DIY Rainbow Scratch Art

Hello. Sorry I haven’t been here lately again. We’re just busy, busy, busy! That’s not going to change over the next couple of weeks as I am leaving my sister housesitting, and we’re off to Florida for 2 weeks with my in-laws!

We’ve been doing a few crafty projects during the summer holidays though, and one of them is for the latest Staedtler Try-It-Tribe challenge, to put some stripes on a project. We decided to try out this Rainbow Scratch Art which we had in a book but had been waiting for the right materials – the arrival of some Staedtler Oil Pastels  seemed like the perfect time…

You are supposed to use cartridge paper but I had some cheap card to hand so we used that, covering it with oil pastels:

Keep going until it’s all full:

Then we spreaded out some slightly watered down black acrylic paint all over the pastels:

Once it’s dry we could scratch some stripy pictures. Cheeky Boy opted for a stripy spaceship and planets, Little Miss went for stripy flowers, an owl, and other doodles:

They were very pleased with their finished pieces:

I also recorded a short video of the making process which you can see on instagram HERE.

I hope you are having a lovely summer!

Jennifer x

DIY Play Tent – Summer Fun!

The latest Staedtler Try-It-Tribe challenge was to build our own tent for some creative camping. As we had a couple of nice days over half term this seemed like a great excuse to get out in the garden for some summer fun!

Ours wasn’t a perfect success as it only stayed up for half an hour or so before collapsing, but that was down to poor structure choices. I’ll explain as we go along so that you can make yours much stronger if you have a go. The kids didn’t mind it collapsing as they’d had so much fun building it – they just made me promise we could build another one again in the summer holidays!

We started off with some bits of material (sheets and beach towels would work too, but we did draw on a couple of white bits of material so you’d skip that step if using nice sheets!), some string, lots of sticks both tall and short, a roll of paper, lots of Staedtler pens, and a bunch of pegs (the pegs aren’t in the photo but they were just basic wooden pegs):

Next we tied three tall sticks into a tee-pee shape. I say ‘we’ but the kids couldn’t reach that high – they were just helping to hold the sticks and string! After tying the tee-pee shape we used smaller sticks to strengthen the structure, putting them horizontally across 2 sides of the tee-pee and tying them in place:

I could tell at this point that our play tent wasn’t going to last too long. See the tall upright stick on the left-hand side of the tee-pee? It’s actually 2 sticks tied together. I tied 2 together because they were not very strong sticks and they kept bending. I hoped that tying 2 together and strengthening the sides would be enough to hold it up, at least for the afternoon. But once we put the material on too, and the wind blew the tent over a couple of times, well them sticks just kept bending! Lesson learnt – I will gather tall strong sticks before attempting this again!

The kids went off to colour in some pegs, decorate the white material, and design a flag, while I worked out how to peg the material onto the stick structure (they especially liked using gold & silver pens on the pegs):

Another note – this flag was way too big for our windy day – it kept knocking the tent down too! Next time I’ll use an A4 size piece!

The tent didn’t look very pretty from the back, with pegs all over it and some big stones weighing the sides down to stop them blowing in the wind:

But it did look cute from the front, especially when the kids stretched their legs out so I could see their feet poking out:

The front of the tent had the most colourful pegs holding the door together when they were inside:

They’d even coloured in a couple of leaves which they pegged onto the tent too:

They had lots of fun with the tent while it lasted:

Have you ever tried to make your own tent? It’s a fun way to spend an afternoon. But next time I’ll definitely have more strong sticks! I want to try an A-Frame tent next time!

I hope you’ve had some warm weather where you are too, for some outdoor adventures!

Disclosure: Staedtler sent us the pens to use for this post, but all photos, text, and opinions are our own.

Bye for now,

Jennifer x

Art Party! Little Miss Turns 8

It was my daughter’s 8th birthday on the 19th of March and she wanted an Art party. Like mother like daughter, eh?! I of course happily obliged, using pinterest and my own ideas to come up with some projects for her and her friends to make!

I had a minor meltdown on Monday this week when I came to write this post and thought I’d accidentally deleted all the photos from her birthday. I was searching everywhere, and for 24 hours I thought they were gone completely. I even ran several recovery programs trying to find them. On Tuesday I’d given up hope, then when I was working on a new cover photo for my Etsy shop I randomly discovered the photos inside a folder for my Etsy shop pictures. I don’t know how they ended up there but I’m extremely glad I found them!

