Leaf people

This was an after dinner craft.... a rare thing in our household. Craft before bed generally ends badly but this did not. I had a large pile of magnolia leaves left over from a flower bouquet. The kids caught me bundling them into a container ready for bath time. I thought they would make excellent lily pads in the bath. The girls wanted to make leaf people with them instead.

Magnolia leaves are lovely – glossy green on one side and dusty brown on the other. I gave the kids a permanent marker each and they quickly figured out that the markers would only work on the brown side. Cakey drew very happy faces and Boo made lots of marks.

I pulled out our stack of plain coloured circle stickers to create faces on the glossy green side of the leaves. Cakey got very busy and made a stack of leaf people – some happy and some sad. Boo over-handles stickers and they lose their stickiness by the time she gets them into position. I gave her a tub of glue and she happily glued her stickers to the leaves.

The kids wanted their leaf people to 'hold hands'. I helped staple them together to create lovely leaf families.

For another way to use plain shape stickers have a look at our sticker monsters.

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along through our facebook page or subscribe via email or RSS. Cheers Ali



Linked to Cheerios and Lattes, It's Playtime, The Kids Co-op and Kids Get Crafty

The Princess buses

Way back in June, on the Queen's birthday weekend, we made princess buses. I had saved two nappy boxes for when the kids were in the mood for creating transportation. Before I handed over the boxes I cut off three of the four cardboard flaps.

Painting the covered boxes

We have painted nappy boxes before –  Cakey gets very frustrated when the paint does not cover up the box print. To avoid this issue, we glued a sheet of white paper on each side of the boxes before we started painting. We didn't worry about getting an exact fit, we just wanted to cover the majority of the box print. Then the girls painted their buses – one in pink and one in blue.

Adding stickers for windows

Choosing the princesses

We left the paint to dry overnight. On the following day the girls applied big white stickers to their buses for windows. Then we were ready to add the princesses.... we found some images of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Mary of Denmark. The girls selected their favourite images.

A paper plate acts as the steering wheel

We added a few extra details. I helped the kids glue on a set of four paper wheels. We also attached a paper plate to the remaining cardboard flap of each bus for steering wheels. The girls spent a happy week driving around in their princess buses. They loved them so much I didn't have the heart to throw them out when they were no longer being used. I have stored them away for a rainy day.

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along through our facebook page or subscribe via email or RSS. Cheers Ali



Linked to Sunday Showcase, The Kids Coop and It's Playtime

Don't do this with cement

Did you see Nurturestore's cement garden tile? I did, and then I got totally excited to work with cement.... and I am not alone, Rebekah from The Golden Gleam was also inspired by the same post. You can read all about her cement adventures today too!

Great idea from Nurturestore

Unfortunately, instead of heeding Cathy's wise advice and making a large cement tile I decided to make some teeny weeny cement blocks. My kids love to build dams, walls, fairy houses and various things in the garden. Little cement blocks would have been so useful. In my head I imagined gorgeous little brightly coloured and perfectly shaped cement blocks that would stack neatly. In reality I got ugly grey lumpy blocks.

Awful idea by me

Here's what went wrong:

1. I decided to use my mini muffin pans as a mould. I thought I was being clever by lining the pans so that they could be used for baking mini muffins after this project...... hahahaha in my dreams.
2. I decided to line one of the pans with circular pieces of plastic cut from an old shopping bag. I chucked a mini tantrum trying to get those liners to stay in the teflon coated mini muffin pan while I spooned in cement.
3. Oh yeah, cement does not behave like mini muffin mixture!
4. I decided to line the other pan with paper patty cases – a bit easier but paper patty cases do not easily come off hardened concrete.
5. To salvage something from this cement disaster, Cakey and I painted our blocks in bright, glossy paint. The gloss was gone after a week and the paint has faded and flaked leaving us with a set of ugly grey cement lumps. Super!
   

This is NOT what I imagined

This colour did NOT last

So here is my recommendation – visit Nurturestore and make a cement garden tile. Leave mini muffin pans for mini muffins. And pop over to The Golden Gleam to see if she fared better with cement.

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along through our facebook page or subscribe via email or RSS. Cheers Ali

Sticker monsters

I feel like I have been posting complicated projects and activities lately. So here is something much simpler – monsters using coloured stickers. This little activity was inspired by the post Creating Splat Monsters from Artful Adventures.

 

I supplied some paper and sheets of multi-coloured circle and square stickers. I love plain shape stickers – Cakey can turn them into anything she wants. Using a pencil and some oil crayons Cakey added some monster details... she decided they were all friendly monsters who didn't want to eat us.

