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!!

Fun with packaging

Recently I bought a lightshade.  It was an awesome lightshade and I saved up for a looong time to afford it.  It's from The Glow Company and it's in the shape of a ghost.  Not only that, however, it is also coated in glow in the dark paint so that it absorbs some of the light while it's on and when you turn the light off, it glows green, giving you enough light to find your way to where you were going without stubbing your toe.  I love my lightshade.

My kids, however, were much more fond of the packaging than the lightshade, and it did come with a LOT of packaging:

This box was as deep as it was wide, this was a serious overkill on the packaging front

This stuff is brilliant, it sticks together with water, although they do get very, very sticky if they get too wet.

So, we split the work and I made the legs:

I made five of them.  I'm not sure why, I think I was having a funny five minutes

 My nine year old made a head:

This was approx attempt no. 478.  I'm not sure what kept going wrong, but this was apparently the closest to what she was trying to make

My six year old made a body:

It's fairly evident she was paying attention when they studied bones at school recently

And then we stuck them all together and left it to dry:

Ta da!  One creature of some description.  Not quite sure what it is, but it's a masterpiece nonetheless.

An Early Start

My nine year old woke up early a couple of weeks ago and tried to watch the sunrise out of her bedroom window.  Unfortunately we live in an estate so she really didn't get to see much of any interest.  I promised I would take her to see a sunrise at some point.

So last weekend I took my two youngest to go to see a sunrise (my helpful (sometimes) teenager was much more interested in sleeping, so she didn't come with us).

Fortunately we live within about a 20 minute drive of an easterly facing beach, so we set off at about 6am to see what we could see.

Waiting on the beach for the sun to rise - with the class elephant who we had home for the weekend!

First few colours appearing in the sky

It's all starting to look a little storybook now

THE SUN!

I love having a camera with a good zoom

More colours working their way into the sky

Messing about with the camera - catching fairies

On the way home we stopped for this one.  Kind of wish we had waited at the beach a little longer but it was cold and we wanted breakfast!

Fish cushions

Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that a week or so ago I posted about redecorating my 6 year old's bedroom in an underwater theme.  I will be blogging the rest of the room painting when it's finished (might be a little way off yet!) but this week I've been making fish shaped cushions to go on her bed in keeping with the underwater theme.

First I found a selection of different coloured plain material and cut out some fairly chunky fish shapes, two in each colour.

The next thing to do was to sew a button on each where a fish eye would be, then put the two sides together (the side with the 'eye' on inwards) and sew around the edges, except across the end of the tail.

Then I went out to the garage to find an old sofa cushion.  I have bought a few sofas on ebay over the last few years, it's helpful that I have a very nice father (but don't tell him I said that!) with a trailer, but it's not hard to pick up an old sofa for less than £10 and the amount of wood and stuffing you can get out of them is incredible.

So next step was to take the padding out of the sofa cushion.  Different cushions are stuffed with different things, but this particular one had two layers of sponge as their padding.

And then cut it into a fish shape (I could get two fish out of one layer of sponge)  I also rounded the edges.

I turned the fish shaped material the right way out again and put the padding inside it.  The padding was reluctant to go through the narrowest part of the tail, so I had to roll up the padding tightly to get it through, and then flatten it out again afterwards.

Next thing was to sew up the tail with hand stitching, folding in the edges to make sure they didn't fray.

Ta da!  Finished fish cushion!

 Once they were all finished they were ready to go on her bed (or mattress on the floor as it currently is while the room is being done)