2013 - A few of my favourite things

As it's nearly the end of 2013 I thought I would have a little look back at my favourite things of this year....

My favourite scrapbook page

This was inspired by a tutorial video from Creative Jumpstart 2013. I am very excited that Creative Jumpstart 2014 will be starting tomorrow. I love the comic book look of this page

A Breakfast fit for a superhero

 My favourite new craft

I have had fun starting to discover felting this year (and I only managed to stab myself in the finger twice! ). Father Christmas even bought me a lovely new needle felting brush mat, so I won't have to felt into a sponge and peel it off afterwards anymore. I think Father Christmas may have had advice from my Mum.

A celebration postcard

My favourite photo

I took this photo while we were on holiday in Paris and I managed to get all three kids looking at the camera and smiling - hurray! How did we achieve this? My other half was standing behind me and licking my head to make them laugh!

Can you see a resemblance...

My favourite song

My favourite song this year is "Little talks" by "Of Monsters and Men". I love all the different instruments used in this and I think it is definitely a "jangly" song ( This word has been used to describe other music I like).

My favourite kids craft

This was the most fun. Paper plates + paint+ salad spinner = spin paintings!

Spin painting

My favourite book

A perfect blend of modern policing with a large dose of fantasy.

Rivers of London

 My favourite quilt

A pirate quilt for a pirate themed nursery, with my own pattern for the paper pieced boats.

A pirate quilt

 My favourite film

Star Trek:Into Darkness - A fantastic sci-fi film with the added bonus of Mr Benedict Cumberbatch!

And a New Year's Resolution to finish the year... I will try to finish all the online craft workshops I am halfway through!

Wednesday Love: Nativity plays

We've loved watching the kids in the school nativity plays over the years. This year we have two in the nativity, one "Child" and one "King". We had fun making a sparkly crown with card, tin foil and some sticky jewels - along with a tunic made from curtain lining and decorated with ribbons.

My favourite costume seen in the school nativity was in last year's play and it wasn't one of our kids - it was the dancing Etch-A-Sketch! The girl's family made a fantastic job of her costume and it looked exactly like a giant version of the toy. We have to hope that there won't be so much illness going around the school this year. Last year Mary was missing in the stable as she was poorly.

We are definitely getting into the Christmas Spirit in our house now.

Cardboard box castles - Part 2

My previous post on cardboard box castles has proved very popular and now it's time for another one as the ginger one is learning about castles and had to go into school for a day dressed as a princess. Here's our latest castle. We got a bit carried away and it got bigger and bigger. Luckily we could still fit it through the door! We used the book "See Inside Castles" as our inspiration - even including a flap so we could "see inside".

This was how we started out, with boxes and Pringle tubes. My hot glue gun came in very handy to make sure it was all secure. We gave it a layer of papier mache with watered down PVA glue and tissue paper to add extra strength. It would be awful if it fell apart on the way to school! I didn't glue the castle onto the courtyard, which made it all easier to paint and to transport.

Then we painted it, inside and out with grey acrylic paint (and green for the courtyard). I cut out window frames which were painted separately and glued on when it was all dry.

Here it is completed. The ginger one used a black pen to draw on lots of arrow slits and we used a selection of Lego knights (from the castle set I had when I was little), which we glued on with Copydex so it could be easily peeled off later.

She wanted a dragon on the roof and so she used a packet of green Fimo Air light (with a little bit of white) to make her own dragon.

There was a garden in the castle picture in the book and here's our version with scrunched up green tissue.

In a recent school trip to a local castle they learnt how the knights would pour boiling wee onto their enemies. Here is our bucket of wee!

Luckily our pirate ship has lots of small plastic barrels we could use in the cellar

We used Lego to make chairs, tables , benches and a fireplace for the banqueting hall.

What castle would be complete without a princess and her 4 poster bed?

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.

Wednesday Love: Extracting DNA from a strawberry

In our house we love science. The blonde one has been asking "Why?" almost since she could first talk and we love getting scientific with our answers to the many questions. Last Sunday afternoon we extracted DNA from strawberries. The kids loved it - particularly as the result is very gloopy and a bit yucky!

