Summer is here

Hello my dears, and welcome to another page of rubbish crafting! You will find this week’s offering  is a particular good example of the genre.

Sorting out the junk  craft materials I  have hidden around my house I found I still had a lot of bottle tops. I haven’t used that many for the toddler group craft as they do not stick to things very well, and if they do manage to stick usually fall off in a couple of days. They are not an ideal medium for a toddler group anyway as several of the small children like to taste them – usually the same ones that like to eat the PVA glue and paint the plastic tablecloth.  Bottle tops seem also to be the one thing that the mums at toddlers collect for me to use – I have no idea why, I have never asked any of them to, I have asked for them to save yoghurt pots, toilet rolls, wrapping paper and sweet wrappers, but no they bring me bottle tops. Anyway I needed to use up some of the many(many, many) bottle tops I had.

So I tried some ideas on a summery theme – it also used up the pretty bases of the graze boxes I had been collecting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are supposed to be 3D pictures of a caterpillar, beetle and butterfly. A bit too abstract for a 3 year old, even my own loyal 6 year old couldn’t identify the beetle.

I improved the butterfly a bit using some gummed circles I found in the cupboard.

 

These 2 on the left were the examples, these ones  on the right are my children’s pictures. I don’t think they were going for minibeasts- probably just keeping me happy!

 

So summer is definitely here, I spent this afternoon making cakes for cake plates. Preschool and school summer fetes are both on Saturday, both at the same time.

 

I did make raspberry and white chocolate muffins but they cooked a bit too long- and the ladies that sort out the cakes at school are very ruthless –  I think these would have ended up on the ‘staff tray’ – the resting place for dodgy looking cakes.

 

 

So instead they are getting these, plain buns decorated by a 3 year old. I’m not too upset by this, means I get to keep (and eat) the muffins.

 

 

 

 

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Coming to the end…..

Hello,

 Well no craft to show you this week as we went on our playgroup summer trip. It was a little bit wet and a little bit sunny so not too bad a day at all. I even managed to find a present for my mum in the gift shop- so I hope she will be watching the post everyday with bated breath.

I now only have one (or possibly two) weeks left to provide craft at toddlers so the question is what to do now?

Fathers’ Day Craft

 

Take a muller light yogurt pot and a nutella lid and glue together.

Wrap in tinfoil.

Make 2 thin ‘sausages’ out of tin foil and tape in place to look like handles.

Tie some ribbon around middle.

And this is what you get:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perfect trophies for Fathers’ (or Father’s ???) Day. Would love to know what you think.

My husband and daughter have also been rubbish crafting this week, making a dinosaur for her to take into school.

 

                                        Amazing what you can do with a load of old junk.

A whole load of rubbish.

This week’s craft was designed with one aim in mind- to use up as many of the things that I had been collecting as possible. I have recently realised I have far more craft rubbish in my kitchen and office (and under pinball machine and in my greenhouse) than I have need for at toddlers. The sensible thing would be to bin it as soon as toddlers has finished but somehow that seems wrong.

Anyway, this week I have managed to use up all the toilet rolls,  the strawberry boxes (left over from the Easter baskets a few weeks back), some card I have had for a while and the tops of washing liquid bottles I collected just in case. Pretty good going really.

Using these 4 things, a lot of masking tape and some paint these dumper trucks or diggers (depends which way you drive them) were made.

 

A tiny bit of imagination is needed (the bottle tops are supposed to be drivers or chimneys ( according to my daughter)). But you get the general idea.

I guess this idea can easily be adapted for any box, just remember to fold the cardboard so that the truck can tip the rubbish out.

Well that’s it for this week, I found this photo on my camera of my 4 most favourite people (my husband’s knee is just to the edge of the picture, probably better than having all of him in the photo).

 

Catching the sun

Hello,

Sorry for the slight blogging delay, will be back to normal next week- and its a going to be a great craft idea then….

This week I went for simple but beautiful- much like life. As you can see a week filled with camping, fossils, hotels and musicals has left me in a very relaxed state of mind. These suncatchers seemed ideal.

Using my favourite faddish resource – a graze box- I took out the inner (which is a piece of cardboard with 4 rectangles in that looks like a window).  I then taped a  sheet  of stiff, clear plastic (in this case they were OHP sheets that someone had donated to the toddler group) to the back. I then glued torn up strips of tissue paper all over it

 

 

It looked like this:

Held up to the light it looks like this:

Very nice, I can imagine that done in blues and yellows it will look very summery this one looks a bit stormy.

Enjoy your weekend.