October Crafts

Art group was based around the book The Lost Words, they had black ink and lots of leaves to print with or create whatever design you fancy.

Then onto some printing, Ls view is you should say yes to words, not remove them from the dictionary.

Halloween crafts, including a black cat made out of a paper plate.

Bats made from cardboard rolls and enjoying trying out new pens on black card.

Watercolour night sky.

Birds are enjoying our new bird feeder.

August

August we made the most of sunshine, lots of time spent in the garden, which is producing a nice lot of veg for us.

The girls have been enjoying different art classes put on by our local art centre, M attended a couple of teen classes which she really enjoyed and L attended the younger group, she made a diorama with her favourite animals in it.

The following session she made a penguin puppet with a fish for his supper.

All the years of watching me set up various tuff tray scenes, L now does her own.

We have adopted a new rescue bunny, he's another mini rex, not the best photo of all 3 but its very difficult to get them all together! So going from left to right, here is Lucy, Rosie and Jack.

L has started a nature journal, she has spent ages drawing and decorating various pages.

I know its upside down, I have deleted the original and can't work out how to rotate it the right way but wanted to share it anyway as L spent ages going through her bird books and then drawing all their eggs.

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.