I didn’t take too many photos because I was very busy helping them all to craft. But of course the photos I do have are precious!

Four of Little Miss’ friends came round so there were five girls all together (Cheeky Boy had a friend round to play with him in his room too!). We started by using lots of Happy Scatter stencils and some Martha Stewart Satin Paint, decorating the party bags that we’d be filling with their makes at the end of the party:

They added a bit of glitter too! I love how bold and bright the colours are.

Next we made Fimo trinket bowls, following THIS TUTORIAL at A Beautiful Mess. I got the girls who finished their bags first to start squishing the Fimo to make it softer. They twisted sausages of colours together, then they all rolled out their bowls using some ‘rolling pins’ which was actually a long wooden pole we’d picked up at B&Q and cut down into sections.

We put them inside some oven proof bowls to bake them. In future I’d spray the bowls with some spray oil or something first, as they were a little tricky to get out!

They looked great though, both the girls and their parents were impressed. I would add the gold rim as a finishing touch like the original tutorial if we had more time!

I liked how different they all looked. Some of them gave their bowls wavy edges which I thought was a nice touch:

While the bowls were baking in the oven to set they played pass-the parcel, and then we moved onto the next project – drawing on some mugs using my Edding Porcelain Paint Pens. I’d shown them the mug on THIS POST at Design Sponge to give them an idea of what they could do, but told them they could draw what ever they wanted:

They were having great fun giggling over what the others were drawing and offering suggestions – both helpful and silly ones! Most of them drew pets they either owned or would like to own:

A couple of them had left the party before I remembered to photograph the mugs, but here’s a few of them after they’d been baked to set the pen. Little Miss’ is the one on the left, which is an Easter mug apparently:

After the mugs we moved on to edible art as Little Miss wanted to make something to eat. I melted some chocolate, butter, and golden syrup together following THIS RECIPE, and mixed in some broken biscuits. I did all this while they were drawing on their mugs. Then I poured it into some silicone cake cases, and they decorated the tops with a variety of sprinkles (including salted caramel, popping candy, and strawberry flavours), and marshmallows!

I stuck these in the fridge and they ran off to play upstairs for a bit.

While they were upstairs me and hubby prepared the party feast, which was a tea party. Though they had smoothie in their tea cups instead of tea!

They thought it was very fancy and were all trying to drink with their little fingers sticking out!

Then we sang Happy Birthday and Little Miss blew out her candles. I had planned to bake a cake but I ran out of time so Little Miss had chosen this very pretty one instead:

Then it was time to go. We put all their crafty makes into the bags they had decorated (the choc cakes were put into a sandwich bag first), along with a couple of other crafty gifts like a tube of glitter, a mini notebook, and a small paint-by-numbers set, as well as a slice of cake and a few sweets of course!

It was a fun party. I would have done a few more preparations if I’d had time. I wanted to make some decorations like THIS watercolour number poster. Instead I just used some paper chains and octahedron bunting which I’d made previously for other events. And I would have made a cake – I’d planned to make one with smarties hidden in the middle. But never mind, we can never fit it all in, and I’m sure that Little Miss enjoyed her day, so that’s the main thing!

Have you ever had an art party? Do you think you’ll be trying any of these ideas out?

Thanks so much for stopping my,

Jennifer x

Easter Egg Bunting – Kids Craft

We’ve just had a nice relaxing weekend. On Saturday I went out for lunch with a friend, then me, hubby, and the kids went to Dorchester Library to pick up some books – we’re lucky that we can take books out from there, but still return them to our local library as they are all part of Dorset County Council. It was fun as they had lots of different books to our library. We also went and spent the kid’s World Book Day vouchers at Waterstones.

Here’s my kids dressed up for World Book Day, as Hermione and Harry Potter, and them sharing a book at Dorchester Library (ignore Little Miss’s messy hair!):

On Sunday we just chilled out at home all day for Mother’s Day which was lovely. I was served a bagel, strawberries, and a cup of tea in bed for my breakfast and we played some board games (Rummikub and Picture Yahtzee), then in the afternoon we did some homework, and worked on our next Staedtler Try-It-Tribe challenge, which is to design an Easter Egg.