Here's some strawberry DNA...

If you'd like to extract strawberry DNA, here's how it's done. (We used surgical spirit instead of rubbing alcohol).

A Roald Dahl scene in a box

This term's topic homework was to recreate a scene from a Roald Dahl book inside a shoebox. We didn't quite manage to contain it all in a shoe box, mostly so we could furnish the house with Sylvanian Families furniture. The blonde one wanted to make a scene from "George's Marvellous Medicine" when Grandma's taken the medicine and grown so tall that her head pops out of the roof.

Here's the house when it's open. Grandma and George are made from air drying clay (Fimo Air) around a wire frame, which was painted when it was dry.

Here's George...

We left lots of evidence of when George made the medicine with lots of little bottles from the Sylvanians collection. We stuck everything down so that the scene could be easily transported into school without everything getting lost. The large pieces of furniture are stuck down with Copydex (so we can easily peel it off later) and the tiny things are stuck down with strong double sided tape.

The blonde one had another go on my sewing machine and stitched all the tiny curtains, which we threaded onto bamboo kebab sticks. We added lots of Roald Dahl details too by printing off little books (a copy of "George's Marvellous Medicine" is on the bed!) and using Quentin Blake's illustrations as pictures on the walls.

Her teacher was full of praise for the homework and told the blonde one she is a natural artist - she was so pleased.

A kids banner for church

We've been working on a new banner at our church and this time we got the kids involved from the Sunday school I help at. We (the kids and I) are really pleased with how our handiwork turned out. 

You can see more about how we made the banner at my other blog - An embroiderer in the temple.

An origami crane mobile

The blonde one spent an afternoon at my parents house last week making origami cranes and then the next morning at our house she made more so we decided to thread them all together to make a mobile.

We found two sticks in the garden and she would wool around them to decorate them, with more wool wound around the centre to make the cross. I threaded the cranes onto embroidery threads with knots to stop them slipping down the thread, which were simply tied in a loop and hung on the sticks.

The mobile has turned out beautifully and the blonde one is really happy with her creation.

I guess these photos also show a little of our colourful house! One day the girls' bedroom will be decorated properly but for now it is a mishmash of a large wall mural I painted when they were babies along with a very bright pink chosen by a 4 year old! As they get older the decor is also "enhanced" with drawing, school work and posters from Moshi Monsters magazines. I love looking at the beautiful, creative kids rooms as featured in magazines such as Mollie Makes but, for now, we are happy letting them have a colourful space they can call their own.

Sock animals

We are enjoying the lazy mornings of the summer holidays and we have started getting creative during the days. I bought a brilliant book called "Sock and Glove" by Miyako Kanamori about making soft toys with socks and gloves. It is beautifully written to show to kids as there is a little story about the animals coming into being at the front with instructions in the back. 

One very long stripey sock became a zebra, with the blonde one (aged 8) doing all the sewing - mostly by hand with a little go on the sewing machine too. The cat was made from two socks left over from a sock puppet craft kit we had a while ago. The ginger one (age 6) had a go at the simpler sewing with a little help from me to finish it off. The kids are so proud or their creations.

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.

Papier mache birdie

Recently the ginger one had to make a space rocket as part of a school project. I love these projects that the school sets as they always end with an exhibition of all the kids work and there is such a great variety of imaginative projects, from small intricate Lego constructions to huge cardboard box creations. With all the papier mache equipment out on the table I couldn't resist having a play too.

Here's my little bird. I made his body by scrunching up newspaper around the wire legs I had bent into shape. I then papier mached a layer of book paper over the newspaper, with a final layer of tissue paper over the top. I used Prima "crystals and pearls" for his eyes.

Here's the space rocket...

My other kids also couldn't resist joining in, so the blonde one made a giraffe ( it still needs some wobbly eyes)...

... and the boy didn't want to be left out so he decorated a tube, which he is very proud of.