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Make your own little Loom Band looms 19 Jun 2014 2:43 PM (10 years ago)

Loom Bands! It's a craze. A big fiddly tweeny fad that just last week swept up my eight and nine year old. I've been reliably informed by friends back in California that this is very much a "thing" over there too. I just need to keep the tiny rubber bands away from the baby because he's pretty good with the old fine motor skills for a seven month old, and everything looks like a tasty snack to him!

I wanted to slap up a few pictures of the hacked together looms that we made today for the kids to make different types of bracelets on. There are no photos of them actually being made because I was out in the back yard on my hands and knees with a drill and a toddler and a baby in a buggy and you just need to see them to realise exactly what I did, because it's really simple.

I wasn't going to be getting the proper plastic loom thing that is sold to make these with, because I'd have to get two because there are two older kids for a start, but also they just look like they are over engineered for the job. The kids had been making the more simple bracelets just using their fingers to loop the bands over, but it becomes tricky to put things down mid bracelet when you're doing that, and you can't do the more complicated ones with fingers anyway.

We made three different looms, each by just drilling a hole into a bit of wood and then banging a few little nails into the appropriate places. Sanded the wood a little to smooth off the drilled hole and edges, but really it was that simple. By using two nails fairly close together as the loop point, it's really easy to get the little hook in to pull the bands over.

The easiest loom was the one with two loop points.

The next was one with three loop points.

Then we skipped right ahead and made one that had six loop points.

Even little Del was intent on having a go. She's got a lot of focus for a kid that's just turned three last week, but I guess when you can see your two older sisters doing something, you really want to do it too.

I put together a bunch of photos to show how the three loop point bracelet starts, builds, and ties off. If you click on the image below it should open up the full size image for you to see it better. The black bands that you see making the start are eventually snipped with scissors and pulled out and thrown away.

Hope that was of some use to someone out there. My kids are having so much fun with this stuff. It's lovely that they want to make them for friends and it's great that they are small and light, so cheap to send to friends overseas too! It's very much like those dolly bobbin french knitting thingies we used to have as kids, but just so much easier and more fun with elastic bands.

Bathtub Ice Cube Curling 10 Feb 2014 2:52 PM (11 years ago)

It's the new craze. You heard it here first! Well, maybe not, but it is kinda fun and silly. We invented this slightly daft take on the Olympic sport of curling last week. The weather here has been atrocious and rainy day ideas were needed.

The Winter Olympics in Sochi are now in full swing, and if letting the kids play "Laundry basket Luge" on the stairs is a little too terrifying, pop on over to the post I've got up on Alphamom.com showing how we made our ice cube curling stones, and what the basic rules and scoring is for a game.

I have a bit of a secret fondness for the sport of curling, because up until the early 1990s there was a little workshop near where we lived in Wales that made curling stones from Welsh blue granite. They would mill out cylinders of rock from this rough cubes, and then sell the left over rough cubes with cylindrical holes in them as planters for gardens, and there are still quite a few around the place in people's front yards. I thought that was super cool when I was a kid. I guess I was pretty into creative reuse from an early age!
As with most of the things we get up to, you don't need much to do this, just a muffin tray, some paper clips, and some crayons. Full post can be found here.

Thank you too for the get well wishes. I am actually doing a lot better a lot faster than we thought was going to be the case. I'm just very impatient and want to be back to normal, which is likely to take another three to six months so they say. I'll be able to walk up in the pretty Welsh hills, pain free by the summer time hopefully.

Golden Snitch Valentine's Favor Printable 9 Feb 2014 1:27 AM (11 years ago)

Another Valentine printable for you! This one lets your Harry Potter fans make a 3D "golden snitch" card (four to a page) for their BFFs. The free printable is available for download over at Alphamom.com 

Ultimate Souper Star Valentine 3 Feb 2014 2:31 PM (11 years ago)

Helloooo! Valentine's Day is fast approaching again. Where does the time go!?! I just made an easy peasy lemon squeazy printable valentine for classmates. And it's punny! I love cheesy puns. This is a soupy pun though.

