beach treasure mosaic mirrors

My sister Tressa and her boyfriend just recently moved home and the kids and I wanted to make a gift to take to their house warming party. Tressa loves the sea so we decided to make something using some of our collected beach treasures..

I thought we could make some mirrors with a mosaic border. I found these small round beveled edge mirrors cunningly disguised as candle plates for a £1 each! Exactly what I had in mind, don’t you love it when that happens!



The mirrors are about 4" diameter. I cut two 6" squares from 3mm plywood we have lying around. I then fixed the mirrors in the center using dual purpose tile adhesive/grout. I made sure to scrape off any excess around the edge. Ideally they should have been left to dry overnight at this stage but we were making them the morning of the party so I just left them for a couple of hours to dry.



I then got Oliver and Cyan to come and design their mosaic borders, using shells and sea glass from our collection. I also have some little tumbled glass mosaic tiles and they used a few of those too.



I was originally going to let the kids stick the pieces on, but I had a few concerns about this. I was not sure about the tile adhesive/grout on their hands as it’s not very skin friendly. Time was also an issue and I suspected it would be quicker to get them to work out their layout and then I would fix them after. I am so glad we did it this way, it is quite fiddly fixing the pieces on. I took photos of their layouts to refer to when I was sticking everything down:



Cyan’s design



Oliver’s design



I spread a fairly thick layer of tile adhesive/grout around the borders, working on a small area at a time, about half of one edge, to stop the adhesive drying too quickly.

Next time I make these (I am planning to make more for birthday gifts this year) I will make sure that the grout is up to the edges of the mirror at this stage. I didn’t – if you enlarge the above photo you can see there are gaps around the edge of the mirror. This meant I had to wait for it to dry and then go round and fill in those gaps which was a real pain, I discovered you can’t use the usual grouting method with these uneven objects!



Cyan’s mirror all finished



Oliver’s mirror all finished

Once they were all fixed and dry I painted round the edge of the plywood bases with white emulsion paint to tidy up the edges, I had scraped off excess grout around the edges when I was fixing the pieces on.

They turned out so pretty and Tressa loved them. I love both the kids’ designs – they are different but complimentary. Oliver was very proud of his symmetrical design and Cyan incorporated a little symmetry after Oliver explained symmetry to her, I love her combination of randomness with a little symmetry!

Linking up at some of the fabulous link parties in my sidebar, go check them out..

pirate party games

The theme for my son Oliver’s 7th birthday party was dalek pirates. I selected and adapted some fun party games on a pirate theme. I ran all the game ideas past Oliver before the party and he was really excited about playing all of them!

These are the games we played..

Shipwreck
To play this game you need a large room or outdoor area with different items of furniture etc. which the kids can climb on. One person acts as Captain, then all the kids run around until the Captain shouts “Shipwreck” and calls out an item which the kids must run to and climb on it. The last one to reach it has sunk in the sea and is then out. As there are less and less players left in the game, the Captain calls smaller and smaller items to climb on.

It was raining so we played it in our dining room; we used a wooden pallet (we were going to use these to make a deck in the backyard had the weather been fine) which was ‘the deck’, a plank of wood ‘the plank’, a long floor cushion ‘the bridge’, a square floor cushion ‘the Captain’s chair’ and a large round wooden chopping board ‘the crow’s nest’. We played it so as each player got out they acted as Captain and called the next “Shipwreck”. I didn’t get photos of this game being played.

X marks the spot
This game is basically musical chairs, but we used Xs made from strips of black card instead of chairs. So all the kids run and dance about until the music stops then try and get to an X until there’s only one player left.. you all know how this one works!





Port and Starboard
There is a list of commands with actions, when each command is called the kids have to do the appropriate action, once they get used to all the actions the last player to comply with each action is out. I adapted the commands and actions to make it a bit more piratey..

• Port : all run to the left
• Starboard : all run to the right
• Captain’s aboard : raise fist and shout “Aaargh!”
• Hoist the mainsail : run on the spot like climbing the rigging
• Mess deck : sit cross legged on the floor ready for lunch
• Davey Jones : climb on anything so you are not on the floor
• Land ahoy : hold hands to eye as if looking through telescope

This was really fun – and I got Captain Jinni (my youngest sister) to call the commands so I did manage to get a few pictures (not great, but you get the idea)





Treasure dig
We planned to do this in the sandpit in our backyard but due to the weather had to improvise on the day by using a large shallow plastic box indoors with play sand. We buried a load of booty in the sand and the kids had a blast digging it all out.

They loved this activity so much in fact that a few (Oliver included) were begging me to let them re-bury all their treasures so they could dig them out again! If we had been outside I probably would have let them, but by this time we had sand pretty much all over our dining room floor! The booty included marbles, gold and silver plastic pirate coins and these cute little charms – anchors, coins and keys.



Sleeping Pirate
For this game you need a blindfold and a big bunch of keys. All the kids sit in a circle, one child is selected to be the pirate, they sit blindfolded in the middle with the bunch of keys in front of them. One of the other kids is nominated to try and swipe the keys and return to their place without the pirate hearing them. The pirate then has to guess or point to who has the keys, they then take the place of the pirate in the middle.

This was the last game we played, and the boys took some rounding up at this point, they all wanted to just run around and play, so we nearly didn’t play it – but Oliver insisted and rounded a few friends up.. they loved this game best of all I think, as they were playing the others gradually came and joined the circle, I think we had all but one guest in the game by the end. They wanted to keep on playing and playing, they all kept getting the giggles when someone was trying to quietly sneak the keys and then there would be a little jangle of keys and the pirate would know who was the culprit!







Treasure chest lucky dip
I found this really cool pair of treasure chests on ebay (I think they are supposed to be for wine bottles or something?!), the large one was just perfect for the treasure chest lucky dip I was planning for prizes.



We made lots of shrinky plastic pirate daleks in different colours, I bought brass keyring parts on ebay and we made them up into key fobs, each one was placed in a little paper bag and the winner of each game picked one out from the lucky dip.



At the end of the party anyone who hadn’t won a prize yet picked a keyring from the lucky dip, and then we all sat round and they had the option of attaching their little charms from the Treasure dig to their keyrings if they wanted (some did – some didn’t). This was a nice way of calming down at the end before everyone went home.



Many of these games were from (or adapted from) this site:
Little Cherry eco-friendly party supplies.

Linked:

a hoard of beach treasures

It’s been a very busy week, one way and another.. I did find time to wash and sort our stash of treasures which have been collected over several days out to various local beaches so far this year. The creamy/white ones on the left above my Mum collected from a Spanish beach on her holidays, some with perfect round holes! They all looked so pretty laid out to dry in the beautiful sunshine.

Some of these were collected when we went to the Pirate weekend at Mount Edgcumbe recently, most of these have come from Mount Edgcumbe, which has a couple of little pebbly beaches which are full of shells and sea glass. My kids have inherited (or learnt?!) my love (obsession!) of beach combing, every time we visit a beach we come back with another load of treasure!



Some of these treasures (heart shaped stones, large sea glass pieces) I have specific purposes in mind for (look out for future projects coming soon), the tiny shells will go into my tiny shell collection jars, and I have promised the kids a jar each to fill with their favourite treasures to keep in their rooms. The rest will get organised into more jars (part of my new getting organised craftiness!) and sit around looking pretty until I have a purpose for them!



Do you love finding treasure from the sea too?

Linked: