Fun with cotton wool

This started off as an attempt to make decorations and just ended up as some extremely messy fun with cotton wool.  That kids loved it, however, but don't expect anything decorative to come out the other end. 

We assembled some cotton wool, a few empty pots, a variety of food colouring colours, a couple of pipettes from an old Make Your Own Bath Bombs set, and a jug of water.  We also later added a spray bottle of water.

My kids got these 'Messy Mats' from Father Christmas a couple of years ago, and they are amazing.  I highly recommend them!

We mixed a small amount of food colouring with some water in each of the tubs and then used the pipettes to drop small amounts of the colours onto the cotton wool.

This very quickly turned into a massive science experiment with lots of 'I wonder what would happen if ...'

I wonder what would happen if the cotton wool was dry

I wonder what would happen if the cotton wool had been dunked in water

I wonder what would happen if I wrapped a dry piece around a wet painted piece and then rolled it around

I wonder what would happen if I flattened out the cotton wool

I wonder what would happen if I made it REALLY wet

I wonder what would happen if I put a wet painty bit around a dry clean bit and rolled it around

I wonder what would happen if I splatted paint all over a big bit and then sprayed half of it with water

So this is the finished array of creations.  There is an attempt at some Mandarin characters in there somewhere, and a big blob which was being used for stamping yellow all over another piece at one point.  Anyway, it kept us occupied for an our or so!!

Drainpipes

Luckily for me (or unluckily depending on your point of view) I and my children get an extra week of the Christmas holidays to most so today we have been back to the holiday activities.  Today's was making ball runs out of pieces of old drainpipe.  First step was to collect pieces of old drainpipe from the garage.

Second step was to remove kitten from drainpipe ...

The children then found the highest thing in the lounge we could attach them to - we went for the clothes drier and some string

The string tying took a lot of attempts to get it right, drainpipes are not fond of attaching to driers!

Next thing was to attempt a corner - this was done with a LOT of parcel tape, and a chair balanced on a box to give the right height for it to rest on the other end

This is also possible in houses with clear and tidy sofas

After that we went on a mission to make the ball double back on itself, which was much easier said than done.  Another acre of parcel tape and 250m of string (plus a margarine tub) and this was sorted!

After a test run where the ball stuck to the parcel tape I had to put another piece on the inside of the end stop

And then finally a last pipe to take it back to the clothes drier, and (occasionally) into a cardboard box at the end of the run.

Then all that was left was to watch it work.  Sometimes.

The kids played with this for hours!  All the joints were repaired at least five or six times before I finally had to take it down to hang up some washing to dry

Christmas Decorations part 4 - tree angels

Our Christmas trees went up a couple of weeks ago - one main one in the lounge which I am particularly precious about, and a slightly smaller and much cheaper one in the playroom that the children get to choose the decorations for and decorate themselves.  Both, however, needed an angel for the top of them, so this week we have been making them.

I got together a mass of general craft equipment, including shiny and coloured card.  Quick thank you to my cousin who threw out a lot of this stuff and passed it on to us.

Selection of craft material (aka a pile of rubbish)

 We also needed two toilet roll middles

In case you don't use toilets and therefore don't know what a toilet roll middle looks like

The kids chose the colours for their angels' dresses, and I cut out some U shapes, the width being the same as the length of the cardboard roll

So then, they wrapped the card around the tube to make a dress.  We stuck it with tape and put some PVA glue around the top to hold the tube to the 'dress'

It needed a slight trim to make the bottom even, but otherwise pretty good!

Next thing we needed a head, the kids chose some pink card we had (this was from my cousin's stuff, thank you Rachel!) and cut a circle for the head, with a 'neck' the same width as the inside of the cardboard tube. 

Once the head was decorated with a face etc, we put it in the top of the tube and stuffed either side with cotton wool to hold it upright

After that we needed to think about wings.  The kids chose gold and a ridged silver which I cut into semi circles (sort of) for them 

It's easiest to hold them against the back of the angel to get an idea of what size you want

Once the kids were happy with where they were positioned they stapled them in place and ta da!  Finished angels!

A finished angel.

 Lastly, we needed to put them on the Christmas trees, so this is angel one on the children's tree:

And this is angel 2 on the main Christmas tree:

Christmas Decorations part 3

Regular readers will remember (maybe) that we made a playhouse out of a large cardboard box a few months ago, and this week we've decided to make it part of our Christmas decorations.  Although this is an enormous cardboard house, I don't see why it couldn't be adapted to work just as well with smaller cereal box houses.

The finished Christmassed house

 The first thing we did was to make a wreath to hang on the front door.  I did have trouble taking this picture since our kittens keep pulling it off the door and fighting over it, but I managed to get it hung up for long enough to at least get this picture.  All this is is a few pipe cleaners twisted together, with green strips of paper wrapped around and a few blobs of red glitter glue.

Then we spent some time sticking gems on around the top of the house like coloured lights (sort of).  I drew a stringy lights shape around the top with chalk to stick them on so that they didn't end up all over the place.

I bought a couple of rolls of cotton wool to cover the roof and bottom of the window panes for snow.  Once it had been stretched out to stick down we didn't actually need as much as I had feared.

Make sure you buy cotton wool rolls, not balls, otherwise you'll be there all year and it will cost you a fortune!

We put some snow on the top of the chimney and cut some boots out of a sheet of black plastic from a cake packaging and glued them in the top.

 Then we decided that if Santa was on his way down the chimney,  his sleigh and reindeer should be nearby waiting for him.

Only four reindeer since there was limited space on the top of the house

The sleigh was made from a sheet of polystyrene from some packaging (I seriously never throw packaging away, you never know when it might come in useful!) decorated with glitter glue, then slotted together to hold it up.

I'm not 100% sure where Santa is going to sit, but I guess that's the least of his problems all the time he's stuck in the chimney with his boots in the air!!

The reindeers were made out of toilet roll middles (I know some people are concerned about the hygiene aspect of using them, so I guess kitchen roll middles cut in half would work just as well).
We stuck some googly eyes on the sides, cut out some antlers from some gold card and attached cardboard legs by poking them through slits cut in the sides of the roll and folding the ends over to hold them in place.  Then we used a big red pompom stuck to the front of one of them for Rudolph.

Park Crawling

Not a lot going on this week so I shall use the time to tell you about summer 2012.  We had lived in our current house for about three years at this time and my children had spent a large portion of local journeys saying 'can we go to that park some time' about probably every park in the local area.  I'd always said we could and then not got round to it, so I decided we would have a day for park crawling.

I spent some time on Google Maps locating exactly where the parks were and our best route, plus a pub with a play garden to stop for lunch.  We packed up some drinks and coats etc and set off about 10am with a plan of no more than 30 minutes per park and to be back before dark.

So we set off and, to be honest, not an awful lot more to the story, the kids played at a lot of parks, we liked some more than others.  The ones we didn't like so much only got 20 minutes and a decision to not bother to return to them, the ones we liked more we spent a bit more time at and remembered for future trips to the park.

By the end of the day it was getting dark, we were all so tired they were barely able to climb a slide any more and parks had ceased to be nearly so fun as they had been at the beginning of the day.  We didn't get home until 6 and take it from me, 8 hours is a long time to be in a constant state of playing in parks!

Also, if we ever do it again I shall take plasters - 8 hours of park crawling is pretty likely to include at least one bleeding knee!

Christmas Cards

Before I start, my blog is a little late this week because our family cat has died, which has thrown all our plans and made some things not happen quite as they should.

We'll miss you, Marie, even though you stole my dinner!

