Shape Pictures

World Book Day is almost upon us again so we've been thinking about favourite books this week and last. Jessica's taken some pictures into nursery that she's drawn, including one of Gobbolino and Sootica the witch's cats, which we're reading at the moment. Today we turned our attention back to a firm favourite, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark. As with the other animal pictures that follow, I cut out what I was told to and Jessica assembled the pictures. She can be terribly bossy at times!!

This next one is Nala, the black cat that lives down the road from us. I'm not sure why she needed two pink paws or why she's holding them up as if she's begging but I can explain (to some extent) why she has seven whiskers - it is one of Jessica's many whims! She always draws three whiskers on both sides and then a fourth on the left. At this point, she always says, "there's the extra whisker". It's her little style, shows that the picture belongs to her I suppose.

The cat was for me, so she had to make one for Daddy too. Naturally, he got a bird. In this case a Tawny Owl. To be specific, a lady Tawny Owl, identifiable by the eyelashes. Six eyelashes, not seven as her whim has not extended beyond whiskers yet!

Toilet Roll Castle

One of this weekend's crafting exploits was to make a kitchen and toilet roll tube castle for some of Jessica's characters. The rolls are wrapped in coloured paper and stapled together. The turrets are made from self-adhesive stuff (I really don't know what to call it!!!) from Home Bargains. Once I had cut the doors in, Jess added sticker windows and a few beautiful gems from her endless supply. Who doesn't love a toilet roll craft?!

Kat's Melted Crayon Experiments

Kat's second request of the evening on Saturday was to do some melted crayon art. So, out came the crayons, the pencil sharpener and the baking parchment along with the iron and ironing board. She arranged the shaved wax on card before placing it between sheets of parchment paper and ironing over the top. We used the iron on its coolest setting and used lots of baking paper because the wax is pretty greasy and has a tendency to melt off the card so we needed to protect the ironing board. Although it does not always produce the most beautiful creations it is definitely an incredibly satisfying process.

Watercolour Mixing

Colour mixing has fascinated Jessica for quite a while now. It's a brilliant topic for experimentation and there are so many brilliant ways of playing with colours. We've particularly enjoyed using pipettes and liquid colours in the past. Today though, we just used a palette of watercolours and a brush. Jess used a crayon to repeatedly draw around a square tub and I encouraged her to overlap the shapes. She then painted each square with a different colour and was thrilled to find that the overlapping parts colour-mixed. Her preference for pinks and purples led to a somewhat less interesting image than we might otherwise have got but I really do try not to get too involved in these little projects.

Nutella Marbled Loaf

Kat was still in school while we were enjoying our half term last week so she had her one and only sleepover with us on Saturday night. Once Jessica was asleep Kat's crafting demands came thick and fast and it all began with a request to make cake. Big fans of Nutella that we are, we opted for a recipe for a marbled loaf cake from GoodtoKnow. It was very straightforward and the resulting cake was delicious. I think you can probably tell from the photo that Kat wasn't brilliant at splitting the cake mixture in half so we ended up with rather more chocolate than plain cake but no-one's complaining!

Chocolate Making at Craft Cabin E4

We had a lovely morning at the Craft Cabin E4 in Chingford today.  We were there for a birthday party, which they ran brilliantly. Jessica loved creating her own chocolates from the array of sprinkles, raisins, cereals etc. and made a glorious mess spooning the melted chocolate into the moulds to fill them up. The children decorated boxes to take their chocolates home in, played party games and had a nice lunch too. It was a very busy couple of hours and the little lady had a blast. A huge thank you to the hosts and the staff.