I decided we could make some Easter Egg bunting to hang up, so I cut 6 eggs from white card using my Cricut Explore and put all our Staedtler drawing materials out on the dining table – we have crayons, felt pens, colouring pencils, highlighter pens, fineliner pens, and metallic gold and silver pens:

And then I just let the kids loose!

They used some of each of the drawing materials, but Cheeky Boy’s favourite items were by far the gold and silver pens. He finds them really easy to use, and though he smudged them a bit here and there it didn’t seem to bother him, and I managed to clean it off his hands and the table okay! Little Miss favoured the felt tip pens.

I love how each egg turned out differently. I didn’t give them and guidance except to say they could do patterns or pictures or a bit of each. I just wanted them to have fun and they sure did – so much that I had to go and cut another egg out each as they didn’t want to stop!

I tied the eggs all together with curling ribbon once the kids were finished:

On the back of each egg we wrote ideas for what the flavours of the eggs would be. The ones I like the sound of most are the ‘Night Time Egg’ which tastes like the moon, a ‘Robot Zorg Egg’ which tastes fizzy and spiky, a ‘Minty Air’ egg, and an ‘Every Flavour Egg’ – which is the one with the girl’s face on – apparently the ‘every flavour’ only works for that one if a girl eats it, you can also get one with a boy’s face on if you’re a boy.

It was a lovely way to spend an hour or so, just watching their process and seeing their ideas, and they were very proud of the finished item:

I’m tempted to make some mini Easter Egg bunting to add to a scrapbook page, what do you think?

I hope you’re having a lovely, relaxing day today!

Disclosure: Staedtler sent us the products to use for this post, but all photos, text, and opinions are our own.

Bye for now, Jennifer x

Valentine’s Day Fimo Hearts Teacher Gifts

For the latest Staedtler Try-It-Tribe challenge we were asked to make some Fimo Hearts for Valentine’s Day, using a Fimo mould. The kids were not so keen on making hearts (can’t we make more spaceships?!), until I suggested we make them to give to their teachers for Valentine’s. They LOVED this idea as they are still at the age where they love their teachers and want to give them nice gifts!

Here’s the hearts we made:

The 6 large ones are teacher gifts, so we added ribbon to those to make them into decorations. The others are spares for the kids to play with (though they gave the tiny yellow one to me).

Want to know how to make your own?

Step 1: Start with some Fimo, a Staedtler Fimo Clay Mould, some talcum powder, and a brush:

Step 2: Sprinkle your mould with talcum powder:

Then use the brush to dust it around and into the creases of the patterns, tapping any excess off:

You should barely be able to see the talcum powder:

Step 3: Knead the Fimo a bit to soften it then roll it into a ball:

Step 4: Press the ball into the mould, making sure you are pushing it down enough to fill the dips of the patterns:

Once you’ve pressed all your Fimo in it should look a bit like this:

Step 5: Turn the mould upside down and use your thumbs to press the Fimo out of the mould, the mould is quite bendy so it’s easy to do:

Ta-da!

Make sure you re-dust the mould with talcum powder if you are using the same heart again. We had to re-do the rose one almost straight away, as I managed to put my elbow on the one we’d just made. Doh!

Some hearts may need a bit of excess Fimo cut off if there was a bit too much for the mould:

You can experiment too. We thought the plain heart shapes looked a bit boring compared to the patterned ones, so we twisted 2 sausages of Fimo colours together, then pressed them into the moulds for a marbled effect:

Here’s the ones we marbled:

Little Miss also got creative with the back of some of them, making a pattern with the point of the plastic knife:

Step 6: When you’ve finished making hearts use a wooden kebab stick or similar to make a hole through the hearts which you want to hang up. You will need to wiggle the stick around a bit to stretch the hole so it’s big enough to fit ribbon through. And don’t forget to pick the heart up and make sure the hole is big at the back too, not just at the front:

Step 7: Arrange on a baking tray covered in tin foil, and bake according to instructions – for the Kids Fimo we were using this was 30 minutes at 110 degrees C:

Step 8: Once they are baked and cooled you can add a ribbon – you may need to use the kebab stick to help poke the ribbon through – and tie a knot to hang them up:

The kids can’t wait to give them to their teachers (Cheek Boy has turned into Spiderman!):

I especially like the patterned hearts, they’d make nice Christmas decorations too I think:

They’d look even nicer with a bit of gloss varnish on, as some of them look a bit talcum-powdery! But I didn’t have any gloss varnish, so never mind.

