Grass Creatures

After a hot summer my lawn was looking rather patchy and in need of some TLC. With this in mind, I purchased a big box of grass seed the last time I was in the garden shop and sprinkled the seeds onto the prepared patches of lawn. There was still quite a large amount of seed left over so we decided to grow some grass men. 

We took some disposable cups from the cupboard, poked a few holes in the bottom and filled it with dirt. The children drew faces on the cups and then we sprinkled the seed on top.

For some reason, I don't have any photos of the cups before the grass started growing, so you will have to imagine peculiar white cups with faces and nothing else. I gave the children a spray bottle and explained that they would need to keep the seeds damp so that they could sprout. 

This is two days after we started growing the grass hair.

The hair has grown some more thanks to the diligent watering the children have been doing.

This little man is ready for a hair cut after 1 week. I wish my hair grew that quickly. 

It seems we picked a good week to try growing grass at home, since it turns out that the preschool started growing grass creatures at the same time!

Here we have our grass caterpillar. We used an old stocking, filled it with a seed/dirt mix and tied the end in a knot. Once it was secure, we used pipecleaners to twist around the stocking to create legs and segments of the caterpillar. We glued googly eyes on and then kept watering it until the grass grew. The grass here took much longer to grow - this is 1.5 weeks old.

Rainbow Cake

My son wanted my to make him a rainbow cake for his birthday. To start with I thought he wanted a swirly marble cake (I'm not sure why since he didn't ask for a marble cake). After a few hiccups we discovered that he really wanted a cake similar to one my fabulous cousin made last year when we were visiting her. That made it easier. All I had to do was get the recipe from her and make it.

The hardest part of this cake is sorting all the m&ms. Good thing I have lots of willing helpers and don't mind the helpers taking payment via the occasional m&m that disappeared into their mouths and not the bowls.

After the m&ms are sorted, the cake baked and cut into shape, the only part left to do is ice the cake and stick all the m&ms on in rows.

Hand Print Art

Time to make another set of canvas art. This time, since I found 4 small canvases in my cupboard, it is going to be 4 hand prints. One for each child.

We painted the canvases in 4 different colours and then used hands to put a print in the middle of it. All that is left is to sign a name down the bottom of each canvas and put a date on it. Maybe one day my children will look back at these prints and be able to compare how much they have changed/grown.

Magnetic Peg Planes

In our house our fridge is our noticeboard. We stick notes, invitations and artwork up on the fridge because this is the central location here. We all congregate around the kitchen while I am cooking. We come and go through the kitchen multiple times a day, so it is really the ideal place to display information. I finally decided to re-make our tacky magnets from our local MP.

We made some peg planes to stick on magnets and use to hold our artwork up in style. I did discover that my boys don't know what bi-planes are. We did have to go and visit the War Memorial to confirm that there really are planes with two main wings, one on top of the other.

Biscuit Wreath

This year my oldest son wanted to take in a gift to share with all the teachers from his school and he wanted it to be something edible. While we were sitting in a waiting room at an appointment he found a picture of a biscuit wreath and decided that this was exactly what he wanted to make.

We made a butter biscuit recipe with white chocolate added to the mix for a richer biscuit. Once we cut out the biscuits we 'glued' them together into a wreath shape with melted chocolate. I thought this was easier than a royal icing alternative and the children could manage without my help.

White Chocolate Butter Biscuits

200 grams of butter

1 cup of caster sugar

1 egg

2 1/4 cups of plain flour

100 grams of grated white chocolate

Extra 150grams  white chocolate for joining the biscuits

Icing sugar for sifting over the finished wreath

Cream the butter and sugar then add the egg and mix well.

Slowly add the flour and grated chocolate to the mixture. 

Once the mixture comes together in a big lump put it in the fridge for half an hour.  

Roll the mixture out and cut out various sized stars, place on a baking tray and put in the oven at 180C conventional or 170C fan forced. Bake for 10-15 minutes or until they start to colour - these biscuits are not meant to be brown, so stay close to the oven when cooking as the chocolate in the mix ensures that they go from cooked to burnt in a few minutes!

Once the biscuits have cooled, melt the extra chocolate and use it to glue the stars in a wreath shape. Sift icing sugar over the top to finish.

Blue Flowers anyone?

I needed to prune the roses outside my dining room as they have grown into a rather peculiar shape. Sadly this means I ended up cutting a number of flowers from the plant. Rather than put the roses into a vase to decorate the table (boring!) we thought it was the perfect time to try a mini science experiment with the flowers.

 First we took a glass of water and put food colouring in to make a dark blue mixture. The we put two cut roses into the glass and sat back to watch. A few moments watching the colour change when I remembered that I was planning on taking before and after photos. Oh well - this is a minute or two after the rose and blue water met for the first time. There is already a very faint tinge of blue on the petals.

 This is our rose after 5 minutes. The veins inside the rose are now very clear and we can see the path the water takes as the flower sucks it up. I am rather surprised at how fast the colour  changed with the rose. I wonder if it would do anything to a pink rose - I am sure my pink rose bush wouldn't mind me taking a few roses for the kids to play with.

And here is a photo 6 hours later.

Plaster Ornaments

First we had a slow afternoon where the children were bored. Then we had these ornaments that had been sitting on the kitchen bench since we made them. Combine the two and we have a busy house with the children painting the ornaments and when they ran out of ornaments we had a big pile of paper they could use.

