the crown jewels

Oliver and Cyan’s school held a party to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with a hat competition for each year group. We decided to make crowns.





Oliver’s crown is based on the St. Edwards Crown, worn by the Queen at her coronation.





Cyan’s is a mini replica of the Imperial State Crown, worn by the Queen for important state events.

It’s amazing what can be done with some corrugated cardboard, a little gold spray-paint and lots of acrylic gems and other embellishments! I think it’s safe to say I got a little carried away with the whole project! I made the crown bases, Oli and Cyan had fun helping with the spray-painting and loved sticking all their ‘jewels’ in place. They also enjoyed researching the real crowns, and reading all about the amazing gemstones they have. I remember having quite a fascination with the crown jewels after I went to see them in the Tower of London when I was a child.

Oliver won his competition; Cyan didn’t win hers, but she did just win a drawing competition at school the previous week and I guess you can’t win ’em all!

dalek pirate party stencil décor

For my son Oliver’s 7th birthday party on a dalek pirate theme I enlarged
the stencil designs I created for the invitations and used them to make flags
and other items for the party..



I made one large and three small flags with our dalek jolly roger design..



The large flag and two small flags were put up in our back yard,
and one small flag we put up at our front gate.



I used lightweight black poly-cotton for the flags, and gold spray paint
for the stencil designs.











I made a backdrop to hang up with a (almost) life-size dalek stencil..



It rained on the day of the party, so we hung the dalek backdrop indoors
in our dining room..



I stencilled a T-shirt for Oliver to wear – he wanted to ‘be’ a dalek!
I used special T-shirt spray paint for this, which is machine washable and everything..



I also re-used the stencil from the invitations for the party favour bags
which the kids took their booty home in..



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butterflies birthday card

Oliver and Cyan made this pretty card for Grandma’s birthday. Cyan decided they should make a card with butterflies because “Grandma likes butterflies”. So I cut out some butterfly shapes from coloured paper, and showed them how to finger-paint patterns on one side (they ended up adding paint to both sides but never mind!) then fold them in half and press down to get a symmetrical pattern on both wings.

When the paint was dry I stuck a strip of double-sided sticky tape down the middle on the back of the butterflies, they stuck them onto the card, Cyan drew them some curly silver antennae and stuck the white sparkly letter stickers to say “Happy Birthday Grandma”.




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