Painted stones

Acrylic paints are brilliant. We love them. Fast drying (which avoids everything turning brown) and hard-wearing it is the perfect choice for this project. Dad buys packs of 20 12ml tubes from The Works for just £5 for the kids so it doesn't break the bank either. 

Over Whitsun last year, Dad bought a couple of brooms and buddlejas for his front garden. Planting them produced an array of stones in the rubble that I dug up so once the hard work was over, Katryn, Archie, Jessica and I set about painting what we had unearthed. If you look closely you can see that they were generally painting creatures: bees, ladybirds, ants, spiders, butterflies, a millipede and a toad are about all I can identify from this picture! Here they are in Dad's pebble border...

Back at home we've also decorated quite a few stones and shells. Jess loves it when I do painting with her as opposed to watching her do it by herself so we usually bring a stash in from the garden and she tells me which ones I'm allowed to decorate. I find it really therapeutic and Jess likes playing with them out in the garden. 

During one of the few hard frosts this winter I ventured out early and spotted these beautiful ice crystal formations on all of our stones and shells. I couldn't resist snapping a picture and sharing them...

St David's Day Holiday Homework

Half term holiday homework for Katryn and Archie was to create something inspired by Wales. I believe it's a St David's Day competition. Two of the seven wonders of Wales are Llangollen bridge and Pistyll Rhaeadr, a stunning waterfall. Both these wonders are very close to my childhood home and were the inspiration behind the crafts that Katryn and Archie created.

Katryn used painted lasagne and button mosaics to create a fabulous image of Llangollen bridge...

Archie made a collage to represent Pistyll Rhaeadr with a lovely Welsh dragon floating in the middle of the waterfall...

 

Lasagne Mosaic Flower

Archie was lucky enough to be the only Wave 4 swimmer who took up Chirk's booster sessions over this half term. This meant he benefited from three 40 minute one-to-one sessions with his wonderful swimming teacher, Rebecca. As a special thank you at the end of half term, Arch made her this beautiful card. He painted some lasagne sheets green, blue and yellow with acrylic paints before breaking and gluing. I still love this craft!

Shades of Autumn

Archie's holiday homework last October half term was a lovely activity that inspired a rather elaborate response from the pair of us. The Year 1 class were asked to go for an Autumn walk, to collect leaves and create a collage. 

Earlier in the week we'd been making pretty pictures using flowers and contact paper so we thought we'd try a similar thing with the leaves. Archie asked to cut his initials out of the paper to create the apertures which he eventually filled with his beautiful selection of leaves. Before this though, Archie wanted to try out doing some melted crayon art so we grated some autumn coloured wax crayons and he sprinkled them liberally all over the page. Using baking parchment I ironed it to melt the wax. We then covered the whole sheet in contact paper and Arch stuck the leaves down on the back of the paper to cover his initials in leaves. I'll be honest, it was all a bit over the top but we enjoyed it and it was certainly something a bit different!