Rosy Red Glue Apples

Our craft for Toddler group tomorrow is a little bit different. As we did last year, we will be creating a display for the Harvest Festival at St Mary's Church. This time around we're going to be making an apple tree. I'm planning to get children's handprints to use as leaves and we will be making a bumper crop of rosy red apples for the tree. These apples will be crafted with copious amounts of PVA glue on top of plastic lids. When the lid is covered in glue the children will be able to stick a wide selection of red things to their lid. I love using PVA on top of plastic because once it's dried it just peels off and you're left with these lovely pieces of artwork that make brilliant suncatchers. I'm hoping I can pull off creating the actual display but for now we need to let the children have some red messy fun!

Foil Art Cake Card

Jessica created this birthday cake card using ripped double sided sticky tape and some spare foil sheets from our Galt Foil Art kit. The process worked really well and I'm now planning some similarly simple Christmas card designs. It's never too early to think about Christmas as a crafter - particularly for one whose child has just started school!

Polystyrene Pizza Base Printed Ice Cream Picture

Jessica brought her first book home from school today. She had chosen one about a trip to an ice cream shop. It's a book with just pictures and she enjoyed telling the story after she'd spent a while studying the images by herself. At the end of the story there are a number of questions to answer and then a few suggestions of other things you could do or discuss to engage further with the themes. We decided to make our own ice cream picture. 

We cut up a polystyrene pizza base into a wedge to use as the cone, a rectangle for a flake and two circles for vanilla and strawberry ice cream. We printed the paint with these shapes using the textured side for the cone. Jessica mixed red and green paint to make the brown for the cone and flake before adding glitter glue as sauce, glitter and paper stars as sprinkles, foam shapes to be marshmallows and a paper strawberry complete with felt-tipped pips. 

This all worked so well that I'll definitely be doing it at Toddler group later in the year. 

Handmade PE bag

It's the first day of school, you're suddenly restricted in your choice of clothes, your book bag has been accessorised with a cat keyring from your summer holiday but it's still basically the same as the other 59 book bags that enter the building along with yours for the first time today. You like to be a little different and you definitely like everyone to know how much you love cats so what you really need is for your Mum, who is trying to come to terms with her little girl starting school today, to have made you a very special, very catty PE bag. Well, Jessica, you're in luck. I mastered eyelets and rustled up this fabulous bag just for you! 

This was a really simple sew that took well under an hour and Jessica was thrilled!

Velvet Pictures

Now, these really take me back! I haven't introduced Jessica to velvet pictures before but I will definitely be buying some more. This one gave me a very welcome quiet afternoon at the end of the long summer holidays. She was so focused and did the whole thing in one sitting, which I hadn't expected. She was really pleased with the neat finish that the black velvet sides give as they help stop you going over the edges too badly. I picked this one up in Home Bargains I think but Galt do a very inexpensive book of 10 lovely designs that we'll try next.

Decorated Birthday Present

We ordered my sister's birthday present from George this year and used their Click and Collect service. When we picked it up her crockery was in a large cardboard box so we decided to decorate the box rather than wrap them up in paper this year. It was so much more fun! Jessica wanted to make it into a tiger so we painted it orange and black before adding some unique features...