Crafting around

The wet weather has meant lots of indoor time lately. Karsten, our two year old, loves making craft (or perhaps more accurately, watching Mummy make craft and occasionally assisting). Here are a few crafts that we recently enjoyed.

Ocean animals

Last week, Karsten became fascinated with sharks after a visit to the aquarium. So we indulged liberally in this new fascination with this little piece of sea...

Material:
Clear plastic takeaway container (we used the lid of a takeaway sushi box)
Water
Agar jelly
Blue food colouring
White cardboard




To make the deep blue sea, I boiled some water (enough to fill the plastic container) and sprinkled lots of agar jelly powder into it. Once it's cooled, but not set, I poured the warm mixture into the plastic container. Then we dribbled a little bit of blue food colouring into the mixture and gave it a swirl - but not too much! - to give it a marble blue appearance.


Whilst the mixture was setting, we drew and cut out different sea creatures onto cardboard - octopus, fish, and of course, sharks. Then as the mixture solidified, we put the various animals into the ocean (best done whilst the mixture has started to harden but not completely set). An origami boat completes the scene. Now, let the hunting begin...

Flower pots

 

Neither my husband nor I have a green thumb. But I live in hope that our children might be more diligent gardeners than I am. Here's what we did to plant that seed of curiosity...

Material:

A plastic tray, preferably with compartments (we used the bottom of a sushi takeaway box)
Cupcakes patties
Collage paper
Straws
Blu-tack or play dough
Green paper, shredded
Brown rice, loose tea leaves



We made the flowers first by flattening the cupcake patties, and sticking a shiny piece of collage paper in the centre. A straw was stuck to the back of each flower with sticky tape (tip: different lengths of straws will look better). We put the flowers into the tray (one in each compartment if the tray has compartments) and used a lump of play dough at the end of each straw to keep the flower upright.


Now the fun (and messy) part! Into the tray, we sprinkled different kinds of "soil" (the tea leaves, brown rice, or anything else that looks similar) and then lots of grass (green paper).


The flowers bloomed for a whole day before over-enthusiastic handling saw it start to wilt.