You will need to get a bunch of mini Necco wafer rolls to wrap up inside these valentines. Easier to come by them in the US than here in the UK, but I went for these because the tradition of classroom valentines isn't really done here in the UK, but is very popular back in the States.

Because the Necco wafer rolls are only about three centimeters tall, these are teensy little soup cans. If you want to make a few then pop over to the post here on Alphamom.com and download the free printable there.

Here are a load more Valentines themed bits and bobs from Filth Wizardry's past to save you searching through my badly organized archives.

• Hershey's Kiss lighthouse printable.
• Plastic bag iron on valentine's patches.
• Giant lolly pop Valentine's card.
• Candy friendship knot printable and instructions.
• Cardboard valentine's crowns.
• Toilet roll tube valentine's necklaces.
• Crepe paper rose tutorial with video.
• paper plate hats (heart ones, but many others too).
• Kitchen paper and baby wipe kanzashi flowers.

Awesome baby is still awesome and is going to be three whole months old tomorrow. .Like I was saying... where does the time go?!? The littlest big sister is absolutely besotted with him.

In other news... A year and a half after our move from the US to the UK we finally unpacked the "slot together panel" one twelfth scale doll house that we made of our old American home. We waited all this time so that the kids were settled and happy and it wasn't going to make them sad to see it, and miss the old place too much. They were very excited to see it again, and as Delyth was so young when we first made it, it's totally new to her and she loves it! Hooray!


I should show you what the kids had made to use as a doll house during the time that this one was packed away, because it's pretty epic. They took custody of a bunch of the boxes we used to move, and constructed a massive upright doll house against their bedroom wall. I helped them get the structure they wanted and we hot glued and taped it all together.

They kept adding to it throughout the year that we were living at that house, until it was really quite elaborate and well decorated.

I don't have a photo of it in all it's completed glory sadly, and when it came time to move house again last August, we had to pull it apart as it wouldn't fit through the door, but they enjoyed it while it lasted. The last photos I got of it were about six months before we moved and they had done a lot more on it by the time we took it apart, but you get the idea. The old poster tube was an elevator that stopped at the different floors.

One side was meant to be a Polly Pocket Condo, and the other side was a Transformers base. The Pollys got on reasonably well with the Autobots. Not so well with the Decepticons though. Starscream kept using the roof to launch himself from.

3D Printable Christmas Tree Card 20 Dec 2013 3:54 AM (11 years ago)

Hello! I have a Christmas printable I made for you! I made a baby too, but I'll show you him in the next post. Anyhoo, this printable card thingy I made, it's over at Alphamom.com and if you like colouring in then you're going to love it. Lots of little decorations to colour! All you need is card to print it on, colouring pencils, scissors, and glue. We filled ours with sweets to give to the kid's teachers at the end of term. 



Also, here are 15 of our Christmas time posts from current to years gone by (list and links below this image) in case anyone is looking for a few extra ideas of things to do with the kidletts.

• 3D Christmas tree card printable.
• Star of treats advent calendar (save your wrapping paper scraps and loo roll tubes to make this one for next year!)
• How to make 6 pointed snowflakes with a nifty simple folding technique.
• Printable gingerbread house holiday card with opening door to reveal a family photo.
• Candy cane sugar cookies that hook on the rim of your cup.
• wrapping paper printing with laser cut felt ornaments.
• printable Christmas set designed to be coloured in and stoof up with Legoes.
• melted plastic bead tree decorations.
• Paper plate wreath decorating and cheap wreaths from newspaper.
• Giant cardboard trees to decorate with stickers.
• Easy paper plate angel.
• Slackers advent calendar.
• Salt dough tree decorations
• tissue paper and condiment cup advent calendar.
• Freaky snowmen "decorations" (I still giggle looking at these)

Oh go on, you've twisted my arm, here are some photos of the cute baby with his sisters (I'll tell you more about him soon) Now that we have four kids, Paul has started nicknaming them "Eenie, Meenie, Mynee, and Mo." He's 6 weeks old now and completely rad!

