Hoodie!

I found this great hoodie tutorial today and couldn't resist giving it a try! The only fleece I had enough of was black and not enough for the hood but the Angry Birds fleece worked as a perfect contrast in the hood! Also matched the trousers I made him last Christmas - he may be moving up to his brother's soon though as they are on the short side!! Eden loves the hoodie though and kept wanting me to snuggle him! Any time!!!

The hoodie tutorial can be found at http://thecraftykitty.co.uk/2013/12/16/rohan-hoodie-pattern-tutorial/ with downloadable pdf pattern.

The trousers is the much used Katrina's Longies pattern which I have used more times than I can remember! http://katrinassqs.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/longies-pattern.html

Craft club junior! Book page art

Following from the previous nights book page craft club (here) I thought I would try it with the boys!

I let them use the sharpies under supervision (but still ended up with a permanent doodle on the tablecloth!).

Then they used crayons to colour it in. It took a little persuasion to get them to leave some bits blank for the colour to show through but they were really impressed with the results. I was too!!!

 JJ decided to draw 'Daddy's car'!

 While Eden went with a house design!

I love them!

Craft Club - Book page art!

After I had such fun making a house warming card (here) last week it seemed a great project for Craft Club!
I loved everyone's creativity and the different approach everyone took. We found a bit of 'pinspiration' in  some designs and others took their cues from the book pages themselves such as Tara's cute dummy drawing in the parenting manual.
We also used various art materials - mainly water colours of which Jacquie educated us all on the official colour names, as well as pencils and paint markers. The outlines were done with either a fine tipped or standard sharpie.
It was also a great fun night a lovely excuse to drink wine and craft with friends!

Here are some picture and results!

Junk Art !

This is a project that has been on the go for a good few months now!
I wanted to get rid of a lot of the boys toys that weren't being loved anymore or were broken but thought they would bring some happy memories in years to come so I decided a giant rainbow art piece was the way to go!
I started by pencilling out a rainbow onto a canvas which Joplin then painted.

I then began to glue-gun the toys I had collected on to the canvas in their different colour spaces. 

 It is gradually being built up. The only big hitch though is that when it is left between gluing sessions the boys 'discover' their old toys again and want to re-love them!! See those white patches? They were once filled with toys!!

And here is the finished product!! Still a work in progress really and I am still trying to persuade Eden that he really doesn't need the purple broken toy dinosaur he hasn't played with in months! It was great fun too make although a larger project than I originally thought!

Conkers!

We have had great fun collecting conkers the last few days over the park and on walks. The boys collected exactly 100 on their first outing - couldn't have managed that if they had tried to count!

Anyway, we weren't sure what to do with them all until I left the boys on their own to play and came back to this! A giant conker man!

Driftwood embroidery

A lovely project for today combining drills and embroidery needle - great fun!

I found a small piece of driftwood which I then marked out the word 'home'.

I then drilled holes along the wording. I initially used my Dremel, but it struggled a little. I then tried my Grandad's old hand drill which worked perfectly! The oldies are the goodies!

When all the holes were drilled I then threaded wool onto a needle and backstitched along the wording. 

I love the end result! Simple but effective! I have popped it on the printers tray with the stones I 'sharpied' in Spain, and  the wood weaving from our recent camping trip. I think it fit's very well!

Eden's 4th Dinosaur Party

Eden wanted a dinosaur party for his 4th birthday. Well actually it was initially a batman party, then a 'ladybird dinosaur' party and then he decided to drop the ladybirds!

I started with the invitations. These were great fun to make!

For the food I kept it fairly simple with dino twists where I could! I was working all the previous day and the party was at 11am so there really wasn't time to go too fancy. 

Book page drawing / greeting card art

My lovely friend has just moved into a new house and I popped round for the grand tour this evening.
I wanted to give her a welcome card / gift and came up with this artwork based around a torn book page. I have seen similar around and love the mixed media approach. My drawing ability is very limited but the paint markers providing the smash of colour around the basic line drawing on an old book page was simple yet effective!

Sweetie Wreath take 2! (Secret weapon loom bands!)

I have been making sweetie wreaths such as this pervious post here each Christmas for the last few years since a visit to Dan's sister in New Zealand who always makes one for Christmas!
I was approached a couple of weeks ago by a good friend who works for a firm wanting to put on a charity fundraiser / team-building craft workshop. As the company distributes sweets it seemed the perfect craft to take advantage of the raw materials available! As I will be teaching to a team rather than individuals however, some tweaks needed to be made to simplify it.

The first step is with a wire coat hanger. This needs to be stretched to form a circle shape.

This is followed by winding a long strip(s) of fleece around the hanger. 

Now comes the new secret weapon .... Loom Bands! After the 24 hour initial enthusiasm from my son we now have hundreds around the house and they seemed the perfect solution. 

Lego Party!

JJ wanted a Lego party this year for his birthday!
We decided to keep it small - ideally to be able to comfortably all build together around the table so we invited just 5 of his best school friends.

Both boys helped me with the invitations and we had quite a production going with the cutting of circles and sticking in a 6 nobble Lego brick shape, with sticky tabs helping the nobbles slightly raise.

Food wise everything had to be square (including square crisps which they were probably the most excited at for some reason!)
 I cheated a little with the brownies with shop bought mini ones but 'legoed' them up by adding choc chips to make a 4 square brick.

I had tremendous fun making the lego cake stand!!!

Sandwiches were of course lego bricks with circles of bread cream cheese glued on top.

 And I made a sleeve for rectangle cartons of juice to give the lego brick appearance.

The cake was homemade - a basic rectangular victoria sponge with oreo cookies on top, iced with red butter cream icing. Slightly messy but they enjoyed it and it wasn't too much of a challenge for my rudimentary skills!

 The balloon lego men doubled as decoration and then party balloon cups later filled with sweets and a small lego kit. (A newspaper had done a lego give-away earlier in the year and I had stocked up in anticipation of the party!)

All the food went down a treat anyway! The juice sleeves became actual sleeves and lego arms were sported for the rest of the party!

Schedule

As the children arrived the first activity was to guess how many bricks in the jar. 

We later counted them and the winer was only a couple of bricks out! (there were 43.)

They were then invited to sit at the table where I had prepared different tubs of lego bits - wheels, bricks, flat plates, steering wheels and people bits. The challenge was to make a car which we would then race. 

 One at a time they let go of their car at the top of a wooden slope and we marked on the floor where the car stopped with their names written on masking tape.

The winner used the excellent technique of bigger wheels and went the longest by far!

We then  went outside to play brick and spoon race - 

As well as a bean bag toss into hoops with different coloured cardboard lego shapes. 

Along with pass parcel, corners game (with a spinner and again using the lego cardboard shapes at each corner ) and lots of free play in the garden it was great fun! It was actually a very stress free party with very little prep too! Can't beat lego!