Do you ever use moulds for any of your creations? I want some small ones to make some embellishments for my scrapbook pages!

Have a great day – it’s a rather stormy one here with Storm Imogen rattling the windows. We’re staying snug inside.

Disclosure: Staedtler sent us the products to use for this post, but all photos, text, and opinions are our own.

Bye for now, Jennifer x

Sea Creature And Spaceship Toys – With Fimo Form & Play!

Staedtler kindly sent us some more bits and pieces to play with as part of our Try-It-Tribe challenges. This time we were challenged to make our own toys with the Fimo Form & Play sets!

Here are the sets they sent us – Pirate, Seaworld, and Space (I opened up the Seaworld pack so you can see what’s inside):

The sets each come with 4 blocks of Fimo Kids modeling clay (enough to make one each of the models) plus a plastic tool, and instructions on how to build the models. The packaging opens up to reveal a ‘scene’ – like a backdrop the kids can use when playing with their toys later. Cheeky Boy was quite excited when he saw the space picture – I let him watch a Star Wars movie (episode 4) for the first time a few days ago!

Little Miss chose to make the sea creatures, and Cheeky Boy unsurprisingly chose to make the space ships. We’ve kept the pirate set for a rainy day!

As the Pirate instructions are now the only ones I can find, here’s a page from inside so you can see how the instructions are displayed:

As you can see the instructions have no text, so even young kids who can’t read will be able to try and follow the pictures. It shows you how much of the Fimo block you need to use, what shapes to mould, and where to put them on the model that you are making. By the end of it Cheeky Boy (age 4 and a half) was really getting the hang of following the instructions. He could easily cut off the right amount of the right colour:

He often needed help making it into a ball or sausage shape, but then he could do the next bit of cutting and shaping. He did all the final shaping and adding to the models. He especially liked making the windows – they were not very round but he loved cutting the Fimo into little blobs, counting them to make sure he had the right number, and pressing them on:

Little Miss (age 7 and 3 quarters) did everything herself, though I did show her how to make a couple of shapes (eg. the turtle shell) then I squished it up again so she could make it. She took a lot longer to make all her models, as she was doing it a lot more carefully and trying to make them perfect. Just look at the concentration on her face:

We had a very fun time making the toys – they stayed enthusiastic the whole time we were making them.

I have a couple of tips for you:

Tip 1: Always wash your hands after moulding a dark colour, or when you start work on the next colour it will get ‘dirty’ (as Cheeky Boy said). Here’s when he’d moved from black to red without washing his hands and ended up with a marbled effect:

There’s not enough spare Fimo to replace a large part like this, so we just had to stick with it being discoloured. Most of it got covered up by windows anyway.

Tip 2: If you have any parts which might droop in the oven you can scrunch up balls of tin foil to hold them up while they are baking. Then they will stay in position once the Fimo is cooked and hard:

One final thing to say is that a couple of bits have broken off our toys while we’ve been playing with them – the tip of a spaceship and one of the crabs legs. To avoid this you could smooth the different colours of Fimo together more where they join before cooking. I’ve just glued them back on and they seem to be okay for now!

This spaceship and the crab are my favourites:

I am looking forward to when we make the pirates – and I’ve seen there’s a dino set so I want to get that too!

Do you think you or your kids would like to have a go at these?

Disclosure: Staedtler sent us the products to use for this post, but all photos, text, and opinions are our own.

Thanks for reading, I hope you have a fun-filled day!

Jennifer x

Christmas Village Candle Houses Kids Craft (for LED candles)

(This post is part of my Frosty Festivities 2015 Blog Event – see a list of all the posts HERE)

Hello! Today I’m sharing these lovely Christmas Village Candle Houses. I’ve called this a kids craft as my children made these, but I’m sure grown-ups will enjoy making them as well – I’m certainly tempted to make a few of my own!

I do want to point out straight away that these are for LED candles – the battery powered, flameless, kind. DO NOT put normal candles in these as you will start a fire – those roofs would burn up nicely.

That’s the safety message out of the way!

My kids had great fun making these and now they want to play with them, but I’m trying to keep them out of their reach so we can have them on display at Christmas. I know they will become a toy as soon as Christmas day has passed though, so you could always just make these as toy houses instead of candle ones. I just want to have a Christmas village to display this year!

