Jungle Tiger

I was inspired by Kathy's beautiful project this week and absolutely had to give it a try with Jessica. So, I copied Kathy's tiger as best I could and we coloured it in together. Jessica insisted on giving our tiger eyelashes and purple eyes! Once we were happy with the image we set about hiding it in the jungle of tissue paper. It's a lovely mixed media piece and we had a lot of fun creating it...

Toilet Roll Windsock

This is another one of our 30 Days Wild activities. We made our own windsock from a toilet roll, some tissue paper and some craft tape. Totally low tech and absolutely not weather proof but when the rest of June is forecast to be like this...

... it doesn't really matter. So, we made it and hung it high in our Cotoneaster. Now we have to wait for some actual wind because we made it on Monday when it was stifling and there was hardly a breeze in the garden.

Blow Paint Poppies

We're participating in 30 Days Wild this month, which is a fabulous challenge run by The Wildlife Trusts. Admittedly, this was much easier for us to do before Jessica was stuck down with chicken pox but we're trying hard to keep going and do something inspired by nature every day in June. 

So, one day last week we took inspiration from the poppies that Jessica has been growing this year and had a go at painting a picture of poppies using a blow-paint technique. We used ready mixed paints but I think liquid watercolours would have been better to be honest. We squidged a spot of paint at the top of each stem and blew the paint into the shape of a poppy. The blow affect is a bit lost as the paint was so thick but it was still an enjoyable activity and we'll learn from our mistakes and try watercolours next time!

Chocolate Owl Cake

Jessica loved helping me make this super-easy cake for her Auntie Ruth's birthday earlier this month. I can't imagine why she was so enthusiastic!!!

Simple Homemade Bird Bath

Jessica and I have made a couple of bird baths now, both using terracotta saucers atop an upturned terracotta pot. They are so cheap and really easy to personalise. We use acrylic paints to decorate outdoor pots. This is the one that we made for our own garden...

We introduced it to the garden while we still had nesting blue tits in our box but I don't think they ever found it. However, this week we're regularly getting a pair of magpies using it. They are fascinating. They're bringing in bits of bread from somewhere and dipping it in our water before eating it themselves or (I suspect) taking it to young in their nearby nest.

Pinecones and Pompoms

Good grief you need a lot of pompoms to stuff a pinecone! In all honesty, I think my cones are a little small for this so they are a bit cramped but they still make cute decorations for the tree. Unfortunately I was part way through a bright pink glue in my glue gun, a clear glue would have worked much better! 

Here are my two decorations adorning our tree...

Pinecone Reindeer

 

To give the blog a brief break from my needle felting exploits I made this pinecone reindeer decoration this afternoon. I have seen the idea in a few places and thought our tree needed one of these this year. It was more fiddly than it looks and I'm glad I didn't try doing it with Jess because it would almost certainly have ended with cross words between us. He was worth a little bit of effort though!

Woodland Friends Garland

I've been busy stitching this week in a desperate attempt to get this woodland garland finished before my friend, Laura, has her baby! When her maternity leave started I thought it was probably time to pull my finger out and get it done! She and her husband have a woodland theme running through the nursery and asked if I'd like to make them something like this for the baby. I jumped at the opportunity and was pleased to be able to make use of a book I bought back in May. Mollie Makes Woodland Friends is a lovely book with some fabulous, simple projects in it. I used the ideas and templates as inspiration for my own make here.

I have used felt from Hobbycraft, a single strand of embroidery silk for stitching and bondaweb to adhere the details to faces etc. The animals and toadstools are lightly stuffed and the pieces are all threaded onto a length of narrow green ribbon. Here's a closer look at some of the individual creations...

Finally, here's the finished garland hanging in my craft room, waiting to be delivered to it's new home next week...

Driftwood Wands

My lovely nephew, Archie, is currently Harry Potter obsessed so Jessica and I gathered up a few driftwood sticks on our holidays in Northumberland with the intention of turning them into wands for his birthday next weekend. I have burned various designs on them and created a little display box for him. Fingers crossed that he'll like them!

