Wednesday Love: Fireworks Crafting

Tonight at Brownies we are continuing to work on our Bonfire challenge badge. In our last meeting we told the story of Guy Fawkes and then split into groups who learnt the fireworks code, ate S'mores, made scratch art firework magnets and made edible bonfires.

Mmmmm, edible bonfires....

Tonight we are going to be painting firework pictures, including glow in the dark paint and glitter glue. I love this idea with pipecleaner stamping.

From :Juggling with kids

There will also be Glow-in-the-dark Hama beads and making "firework pencils" by twisting glittery pipecleaners and sparkly pompoms onto the end of the a pencil.

T shirt printing at Brownies

We have been working towards our Artist badge at Brownies. So far we have made textured collage flags, decorated bookmarks and painted watercolour pictures of wild flowers. This week we finished our stamped and decorated t-shirts.

We made our own stamps a couple of weeks ago using 3" squares of cardboard (with two squares stuck together for extra strength), tacky PVA glue and some wool. We had intended to make them with string, but our string wasn't suitable as it was a nylon one which wouldn't bend and so we grabbed the wool out of our cupboard left over from our pompom making session. We hadn't tried this out before and we just hoped that it would work! The great news is that it did work - brilliantly! The stamps did need to be left to dry completely, so it worked well that we made the stamps in an earlier session.

This week we gave out the finished stamps and some yellow t-shirts (as we ask the girls to have yellow t-shirts when we go on Brownie holiday). We placed some old magazine pages inside the t-shirts to stop the paint soaking through.We handed out palettes with red, yellow and blue fabric paint and encouraged the girls to mix their own colours too. The paint was brushed onto the wool before being stamped onto the t-shirts.

We had some two tone stamping too...

Here are some of the finished t-shirts designs. We embellished the stamping with fabric felt tip pens.

These stamps worked so well. I was a little nervous of the designs which used only one strand of wool, but these actually seemed to work the best. The girls are all really pleased with their t-shirts.

Brownies Toymaker Badge

At Brownies the girls have been working towards their Toymaker badge. We've had lots of fun working towards this.

The first thing we made was this toy owl. The girls loved making their owls! I cut out all the felt pieces using by Sizzix Big Shot and the Sizzix Bigz Die Owl #2 . This was a great way to cut out all the pieces quickly. The die does cut out circles where the eyes should go and so I had to layer up a few pieces of scrap felt over the die to make sure the big owl shapes didn't have two big holes in the middle.

All the owls were different colours with different colour button eyes. I sat with the girls in small groups (up to 8 girls at a time) to do the sewing. Some hadn't sewn anything before and so it was great to sit with them and encourage them to have a go. This toy also included sewing on buttons, which is a great skill to have.

The next toy we made was this Brownie board game. We found blank board games "paths" from Little Crafty Bugs which the girls customised with instructions. I printed out lots of instructions in squares and then the girls cut them out and stuck them down to make their unique game. The path was stuck down to some card with Brownie pictures around it and then laminated it.

We made our own game spinners with some downloaded hexagon backgrounds (from HERE) and some spinner arrows (from HERE). I also bought a big bag of counters and each game had 4 counters. We've got loads of counters left - perfect for a tiddlywinks championship!

Our last toy the girls made was shadow puppets. These were the easiest toys we made for the badges. I made these ones as examples and then we handed out black card, pencils and scissors and let the girls make whatever animals they liked. We made them around Chinese New Year and so I printed off some pictures of the Chinese Zodiac animals for inspiration. The girls needed a little help cutting out the holes to cover with tissue paper and then again to put in the paper fasteners (brads) so the puppets could move. But they were happy to use sticky tape to stick on their own bamboo skewers.

I made a screen with my silk painting screen and a piece of white polycotton fabric stretched tight across it with a desk lamp behind it.

For the girls who may have missed one of the activities above we also made pom pom rabbits for Easter!