise, you'll need, and the quicker you'll be done. (Just in case that's not intuitive). So while we did a bunch of yarn ones since those were cheap, they took a lot longer than the ribbon ones, which took about 30 seconds to complete.

When working with the yarn, I worked in manageable sections of material, cutting a couple yards at a time, and folding it in half to double it up (you can see in the picture above that I'm winding two lengths at the same time, to speed things up). When that was done, I'd glue or tie it down and then start with a new length, until the whole doughnut was covered.

3. Then comes the fun part: Icing.

4. Any material you've got laying around would be great for this; we opted for the classic felt. Trace some circles on the felt, cut them out --- adding creative drips if you're so inclined --- and then decorate with more felt, ribbon, sharpie polka dot sprinkles, whatever suits your fancy.

With all the cutting and hot gluing, this wasn't necessarily kid-friendly, so I set up a little station for Lou by giving her a bunch of pre-cut frosting shapes and a couple bowls of different kinds of sprinkles and the like. Then she could go to town. When she was done, I hot glued her icing onto the doughnut shapes I was making in the meantime. I really think this would be an adorable kid party activity, and each kid could take home their little doughnuts.

That's it! Seriously fun, only one hot glue injury so I'm getting better with that, and Louisa. Loves. Them. I mean, Sweet Lou's just seriously elevated its game. This is not the only Sweet Lou's project in the works, so if you're into kid kitchen play, you're in luck. Thanks as always for stopping by, and if you do make your own special treats, send us pics.