Anyway, before all that happened, I have been making Christmas cards with the children.  We do this every year, so last January (and the previous nine or ten) I cut out all the pictures and words from cards we had received ready to use to make them the following year.  By this point we have quite a collection:

These are all the words I have cut out from old Christmas cards

And these are the pictures

Then we get out glitter and googly eyes and scissors et, largely we treat it as an 'anything goes', and with some folded card we make all the children's cards for their friends at school.

Spot the one which was accidentally made the wrong way round ...

Coming soon:

More Christmas decorations

Curtains

Pillow cases and duvet covers

Christmas Decorations part 2

This week we have been making some more Christmas decorations.  These were really easy to do, and need very little to make them.

So, first step was to cut out some different length strips of card.  I can't tell you any measurements because mine were dependent on the width of the ruler I was using and the length of the card.  But anyway, you need two small, four medium and four long lengths of card:

It's also not necessary to keep your table as messy as this one, that's just me

 Next thing, I stuck them together so that each strip had a red side and a gold side.  The children did theirs differently, the colours don't matter just so long as both sides of each strip are pretty:

We found that paperclips held them pretty well and stopped them bending outwards while they dried a bit.  Don't leave them to dry completely as they will need to bend in one of the later steps

After that We made a whole in either end of each strip using that time-honoured Blue Peter style poke it with a sharp pencil with a blob of Blu-Tak or Play Doh underneath, until there is a hole in both ends of each strip.

Sharp pencil necessary, blurry photography optional

Hole in each end - don't make the mistake I made here of punching the holes through the paperclips, I REALLY regretted it when it came to taking the paperclips off again later

Once all the holes were punched the next thing was to attach them together - short one in the middle, longest on the outside - and tie them through the holes.  I found some shiny purple ribbony stuff which I thought would be great for this, turns out it's really hard to get through the holes, and the pipe cleaner I used for the one hole we ran out of ribbon for was amazing.  Pipe cleaners all the way!

I hope you're learning from my mistakes, people!!

Tied together

Then tie together the other end, bending the longer strips outwards.  As you see, this was the pipe cleaner end.  I really wish I'd thought of this before watching my children take 20 minutes poking ribbony stuff through a tiny hole with a pencil.

All three of them together - shiny shiny shiny

Christmas Decorations part 1

This week is half term so we have been back on the activities again.  In the past I have tried to do Christmas stuff with the kids closer to Christmas but there's never time to get it done during the school week, so these days we do it in the October half term.

We've done all sorts of stuff which will slowly make its way onto here, but for now I shall take you through the stained "glass" decorations we've been making.  We've done this before, and I'll put the older pictures on the end too but this year we made snowmen.

First thing was to find some thick cardboard.  Fortunately I had recently had a delivery which had big cardboard packing corners, so I got the kids to draw themselves a snowman.  He needs to be fairly big.

Next thing was to cut out the snowman and all his detail.  I used a craft knife for this, it's the best thing I've found.  With corrugated card it tends to bend if you try to cut it with scissors.
There needs to be a reasonable amount of cardboard between each hole.

A very smiley snowman

Then, the kids painted them white and we left them overnight to dry.  I might have done a sneaky second coat while they were asleep too, but don't tell anyone.

I had to eat a whole load of sweets to get enough wrappers for the next stage.  It was a terrible hardship but I struggled on for my children :P

Once the snowmen were dry we flattened and cut the sweet wrappers and glued them on the back of the snowmen.  Make sure they don't cover from one hole into another.  The back looks an absolute mess at this stage, but trust me on this ...

One orange nose

Different coloured eyes and a red jacket

Once it is all dry, your snowmen are complete, simply stick them to a window and they make a lovely Christmas decoration.

As I said before, this is not the first year we've done these, here are some others we did last year.  We did different patterns and we painted them black,  There were a lot more fiddly, however, because there wasn't so much cardboard between the coloured areas.

Coming soon

More Christmas decorations, Christmas cards, and the Helena dress from the My Chemical Romance video is nearly finished.

Busy times!!