This was an easy, no stress, no mess activity. If you don't have stickers – coloured paper, scissors and glue would do the trick. For a messier version have a look at our splat bugs using loads of glue and glitter.

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along through our facebook page or subscribe via email or RSS. Cheers Ali

Making a puppy sculpture

Cakey loves her toy puppy, it goes everywhere and is a constant source of anxiety for me... please, please let us NEVER lose puppy. Our entire house would fall apart and the world would end!!! Anyway the point I am trying to make is that Cakey loves anything and everything to do with puppies. So I found a photo of the Puppy sculpture by Jeff Koons that I saw when it was being exhibited in Sydney many years ago. The puppy is a huge sculpture of a west highland terrier made from living flowers on a steel structure. I am guessing there is some dirt in there too. It is beautiful.

Jeff Koons' sculpture Puppy

We decided to make our own puppy sculpture but on a much smaller scale. I vaguely thought about trying to create a wire mesh structure and filling it with soil and flowers but that thought got quickly relegated to the too hard basket. Instead we used playdough.

Using toy puppy as our model we constructed him together, I made one side and Cakey made the other. We found some buttons to use as eyes and a nose.

Measuring up an ear

When puppy was sculpted we popped him and two baby puppies into the oven to harden... but it didn't really work. You see we did this project before I knew anything about salt dough, which will harden in the oven. Normal playdough doesn't. The surface of our playdough puppy did dry out so I figured that would have to do.

Can you see the likeness?

We collected flowers from the garden to decorate our puppy sculpture with. We tried to sticky tape the flowers on but sticky tape doesn't stick to playdough. In the end we glued them on with pva. We learnt a lot from our failures.

Gluing on the flowers

Our flowery puppy sculpture sat on our outdoor table being admired by all, until the flowers died and we removed him to the bin. Toy puppy lives on strong!

For future I have found a recipe for salt dough – one cup water, 2 cups plain flour, 2 cups of salt. Check out the Nurturestore playdough ebook for more instructions and playdough recipes.

Linked to It's Playtime, Red Ted Art, Learning Laboratory and Link and Learn

I can't believe we made an oil rig

An oil rig - whatever next?! It was completely unexpected and I'm still laughing that we pulled it off. Cakey the Queen of Questions spotted a tub of vaseline on the table during breakfast that I was using to sooth my sore nose from a nasty cold. "What's that?" she asked. From the deep depths of my memory I told her how vaseline was first produced as a by-product on oil rigs. The oil rig workers used the unrefined version to sooth cuts and burns. I suggested we check my story on the computer as I wasn't sure if I had made the whole thing up. It turns out that I was right... first time for everything! During the internet search we came across photos of oil rigs and Cakey wanted to make one.

We made a list of all the things we needed to make an oil rig:

• platform
• legs for the platform
• three boats
• cottage for the workers
• helipad
• oil pump

First we made the pump out of pipe-cleaners, paddle pop sticks and pva glue. The sticks kept falling off the pipe-cleaners so I anchored them down with bulldog clips while the glue was drying.

Paddle pop sticks held in place with clips while drying

Next we found a box to make the platform and I scrounged up four cardboard rolls for the legs. I cut some tabs into the rolls and taped them to the platform – not exactly sturdy but they did the job.

We ran around the house looking for little boats (and a toilet roll holder for the third boat) and anchored them on the side of the platform with string and tape. Luckily we had a little 'house' box that we used as our workers' cottage. My favourite part was wrapping two little people in shiny foil paper for little raincoats. Cakey added the helipad by taping a piece of cardboard to one side. Last but not least we secured our oil pump to the platform by sliding the pipecleaners through a slit in the box. And then we played with it.

Our little worker in her raincoat

We love using recycled materials in our craft projects, for more recycled inspiration have a look at my Recycled Materials for Craft pinterest board.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali

When Christmas craft goes wrong

My Christmas flag

I mention in my profile that some of the art and craft projects that I do with my eldest daughter don't go well and this is one of those. It bombed big time!!

Cakey and I had a wonderful time making pretty pink market stall flags a little while ago so I thought she would enjoy making some Christmas flag decorations... I was completely wrong. I spent a fair bit of money buying Christmas fabric, ribbon, gold braid and jingle bells. I then spent a couple of evenings cutting up the fabric and tying the jingle bells onto gold string. Cakey spent a total of 5 minutes making one Christmas flag. Arghhhhh

Cakey's Christmas flag

With a little hindsight I think this is what went wrong...

