Building ships with boxes

A cool little competition flew into my inbox. A cruise ship building competition with no restrictions on what materials you can use.... awesome! And you know what, we haven't had a great big crafting session in ages. When I uttered the words 'wanna make a cruise ship' the kids jumped at the chance.... their poor little neglected crafty souls screaming for tape and paint!

Cakey took on the challenge of making a cruise ship with cardboard boxes. We always have a stack of boxes in our tub of stuff that would normally hit the recycling bin. Having a tub of empty boxes as well as various ephemera is soooooo useful  for crafting and even, dare I say it, independent crafting.

Cakey decided stacking boxes was the way to go, securing them with sticky tape. She cut a door for the people and made a chimney with a massive plume of smoke, made from white tissue paper. Boo copied Cakey, as a little sister will, stacking two small boxes and adding a figurine person to sail her ship. Cakey added a life boat to her cruise ship. Sail boats are her speciality. She makes them using a styrofoam tray as the base and attachs a sail made from a straw and a piece of paper.

This project deserved paint. Cakey chose red, black and gold, Boo chose 'every colour paint'. I added some pva glue to the paint so that they could stick on some sparkles.

Cakey also got to try my new drawing tool - the white out pen. I have seen Alisa Burke use a white-out pen in her work and I have been intrigued to try it. Cakey got to it first and drew on the name of her ship and some windows. It worked a treat.

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

4 apps for kids

Do you do the app thing with your kids or not? Is playing with an app on an ipad better than watching television... worse.... or pretty much the same thing? I don't really know but what I do know is that our kids want to use our ipad.... it makes sense – I want to use it too! Everything in moderation, eh?

There seems to be about a trillion apps available for kids – and it can be hard to sort the good from the bad... and that is where word of mouth can come in handy. I would love to know what apps your kids love to use. And, in turn here are the popular ones in our house. (Now would be the time to apologise to android users... the apps below are all available from the itunes store for ipad.)

1. SquiggleFish

Available in the itunes store here (£1.99)

This app combines good old fashioned drawing on paper with the technical fun of an app. The kids draw sea creatures on white paper with a black outline and whatever colour they like. Once the drawing is complete you can take a picture of the sea create within the app. Then watch as your mermaid or fish or submarine comes to life and swims in the sea. When I first tried to get this app to work I got frustrated until I read the instructions. There might be a lesson in that.

2. The Human Body

Available in the itunes store here ($2.99)
This is an amazingly detailed app of - you guessed it - the human body. You can watch blood pumping, analyse bone structure and record your own sounds. But what the kids love best is making their avatar eat and then poop. On a sidenote this app is illustrated by the amazing designer and illustrator Kelli Anderson.

3. Mystery Math Town

Available in the itunes store here ($2.99)
This is one is for my 5 year old. It is part adventure, part spooky house and part mathematics. It involves searching for fireflies and releasing them from their glass jar prisons. To get through any door or window you have to solve a maths equation – you can set the difficulty level. Try touching some of the furniture in the houses, there are some cute extras.

4. Paper by 53

Available in the itunes store here (Free but then all extra bits to make it good cost $2.99 each)
I downloaded this app for myself but the kids have taken to it. It is a simple drawing app, it works well for us as we can each have our own separate journals within the app. It is a little annoying that you end up spending a lot to add the extra functionalities. Make sure you like it before you hand over the cash. If you and your kids like this drawing app I recommend the paintbrush and the color mixer tools.

What apps do your kids like?

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

Christmas Pudding Decorations

Oh golly gosh these Christmas plum pudding decorations are so cute. Cakey and I had a great time making them and they look fab hanging on our Christmas tree.  I love a tree filled with homemade and kid-made Christmas ornaments.... don't you? Check out some of our other homemade tree decorations here and here. And keep reading to find out how to make these little puddings! 

Materials needed:

Small polystyrene balls (40mm)

Wooden skewers

Brown paint

White air drying clay

Red beads and green leaves

String and an anchor bead

Step 1: Skewer your polystyrene balls onto a wooden skewer and paint them a pudding brown. The kids made their own brown paint.... after all, they have had many years of practice making brown paint (they used a mix of red, purple and yellow). Leave the painted puddings to dry completely. 