Vegetable Printing

We were exploring harvest at Toddler group this morning. Alonside a myriad of other fabulous activities the children got to do some good, old fashioned vegetable printing. We used bunches of celery tied together to make flower-like prints. I used cookie cutters to make potato stampers and we cut apples two different ways to see different prints. Best of all though, we used corn-on-the-cob rollers. I cannot tell you how happy I was when the cobettes were exactly the right size for my rollers!

The finished art work doesn't much reflect how they made them but the little ones seemed to have a lot of fun!

Salt Dough Mice

Salt dough bodies, acorn cup ears and plaited wool tails, these were bound to be a winner!

Jessica made the salt dough and formed the mouse bodies before nursery yesterday. We then painted the bodies and inside of the ears together in the evening before I took over with the fiddly and hot bits - the ears and tails were attached using my hot glue gun. We love the finished family.

Autumn Hedgehogs

I spotted this autumnal craft on Easy Peasy and Fun a while ago and filed a screenshot of it on my phone to be attempted one day. I never really got into Pinterest, not sure why, but my screenshot folder is always bursting with images of the wonderful things that other people make. 

As it was a beautiful, warm September day today it seemed like a good day to find some crisp, dry leaves that would be perfect for this activity. As it turns out we managed to collect them all in the car park at nursery and I think the oak leaves work well. Andreja (author of Easy Peasy and Fun) makes her hedgehog from a paper plate but we just used some card and plenty of double-sided sticky tape. She is 3D and does stand up on her own. I made her base triangular so that her nose comes to a point. We think she's pretty cool!

She's even been off on her adventures in our garden. She seemed to particularly like my Livingstone Daisies!

Salt Dough Acorns

Autumn is upon us and with it a whole new season of crafting. Harvest crafts, Halloween and the lengthy crafting preparations for Christmas are but a few things that will keep me busy in the coming months. 

After collecting Jessica from nursery this afternoon we were in no hurry so we sat down on the path outside and explored some acorns. We twisted them out of their cups, rattled them, opened them, skinned them and left them for the squirrels to collect. Jessica thinks autumn is their favourite time of year; she's probably right. We thought we'd take some home to paint and turn into little people with hats on but that wouldn't be fair on the squirrels so I had a better idea...

Let me introduce you to our salt dough acorn family! 

We collected a handful of acorn cups in the woods near our house and then refilled them with balls of salt dough. I popped them in the oven at 150 degrees Celsius for about 40 minutes, allowed them to cool and then we decorated them using Sharpies. I baked them hotter and faster than I usually would because I wanted the dough to expand slightly so that the hats would be secure. They were fiddly things for Jessica to draw on but she did incredibly well. Here's a closer look...

David wanted to know why we had done this. To be honest, I have no answer to the question. There's little we can do with them now they're finished but the process was fun and it came from one of those special moments when I was just sitting in the sunshine enjoying my daughter and helping her to discover the amazing world around her. I went with the flow and this is where it took us. I suspect we might even do it again!

Blackberry Painting

We have brambles all along the back of our garden and there's a glut of blackberries at the moment. The many that have fallen from the branches are not fit to be eaten so we thought we'd try using them another way yesterday. 

We talked about how dyes and paints used to be made, which we've occasionally seen discussed by Mr Maker - thank you CBeebies. Then Jessica collected a few handfuls and then pounded them in my pestle and mortar to make a lovely squelchy mess!

We probably should have passed it all through a sieve before using it and Jessica would have enjoyed doing that but I didn't think about it at the time. It was fascinating stuff to use because it went on red and dried to a lovely deep purple. Amazing magical ink!

This was a lovely process. We enjoyed it so much that we're now trying to come up with other ideas for making paints from nature. I'm thinking that marigold flowers may work pretty well. I'll let you know!