1. Much to my distress I think the biggest problem was that there was no pink and purple involved. Cakey is really rebelling against the traditional Christmas colours - she refuses to accept that Christmas colours are mainly red and green and tells me repeatedly that HER Christmas colours are pink and purple. This is annoying and I hope the pink and purple phase (at the exclusion of all other colours) ends soon.
2. I interrupted an episode of Diego to do this activity. What was I thinking?
3. When she was in the mood to do this activity I wasn't ready and when I was ready she wasn't in the mood.
4. I really wanted this activity to go well as I had spent time and money. I don't know why but these highly planned and prepared activities are often failures.
5. When she showed little interest in making the flags I pushed rather than just packing it away and trying again another day.

Oh well, I had fun making my Christmas flag and I think my little niece might like to make use of our Christmas flag supplies because her favourite colour is red.

For more Christmas craft ideas check out my Christmas Pinterest Board.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali

Is it an active volcano?

They might look like fancy hats but they are actually submarine volcanoes

Cakey had her first sleepover when her lovely 5 year old friend came to stay. We decided to do a craft project that stretched over the two days. On the afternoon of arrival, the girls sat down at the coffee table with a big box of textas and an A1 size piece of blue card (210gsm) each. I asked them whether they would like to make submarine volcanoes. The answer was 'yes'. I suggested that first they should draw their underwater scenes – fish, plants, squid, sharks etc. (Note: the reason we made underwater volcanoes was because I only had blue card).

The following morning we turned their underwater pictures into submarine volcanoes.

I twisted each piece of card into a cone shape and used a stapler and some sticky tape to hold them in place. I then trimmed the bottom so that they would stand up unassisted. Next we did some research on the computer ie. looking up images of volcanoes. We discussed the difference between active, dormant and extinct volcanoes. Both girls decided that they wanted to make active volcanoes as they liked the pictures of volcanoes spewing lava. We ripped up some pink tissue paper and cut up some strips of red florist paper to make the lava. Using pva they glued the lava onto their volcanoes obscuring all their wonderful drawings.

Although the girls did enjoy this activity they only got super-excited when we were looking up volcanoes on the computer. Now every time we go past a small hill, Cakey will ask 'is that an extinct volcano mummy?'. The next time we do a volcano activity I think I might need to find out how we can make it actually erupt, which will be far more exciting.

UPDATE – Thanks to Julie who provided this information on how to make an erupting volcano: "Vinegar and bicarbonate of soda will create a good eruption, you can also add food colouring to it for a different effect. Put the bi carb in a film canister or something similar make the volcano around it to disguise and then add a little vinegar. Beware, it does make a mess!!"

Linked to The Play Academy 
Linked to The Sunday Showcase
Linked to Red Ted's Art blog 

Bubble wrap crocodile

In case you can't tell this pic shows two crocodiles in their watery croc home

I received an ebay package the other day which came with loads of bubble wrap. Do all kids love bubble wrap? Mine do. Once the bubbles had been popped we decided we should make something with it. Cakey suggested a crocodile. Armed with sticky tape we each made a crocodile, rolling various bits up to make the body, arms, legs and head. I cut two triangular tails, one for my croc and the other for Cakey.

Our crocs pre-paint

Cakey painted both the crocodiles. Bubble wrap is excellent to paint because it has such a great texture (watch out: the paint does flake off after a week or so and makes a mess). Next Cakey wanted to make them a nice watery home so she painted some bubble wrap blue and stuck them down in an opened box. We were both quite chuffed with how it turned out.

If your child hates crocodiles try making their favourite animal. Remember kids are really forgiving – it only has to vaguely resemble what you say it is. I like to choose two main features of an animal to focus on – for the crocodile it was the tail and head. I find that those two features are usually enough to satisfy a preschooler.

Mini mountain

...weirder than a David Lynch film

I am a little bit embarrassed to post this project and I actually had no plan to post it until a friend of mine encouraged me to. This activity really showcases the importance of 'process not product'. The 'product' is a strange looking thing but the 'process' was loads of fun.

It all started when my partner was pruning our cypress tree and we all thought that the cut branches smelled like the mountains. Cakey then wanted to make a mountain. We had an old party hat lying around so out came the sticky tape and Cakey happily stuck the cypress leaves on it. Next came a conversation about what animals live in the mountains....goats, kangaroos, snakes....so the animal box was raided and on they were stuck. This activity kept Cakey busy for a good half hour and triggered a long conversation about mountains and how they are formed.

This activity also proves you don't have to be into crafts to do crafty things with your kids. Sometimes the simplest things work the best. And really you could create any type of mountain you wanted – a snowy mountain with packing peanuts, a magic mountain with party streamers, a mountain with hikers and flags and so on and so on.