Birthday

L turned 7 and M turned 16, M's birthday was easy to do, she was happy to have a friend over, share cake, go shopping and then have a sleep over. L wanted dragon themed party, based around How to Train Your Dragon, so just a little bit more work!

I have been saving all the cardboard boxes to cover the veg patch for the winter (we do no dig gardening) as well as any art project, lucky really, as it was decided shields was one thing she wanted to make, hubby cut out all the shields and I made dragons out of paper plates.

The cake had to be Toothless, according to L I did a really good job, huge sigh of relief, he wasn't easy to make! Please excuse the slight blurred image, I didn't realise till I uploaded the photos there was a small fingerprint on the lens!

So on party day we also had some homemade gingerbread eggs, for the children to decorate, a couple of dragon themed word searches, dragons to colour in

shields to paint. It was fair bit of prep beforehand but so worth it all the children had a lovely time.

We also had a trip to Marwell Zoo, as L really wanted to especially see the red pandas. As well as the giraffes. 

the meerkats

You don't want to know how excited L got when she spotted her first real red panda, even if they were very well hidden!

Then one of them got up and decided to go for a walk, so we really got to see them, they are beautiful creatures and I can see why L loves them so much.

New Pets

The girls have been wanting guinea pigs for a long time, imagine their surprise when their brother comes back from uni with 2 guinea pigs that needed a new home. Meet Rolo and Biscuit, who are enjoying lots of attention and settling in well. The rest of the month has been spent in the garden growing veg, repurposing old duvet cases and cooking lots.

L has started sewing and making a very neat job of it too.

So I have been busy repurposing some an old duvet cover, used the pattern section to make some new hankies and then the plain white part to make some produce bags.

Making homemade cordial and then using the left over orange and lemon peel to infuse some vinegar for cleaning with.

Ginger Cordial

200g root ginger, peeled and broken into large pieces

1 lemon grated rind and juice

600g caster sugar

1.5 litres of water

15g citric acid

Add all the ingredients to a pan, dissolve the sugar on a low heat for 3 to 4 minutes.

Then bring to the boil and simmer for 40 minutes.

Remove from the heat, when cool, strain through a cloth.

Bottle and store in the fridge, I have also frozen some too for later use.

Orange Cordial

3 oranges, juice and zest

500g sugar

600ml water

15 citric acid

Place water, sugar and orange peel in a pan, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes.

Remove from the heat and add the juice.

Leave to cool, strain and bottle, keep in the fridge.

This seems to be Max's favourite place to hang out and watch the world go by, he rarely leaves the garden, sometimes he sits on the fence but most of the time he likes to watch the world go by. safely from his own garden.

Sorting out left over fabric I made one of L's dolls a dress, I will put it by for her birthday next month.

A good friend of mine came back from holiday with some lovely fabric as a gift for me, made L's favourite dress, the geranium by Made by Rae, must admit it was one of my favourites too.

First harvest from our garden veg patch, hopefully lots more to come throughout the summer.

L and I went on a bug hunts and found not only ladybirds, but ladybirds in the pupae and larvae stage too. 

Jackson Pollock and The Secret Garden

Not Jackson Pollack and The secret Garden together, though thinking about it now that could of produced some lovely artwork!

Our weekly art group's theme this week was Jackson Pollock, L loves his artwork and enjoys painting in his style. The first few paintings were done at the art table,

 

they then cleared the floor and put down some large sheets of paper (poster size) and let the children paint there, the finished piece is huge!

We have been looking at the different biomes in our Monday group and they put together a mini lapbook, they rather loved the penguin drawing using a number 8 as the base, so we used their favourite ones to decorate their lapbooks.

One of my favourite childhood books is The secret Garden, ok one of many childhood favourites! I thought it would be a lovely one to share and create some beautiful art work to go along with it. As the story starts in India and talks lots about the heat, we used some chalk pastels to create sunsets, all but my own child who decided she would prefer to draw a cactus dessert.

We looked up India in our illustrated Maps book and they saw the peacocks, so again using chalk pastels they drew some peacock feathers.

Using this simple guide on how to draw a peacock, they drew their own ones.

With the story now taking us to the journey across the moors with the wind and the rain. I thought using pencils to create trees was a lovely way to try out different materials and also to show the contrast between the bright colourful start to the book and now the drab, dulling setting we were now travelling through in this chapter.

Then to contrast again, watercolours to show the secret garden coming alive and of course the robin that helped Mary to find the garden.

Catching Up

Hopefully will now get back into blogging regularly, have lots of photos and things to share, then the computer dies on us!! Now have it back from being repaired and caught up and all the jobs that need to be done. Recovery from op is going well, loving getting out and having at least a 30 minute walk daily, still doing my physio exercises 4 times a week, its great but been busy as trying to do all those jobs I wasn't able to do before my op.

So going back to before Christmas I offered to have a couple of L's friends for a couple of art and craft sessions, this went so well that they asked to come every week! So more than happy to share my time with enthusiastic children, so in January we started to meet weekly, using the Greek myths as our theme, will share those in another post. Any way back to December we started with the story of Wilson Bentley and how he persevered until he he was able to record the beauty of the snowflakes. We also read Curious About Snow, which has some beautiful pictures of snowflakes and talks about the science behind them, how humidity and air temperature change their shape. The girls made up their own little booklets with some snow facts in then, then had some fun making gingerbread snowflakes to decorate later.

The girls work so well as a team, I can stand back now and let the 3 of them get on with the cooking, other than dealing with the oven, they are fairly self sufficient with their baking.

Mary Azarian who illustrated the Snowflake Bentley book, makes woodcut prints, I don't have the right tools or knowledge for this so we used the florist oasis blocks instead. They girls carved pictures into them, a pencil works really well for a carving tool, then printed on some brown paper I had saved from various deliveries we had to create their own wrapping paper.

Our second session was based around the story of the little fir tree, well two different little fir tree stories, we started the session of with the girls telling us what they knew about fir trees and deciduous trees. Why they loose their leaves in winter, why fir trees don't, the design of the fir tree and how this benefits the tree when it snows lots. We talked about how the little tree wished his life away, was this a good or bad thing? How much did he miss out on by doing this? Do we ever do this and why do we feel that way. In my Christmas sort out I found some wooden fir trees so they set to work painting and decorating their own xmas trees and made some paper plate wreaths.

 

We also made some origami fir trees, the instruction video can be found here

They also made some salt dough decorations to hang on their trees at home, we made them a few years ago with cornflour to give the whiteness to the shapes, using this recipe.

 A little bit of Christmas sewing, a gift for my Aunt, can add she loved it.

I finally finished L's Rosebud jumper, it wasn't the easiest pattern to follow but she loves it and that is what counts.

Polare bear cupcakes made by hubby and L

 and of course homemeade mince pies.