Step 2: Once the paint is dry remove the skewers. Mould some white air drying clay over the top of each pudding ball – try to make the clay look like custard dripping over the pudding. Before the clay is dry make sure you re-open the hole created by the skewer - otherwise you won't be able to thread a string through the pudding.

Step 3: To decorate the puddings, push red beads and green decorative leaves into the clay before it dries. Sometimes the beads fall off once the clay has dried – glue them back on with superglue.

Step 4: Once the clay is completely dry, grab a needle and thread. Tie a bead onto the string to act as an anchor and thread the needle through the hole left by the skewer. Tie the string at the top to make a loop and hang it on your Christmas tree.

And there you have it! For more Christmas goodness have a look at my Christmas Pinterest board. 

You may also like to check out some of these kid-friendly Christmas crafts:

15 Christmas Decorations for Kids to Make by Picklebums

Icicle Ornaments by Happy Hooligans

Popstick Wreath by Childhood 101

Chenille Candy Canes

Toilet Roll Reindeer by The Craft Train

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

Printable Christmas Gift Tags

Christmas is speeding towards us like a freight train! The kids are already full of Christmas excitement. At this time of year I tend to be excited about Christmas too. It isn't until closer to the big date that I falter in Christmas spirit.... brought down by the weight of endless to-do lists!

Anyway... before I get to the bah-humbug stage I created some cute Christmas tag printables for you. I didn't feel like going with the traditional red and green Christmas themes. Instead I chose the partridge and a the pear tree and a deliciously plump Christmas pudding.

You can DOWNLOAD them free for your personal use here (partridge) and here (pudding). I hope you and your friends and families like them.

For loads of Christmas craft ideas check out my Christmas Pinterest board. You also might want to have a look at last year's homemade snowflake Christmas cards and tags.

And if you want more free Christmas printables, check out these:
Printable Christmas Gift Tags by Caroline Johansson
Holiday Greeting Tags by Eat Drink Chic
Vintage Pink Santa tags by Shabby Blogs
Lovely type base and funny Christmas labels by Emily McDowell

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

Travel Activity... Journalling

We recently spent some time travelling around New Zealand in a campervan. It was great fun and I would love to do it again. I thought our holiday would be a perfect time to introduce the kids to journalling so before we left I bought:

• Acid-free spiral bound A5 diaries
• Some fabulous bright watercolours that were perfect for travelling (this is not a paid link I just LOVED them). 
• Small paintbrushes
• A variety of artline fine felt tip markers 

Every second day we all sat down and did some drawing and painting in our diaries. It was a combined family effort, Cakey and I often worked together on the same page. There was no right or wrong way to do this, we just painted what most appealed to us from the day. The best thing about this is now we have a lovely keepsake of our holiday.

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

Halloween Witches Brew

Halloween produces mixed reactions from the grown-ups here in Australia. There are those you who love a chance to dress up and then there are the others who turn off all the lights and pretend they are not home. I am yet to meet a kid who is not excited by the prospect of Halloween.

Having spent some of my childhood in Canada where I experienced the full North American Halloween extravaganza I have a soft spot for the holiday.

Plastic Halloween stuff has been in the shops for a few weeks and Cakey has been running an intensive campaign to buy buy buy. With a week and a bit to go I finally succumbed and bought a pile of creepies – spiders, skulls, eyeballs, rats and a severed hand. Awesome! These will probably be handed to friends in a game of spooky lucky dip.

In the meantime, I thought we should have a little fun with them so I set up a witches brew activity. It was simple. I supplied a cauldron (my casserole pot), jugs of water, blood (bowls of water mixed with red food colouring), eye droppers, spoons and assorted creepy crawlies and gross things.

The kids mixed up the brew, adding everything but the severed hand. The brew was well mixed and then ladled out into bowls. And then I sent them both to school with red stained hands... I am really hoping they don't call the stains 'blood'.

I hope you all have a super-fun Halloween. I have been busy with an exciting side-project but I hope to be back blogging with a little more regularity soon. Cheers Ali

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