hand-print hearts mother’s day card

A quick card for Mother’s Day, would also make a lovely birthday card. We made two cards for the kids to give to Grandma and Nana. Got the idea from Oliver’s card which he made for me at school. The kids each made two hearts by making angled hand-prints, when the paint was dry I cut out the heart shapes and we mounted them onto the cards using foam adhesive pads to give a slight 3d effect. We used purple and green co-ordinated paint and card colours.



Spent a lovely sunny afternoon at Dartington Cider Press Centre, a favourite place to visit here in South Devon, with craft shops, a fantastic toy shop, Cranks restaurant, and we also caught the fantastic juggling show just before we left.



Above right, my Mother’s Day offerings, a teapot card and a keyring Cyan made at pre-school; and two cards from Oli, the hand-print heart and another which he made before I got up, with, yes, more honking ducks!

itty bitty princesses and hama dinosaurs

Today Cyan found and decided to make her Itty Bitty Princesses, a Christmas gift from Oliver. The Itty Bitty book has instructions on how to make the tiny characters, and a cute little tin (I love tins!) with all the bits you need to make two princesses.




They are similar to fairies and princesses we’ve made before with clothes-pins, fabric flowers, tissue paper, pipe cleaners etc.; but Cyan really enjoyed making these and loved looking at all the pictures in the little book to get ideas for how she wanted her princesses to look. She did need a little help with cutting and gluing etc. but she was so proud of them when they were all done. They turned out so cute:



Oli got a few board games in with Dad while we were making the princesses, then he came in and decided he would make another of his Hama bead dinosaurs, which he also got for Christmas. He already made the T-Rex just after Christmas. He decided to make the yellow Velociraptor today.

don’t stop me now...

Phew! What a busy busy Friday it has been. At work for the morning; then I had the afternoon off so my partner Karl and I could join our son Oliver at his school for a Creative Partnerships Project – den building! Parents were invited into the school grounds to join our children in an imaginative den building session. So we, along with a few other parents, joined about 20 kids from Oliver’s class; the kids were split into groups of 4-5 along with parents and the only rule was that grown-ups were not allowed to decide how to build the dens. The kids took great delight in telling us what to do!

We worked with Oliver, two other boys and a girl from his class; she had very clear ideas on how the den should be built, Karl and I helped with putting up poles, tying and pegging bits where needed; and the boys built a fence around the den to protect us from sharks! (Part of the fun was to imagine we were marooned on a desert island!) Once all the dens were built the kids ran around checking each other’s dens out, then we all helped to dismantle everything. What a fun afternoon!



Then later on in the evening I made some dinosaur shaped crayons; I have been meaning to make these to list in my Etsy shop. I had a good excuse to get around to it because I wanted to include some in a little gift for Rachel over at Always Sunny as a thank you for being really great over lost parcel issues, and for my replacement items – a lovely necklace and some really yummy lip balms from her Etsy shop my little sunshine. Thanks to the lost parcel issues I found out via email that her daughter is another dinosaur fanatic, so I thought it would be cool to send them some dino goodies – a dinosaur fabric bag, colouring book and the dinosaur crayons.



And then I went and listed three new different items in my Etsy shop which include the dinosaur crayons.

a very merry un-birthday

A collaboration this weekend by Oliver and Cyan to make a birthday card for their Auntie, who is just as much of a Disney fan as they are. Alice in Wonderland is definitely flavour of the month with them, coincidentally as Tim Burton’s was released here last week – really looking forward to seeing that by the way.



Cyan’s obvious choice was to draw Alice – she loves to draw the Disney heroines – using all the right colours and adding all the little details. Oliver decided immediately to draw “one of the purple and gold honking ducks”. I could vaguely remember some honking ducks from the film, anyway he drew one and of course it is just like those which are actually in the film. He also did the lettering in alternating purple and gold because it is the duck honking “Happy Birthday!” apparently. They used a combination of pencil, felt-tips, metallic markers and metallic gel-pens.

We then cut out their drawings and mounted them onto a light green card, and Cyan added the little fabric flowers with coloured seed beads for the centres. I like the way she used a different colour of beads for each little group of flowers – I would have done them random – but her way looks nicer. We use Stickles glitter glue to stick the flowers and beads which really works a treat.

(Oliver is 6 and Cyan is 4.)