Here we have my 2 year old painting a little heart. She does quite well with one colour at a time

And here we have the finished collection. The ones with ribbons have been put on cupboard handles in the kitchen to liven up the whiteness of it all. The ones without ribbons have had magnets glued to the back and are on the magnet board in the bedroom.

Using up the paint to make an abstract card :-)

Paper Christmas Trees

We were playing with shapes today when Imogen decided that this one was a tree. This tree then needed to be decorated.

So I found some small tubes of puffy paint. It dries in a 3D blob, so would stand out from the card. I also found an odd assortment of sequins, beads and buttons to use.

Here is a little forest of trees

We decided to stick them to the cards with sticky dots (removable, reusable stickers) so that the tree can be detached from the card and placed on a mantle or shelf as a decoration.

Coffee Filter Butterfly Wings

Cut the sides of the coffee filter and fold open like this:

Take different coloured inks and drip onto the coffee filter. 

Once we were happy with the arrangement of spots, James squirted water into the centre of each ink spot. This spread the ink and caused the colours to bleed together and make a beautiful pattern for the butterfly!

Now we need to make the body!

Nativity Card

Here we have a fingerprint family (and since I am typing on the computer you can safely deduce that the fingers were not mine). The house is made of sticks and glue and hopefully it will hold together better than the little pig stick house did! I am unsure as to whether I should risk posting these ones due to the wonky nature of the sticks. 

Animal Shapes

Today we have a couple of animal shapes that Imogen decorated while I had a cup of tea. Now we have a sheep and a unicorn to begin a poster farm with. I wonder what other animals will join them over the weekend...

Ladybirds to help in the garden

It is the time of year for me to get out into the garden and do some weeding and pruning. The children like to come out and explore the insects we can find. Today we were lucky enough to spot some orange and red ladybirds keeping our plants healthy by eating the aphids and scale - always a problem in our garden with all our roses and citrus trees. There seem to be more ladybirds this year, so perhaps there will be less scale for me to worry about...

Here are some of the ladybirds we made this afternoon.

First we found some red and black cardboard. Then we cut out two circles roughly the same size.

We cut the red circle in half and used a hole punch to put a few holes in the red cardboard and glued them onto the black circle leaving a space at the top for the head. Black marker works just as well to create the spots on the ladybird. We then glued some googly eyes onto the lady bird. 

Once we finished making our ladybird James decided he wanted to make it into a magnet. So we found a peg and an old magnet from the fridge to stick on the back (one of the advertising magnets that frequently turn up in our letterbox). Then it was simply a matter of glueing the ladybirds onto the peg. 

Once these are dry we will be able to use them to hold up the school notes on the fridge with style!

Screen Splatter Painting

I have fond memories of screen splatter painting from when I was small so I finally managed to get around to trying it with my children.

My Dad quickly nailed together a frame for me and I used some fly wire from the shed to staple onto the frame.

We then propped the frame up on two bricks and set the piece of paper underneath (must remember not to take photos of my foot next time!). To make it a little more interesting the children picked some leaves from my jasmine vine and put them on top of the paper. We mixed acrylic paint with water to make it easier to splatter. We used old toothbrushes to dip in the paint and run across the screen and it created our splatter picture. 

We had a quick look to see if there was enough paint on the picture before we removed the leaves.

Now we have to wait for the paintings to dry before we hang them up in the house.

I did find that acrylic paints clogged up the screen, so next time we'll try water colours or inks and see how that goes.

Fruit Faces

We went to Floriade today and the children made fruit faces at the Yellow Van activity tent. The best part of it was eating the faces when we finished!

Under the Sea Painting

I have a drawer full of paintings like this. Today I decided that we needed to do something with them. When I asked the children what they thought we could make with the picture, they told me it looked like water. Further discussion concluded that there are fish, jellyfish, rocks and seaweed in the water.

I found some material for rocks, glitter for seaweed  and a bottle top for a jellyfish body. We printed out some pictures to colour in and stick on. Now we have refurbished the painting and have to find somewhere to hang it up.

Peg Ants

 We are back to insects again. This time using buttons and pegs. First we take a peg...

and paint it brown. Then we have to wait for it to dry.

The we find some black or brown buttons from my button collection and glue three of them on to the peg.

2 Googly eyes and 3 pipe cleaner legs later and we have our ant. Christopher wanted green legs and James liked the red fluffy ones. I think the fluffy ones look like they should belong to a nasty spider so I have to keep counting the legs to reassure myself!

Matchstick Pictures

On opening the cupboard today James discovered a box of matchsticks. And I am not talking about a little box of matchsticks. This is an entire shoebox full of them.

Just looking at the open box brings back memories of hours spent creating little houses after a visit to Cockington Green one year. I was so proud of my efforts and would display them around the house and give them as presents to any of my relatives who happened to visit during this time.

Telling James about all the things I used to make with them gave him an idea. He wanted to build a rocket. I was rather dubious about this until he explained he wanted to make a rocket picture and stick stars on it to make the picture sparkle. He ran back to the cupboard and pulled out a piece of cardboard and the glue.

We used the glue to draw the picture. Then stuck matches on it to make a lasting picture. Pity we didn't have any stars in the cupboard to finish them. Maybe some glitter will have to do.