Brown paper advent calendar

 
I saw a homemade advent calendar on Pinterest recently with star shapes cut out of brown paper. We decided to make something similar. Instead of using the star shape we used our Xmas cookie cutters to make angel, tree, flower and gingerbread man shapes.

I traced the shapes and cut them out. Jasmine then helped me write the numbers 1 to 10 and stick on some string.We used baker's twine in red and white and pink and white.

I wasn't sure where to hang our numbers for our 10 day count down to Xmas. We could have used a ribbon or a coat hanger but since we have a lovely wire card holder in our kitchen we decided to hang the numbers there.

When we get closer to Xmas (still a while to go I know) we will cut down the shapes one by one until there are none left and Xmas has arrived. Yay!

Artkive - digital storage for artwork

Now that Halloween festivities and my kids' birthday party have been and gone I can do a bit of sorting and tidying before the surge of Xmas crafts and other activities are upon us.

My kids share a room so that we can have a spare room to use for playing, crafting and storage but for some reason we still seem to end up with "stuff" all over the place. I can never find anything when I need though I must say I am quite good at finding things today that I needed yesterday. Is this something that happens to all of us? Or just me?

My kids have a drawer each in our spare room cupboard for their Kindergarten artworks but this is rapidly filling up. So you can imagine my excitement when I was recommended a mobile app for storing kids art digitally called Artkive- http://www.artkiveapp.com/

I downloaded the Artkive App for free via the App store. It is really easy to use. I take photos of the kids artwork with my iPhone or iPad and then artkive them into different albums. So far I have just created two kindergarten albums - one for each child. You can give each artwork a title, date and description if you like.

Maybe at the end of the year I will print off a book. This could make a fun gift for someone. It will certainly be a neat way of storing their fabulous first drawings.

I highly recommend this App.

Halloween crepe paper decorations

If you're looking for a simple Halloween decoration I highly recommend these crepe paper pumpkins. We had yellow crepe paper handy so used that but of course orange would look even better.

Step 1 - take the folded crepe paper out of the packet and draw your pumpkin outline on the front sheet.

Step 2 - cut out the shape and open up to see a string of pumpkins.

Step 3 - draw faces on each pumpkin using a black marker pen.

 Too easy! Jasmine also requested a string of hearts with our red crepe paper.

DIY Halloween costumes

We thought we'd make our own costumes for Halloween this year. For Alex, he requested a skeleton so I used a white t-shirt crayon to sketch one on a black t-shirt. He'll wear this t-shirt with some skeleton print pants made by his talented grandma.

For Jasmine who doesn't like anything scary, we decided she could dress as a "treat" while she wanders the neighbourhood chanting "trick or treat". We settled on a packet of Smarties. We used pencils and cardboard to create her outfit. I drew the tricky bits and Jasmine did the colouring.

In order to make the blue background, we used pencil shavings and grated pencil lead and smudged them with our hands.

Halloween jelly snake swamp

As a special treat in the lead up to Halloween we made a jelly snake swamp for dessert. It's a bit gruesome but the sugary goodness makes up for the ick factor.

We used two packets of green jelly crystals, crushed cookies and a packet of jelly snakes.

Halloween ghosts

We're getting into the ghostly spirit of Halloween this year with some simple ghosts made of styrofoam balls and cheese cloth.

We had three different sized styrofoam balls from Spotlight to choose from. We chose smaller balls in the end as they were lighter and could be easily hung with a simple eye screw and string.

Cutting the cheescloth was a bit of a guessing game I must admit .... We did two layers of about 1.5 metres for each ghost.

We like our cute, friendly twin ghosts.

Recycled plastic

Our household recently embarked on a plastic collecting mission with the aim of seeing what we could create with all our new found bits and pieces. It was amazing to realise just how much plastic we use in our lives and to think that not that long ago plastic didn't even exist. We found different forms of plastic - clear, opaque, soft, hard. Some plastics were smellier than others.

We used scissors and a hole puncher to create a necklace made up of different plastic shapes which Jasmine took great pleasure in parading around the house. 

Alex used sticky tape and everything we collected to make all sorts of plastic ships and flying machines. While I can't say we made anything especially beautiful or worth keeping forever it was certainly an interesting exercise to take notice what different kinds of plastic we use around the house and what ways we could think of re-using it to create something fun.