Father's Day Printable and Update on the Filth Wizards 13 Jun 2013 1:28 AM (11 years ago)

Hellooo! Nearly Father's day! I've drawn a Super Dad illustration that can be coloured in and have a photo of dad's head glued on, plus a little fill-in-the-blanks greeting to go inside that is a bit silly, but fun. You can find the printable over at Alpha Mom here.

I've been a bit slow with the blog the last couple of months because I've been feeling rough as a badger's bum. This is because I am manufacturing another family member! So, come the beginning of November there will be four little filth wizards. We're currently all crammed into two bedrooms, so there's a house move on the horizon too, hopefully in the next month, and that way we can have the seven and eight year old sharing a room and Del (who is two on Saturday) and the new bairn sharing when the baby is big enough.

I'm feeling less exhausted and nauseous now that I'm nearly half way through this pregnancy, so hopefully I can get some more projects up on the blog soon. The kids have made a massive cardboard thing that I really want to share with you! Also, school holidays start here in a few weeks, so we're looking forward to lots of extra time for making messy things, especially now that it's staying light outside until 10.30pm! The house we're hopefully moving to has quite a dilapidated garden, so I figure letting the kids make another junk town this summer is on the cards.


In the mean time, have a lovely father's day weekend! I think we're taking the family to the roller disco on Sunday night. I will resist the urge to crowbar my pregnant self into some gold spandex Kylie Minogue hot pants for the event. Maybe Paul can wear them over his trousers for the full Super Dad look!

Battle of Hoth Ice-cream dessert printable 3 May 2013 6:06 AM (11 years ago)

Star Wars Day is coming up on Saturday (May the Fourth be with you), so that's a perfect excuse right there for me to indulge in some Rebel Alliance themed geekery with the kids. If you fancy making your family a nice cold dish of Battle on Hoth, then pop on over to my post at Alpha Mom, where I've made a printable template that you can download.


And if you think a sci-fi themed battle dessert is a little odd, you're lucky I didn't go with my original plan, which was to make an upside down cheesecake pit of Sarlaac. Yeah. Nobody wants dessert that looks like vagina dentata, so, you're welcome.

In other Star Wars news... We met some of the Rebel Legion UK at the Newcastle Maker Faire last weekend, and the kids were very happy to have their pictures taken with a storm trooper and an X-wing pilot. They took great delight in telling the X-wing pilot about the Helmets they made a couple of years ago, and the storm trooper mask too.

We had a fantastic time at the UK Maker Faire, and are really looking forward to the Manchester Mini Maker Faire that's going to be taking place in August.

Here's a link to some of our other Star Wars themed posts from the archives (It seems there have been quite a few!) May the force be with you!

Easter bunny printable wrappers for your Cadbury's Creme Eggs. 27 Mar 2013 9:12 AM (12 years ago)

Hello! Just a fly by post to let you know that I've done a post over on Alphamom.com showing how to make these little Easter rabbits easily from a baby wipe, a Cadbury's Creme Egg, and a little free printable that I made for you to download over there.

They would make a cute little gift this easter for kids to give to their friends. My kids saw me making these ones though, so they are nommed already! Happy Easter my Peeps!

Easter crafts from the archives 22 Mar 2013 4:07 AM (12 years ago)

Today is the last day of school before the Easter break here, where the kids get two weeks off school, so I thought now was a good time to post a reminder of some of the Easter/Spring type crafts that we've done over the past few years, in case any of you fancy trying them.

I'm sure we'll be doing some new things over the Easter break, but you know what I'm like, we don't do crafts well in advance to blog about them at the right time. We do the crafts and then I blog about them with the excuse that you might want to do them next year! Ha! So, this is what I found in the depths of the badly organized Filth Wizardry archives of yore...
 

Hope some of you fancy having a go at one or more of those ideas. I think we may have a bit of a weekend of crafting indoors here, because although yesterday was the first day of spring, today it has already snowed, hailed, and now it is raining/sleeting and blowing a gale, with more of the same forecast for tonight and tomorrow! Brrrrr.