If you want to make some of your own, here’s how to create them…

Step 1: Find some cardboard tubes, cut them to the size you want your houses to be, and make some initial holes for where the windows will be, to help you get your scissors in. I did all of this step before the kids came to the table, as I knew the card would be too tough for them to get their scissors through without a starting hole. I used a Big Shot to punch the initial holes:

You could also use a paper piercer or sharp scissors to make those first cuts, just be careful not to pierce your hands – you could put a lump of blue tack or playdoh at the back of the place where you are going to make the hole, to give you something to press onto.

Step 2: Call the kids in, if you are doing this with kids who can use scissors, and put them to work making the windows larger. I wasn’t expecting Cheeky Boy (age 4) to be able to do much, but he came up with an amazing star-shaped design, that obviously isn’t neat and tidy, but it let the light out and it’s all his own work. Look how much they were both concentrating:

Step 3: You can do this bit later, but I wanted to get it out of the way before we got messy, and I thought it might help with the next step – choose which papers you will use for your roofs:

Step 4: Start painting your houses. I thought we’d paint depending on what colour the roofs would be, but the kids found it more fun to paint what they wanted and then decide which roof would go on which house later. I let them go with the flow. Make sure you protect your work surface and wear aprons, if you want to. I did neither because our table is too covered in stains to worry about, and I couldn’t find the aprons! We used kids craft paint so it washes off easily anyway:

We painted most houses with one coat of paint, except white which needed 2 coats. Actually it probably needed 3 coats but the kids didn’t want to paint them again!

Step 5: While the paint is drying (which could take all night depending on your paint) you can prepare the roofs. Our circles were 10cm (4″) in diameter, I got the kids to draw around some Ikea cork coasters of that size, onto the back of the papers they’d chosen for their roofs:

Cheeky boy’s circles were way out. Below you can see one of his circles on the left, and one I’d helped him to correct on the right. At least he was having a go:

Step 6: Cut your circles out, then cut a piece-of-pie styled chunk out of them (it doesn’t need to be a certain measurement, just eye-ball it). Cheeky boy also can’t cut in circles. The blue one second from left was one he’d cut, and it was too small, so I re-cut a blue one for him, and a red one. The one on the bottom left, which looks white (but is green patterned paper on the other side) he’d managed to cut outside of the circle, in a very jagged way, so I left that one as it was. I cut the pie-pieces out for him after I took this photo too. Little Miss did it all herself, after I showed her an example of the pie-piece:

Step 7: To make the roofs into a cone shape, put adhesive on one edge of the pie-piece hole, then flip the roof over and put adhesive on the other edge of the pie-piece hole:

Step 8: Bend the roof into a wide cone shape and stick the edges down. There will be a bit sticking out as we didn’t measure the pie-piece hole:

Just trim off the excess using scissors:

Cheeky Boy put the adhesive on his roofs but I did the bending and sticking.

Once the houses are all dry…

Step 9: Stick the roofs on. I used a hot glue gun, just dotting a few blobs at the top of the house before pressing the roof on. Tacky glue would work too, but I wanted it to dry fast:

Step 10: Draw on some details. I actually left the room and went to do some housework while the kids did this bit, as if I’d stayed in the room I would have kept telling them to keep it neat and make it Christmassy, but really I wanted them to have fun and be creative. So I left them too it. Of course I did come back to find they’d got Sharpie pen marks on their clothes, but they had drawn some fabulous designs too:

Hopefully the Sharpie marks will come out after a few washes!

Step 11: The final step is to blob on some tacky glue, around the edges of the roofs, and the bases of the houses, or wherever you want, then tip on some white glitter. This is the step that makes them look like Christmas village houses. Then you just need to pop an LED candle inside, and sit back to admire the glow:

In the above photo you can also see how Cheeky Boy cut a door in one of his houses, when I wasn’t looking. It means you can see the candle inside, but not if you turn it around the other way!

Be Inspired:

Make a Christmas village house, or other Christmas decoration or embellishment, out of a cardboard tube

Cut or punch some star shapes

Tip white glitter on as a finishing touch to make a project wintry

Would you like to live in one of these cosy little houses?!

Remember that commenting on this post, and any post that goes live during November 2015, will count as another entry into the Grand Giveaway {NOW CLOSED}, but only if you’ve registered your interest in winning that prize right HERE!

I’ll be back tomorrow morning at 8am GMT!

Jennifer x