strawberry and peppermint play dough

The girl requested pink, glittery and smelling of strawberries and the boy, black and peppermint. I'm not surprised. M made and decorated cupcakes to sell at her shop and T built a zoo with different spaces for the animals to sleep, they both know what they like.

It's very easy- just make playdough as you normally would but add essence in when you add the hot water. 

Some might say Miss 6 and Mr 5 are getting too old for play dough- over an hour of playing with it proves this is definately not the case!

I wish you could smell it : )

 

more lego storage

We've had a good old sell up of T's toys in the last few months. He's traded his wooden fire station and truck and all of his tonka and fisher price toys all for the love of lego. We did buy a lego storage head ( $15 on trade me- thank you!) but it's starting to get a bit full and T sometimes finds it difficult to find the piece he's after. Since I know this is something that he'll be keen on for the next few years, we were in need of some more storage.

Our solution was to put wheels on the bottom of an old drawer. After a sand we painted it using left over wall paint and blackboard paint for the front. The wheels came off our old bed base. The drawer is one from the kitchen of our old house. We kept the drawers when we demolished it a few years ago ( hoarders much?!). I lined the base of it with some Ninja Turtle book cover we had left over.

We all love it. It fits neatly under the wooden tea trolley that he uses to display his 'creations' and there's more than enough room for lego to be added to his collection.

Sorry about the night time photos- it was whisked away and 'labelled' before I could get any today!

pottery painting

http://www.gopotty.co.nz/

Details at the link above, if you're from ChCh ( or planning a holiday here) this is a really fun thing to do with kids- or with some friends. The first pictures are of M and T at the studio painting their mugs, the others are of the finished products after firing.

what we did with leaves

On my internet wanderings I came across this book, click on the link for more details

Look what I did with the leaf!

The pictures inspired me to have the kids collect as many different kinds of leaves as they could and we pressed them in the 'pressers' their dad made.

With nice flat leaves, some paper and some pva glue we created these. I love the elephant attempt best!

We're lucky enough to live near lots of  big trees. In Autumn our section is always covered with lots of colours and shapes of leaves.  Every year I've tried to use some in a creative way- here's some of our older posts for more ideas:

goldsworthy inspired patterns

 leaf crowns

leaf window collage

leaf rubbings

tealight candle holders

I helped organise a craft for my girl's Pippins this week and thought I'd share what we did

supplies:

a small empty jar and its lid- we used baby food ones
tissue paper in different colours
pva glue and brush
buttons
thin ribbon
scissors

directions:

Cut of tear strips of tissue paper
Apply glue to the jar
Gently press the tissue on
Keep covering the jar, overlapping the tissue from time to time

We put some cut shapes on our jars as a first layer

punch a small hole in the lid
Thread the ribbon through the button holes and through the hole in the lid and knot
Put a tealight candle inside
attach lid ( the idea is that this is a kind of handle to carry it by but you must make sure the lid is tightened!)

Light the candle. We lit ours using a lit piece of dried spaghetti. I was told about this technique and was very surprised that it worked.

The candle holder looks really nice in when it's lit as the light shines through the colours

a leaf press- or two

This is sort of a pre post as I'm planning to do something with M and T. recently we went for a walk to collect lots of different types and colours of leaves while hubby made up these presses. They're just 2 planks of wood with holes drilled in each corner for a bolt and nut.

We lay leaves on pieces of newspaper and stacked them on top of eachother as we went. We then tightened the bolts so that the leaves were as squished as possible. Doing up the bolts with the bolt tightener thingee was a hit ( I can see my husband cringing at that as I'm sure that's not what it's called!).