We were going to go down to Bristol for it's Mini Maker Faire, but it looks like traveling in this weather isn't advisable. Thought I'd put the link in there though in case any readers are down south and nearer to it and might want to pop in. It's free and is from 11am until 3pm at Bristol's M Shed museum. This co-incides with the last couple of days of National Science and Engineering Week.

DIY custom cookie stamps. 16 Mar 2013 2:57 AM (12 years ago)

Whooo, it's the month for patron saints everyone! No sooner are we done with Saint David's Day, than Saint Patrick's Day is upon us! We got our leprechaun gold sorted in the form of some golden coin cookies, minted with some home made custom cookie stamps! I've posted about it over on Alpha Mom, with lots of photos and details on what worked best as far as materials and cookie dough went.

Pop and check it out, and even if you're not into the idea of golden leprechaun treasure, this technique can be used to stamp cookies for any event that you want a custom design for, at very little cost! Birthday parties, birth announcements, valentines, Christmas, Graduation, Bad hair days, bin day, days with the letter Y at the end... you get the idea.

For me, I love it because it removes the need to do complicated cookie icing, which I suck at and have no patience for, and you can't dunk iced cookies in your tea! Well, you can, but your tea would be sweet,  and eugrchhh sweet tea?! Are you trying to poison me?!

My kids have told me that we need to make custom cookie stamps with the names of the members of our family on. There are some serious cookie ownership issues simmering beneath that request if you ask me. I would feel slightly guilty if I ate a cookie with someone else's name on though, so maybe they have something there.

Do I have any long time readers among you? Do any of you remember way back in the distant past of 2009, when the kids were all tiny and we made golden leprachaun cookies with some friends back in the US. Some Irish friends no less! That's what gave me the idea to try and make our own cookie stamps. Something a bit more suited to my now seven and eight year old's crafting abilities, but still fun and edible. Awww, just look at little barely three year old Ffi, all covered in flour. I'm looking forward to doing more of those preschooler crafts again with Delyth!

UPDATE (16th March 2013): Alpha Mom has cautiously recommended that you do not use the polymer clay version of the stamp on foods. The reason for this is potentially twofold. They are mainly bothered about phthalates (plasticizers that until 2009 were used in all polymer clays). If you purchase your polymer clay from anywhere in the EU, or California then it will be phthalate free due to regulations that were introduced several years ago, but if you are buying it from elsewhere then you will need to be aware of the fact that your clay may contain phthalates.

Polymer clay has been thoroughly tested by ACMI (Art & Crafts Materials Institute in Boston) and by CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commissions) It has been evaluated to be non-toxic, meaning there are no acute toxicity concerns even when assuming a large (24 mg) daily ingestion of polymer clay, but don't be doing that m'kay? Yuck! Understandably Alpha Mom did not want to recommend the polymer clay option to it's readers when they couldn't be sure if the readers had access to phthalate free clay.

The second issue is that polymer clay is designated as non-food grade plastic. This is not because of toxicity, but rather because it is more porous than food grade plastics, meaning that it is harder to sanitize properly once it has come into contact with food. So, not a good idea to make yourself a dinner plate or a mug to drink your Bovril out of with it, because it could harbour nasty bacteria from the food making it unsafe to use a second time. With this in mind, if you feel that is an issue with using it with raw cookie dough, then you can always make it a one use item and throw the stamp away (the same applies obviously to the salt dough version, which is even more porous than the polymer clay). I will not be throwing away the wooden rolling pin that also came into contact with cookie dough and is porous though, so you've really got to make your own informed decisions about these things.

So, there's a bit of info for you to make a judgement call. If you want to be super cautious then just make your cookie stamps out of the salt dough and then chuck them in the bin when you're done (the stamps, not the cookies silly!).

Here's a hazard risk assessment study done by Duke University Medical Center in 2000 on polymer clay that DOES contain phthalates. (this also addresses the PVC content of the clay for those that are concerned about PVC in their products)

Recycling containers with crochet 11 Mar 2013 1:26 PM (12 years ago)

This is a post that has been lurking unfinished in my drafts for YEARS!!! How bad is that! The first one of these I made was I think in 2008 maybe. I've made loads since then, for halloween trick or treat pots, for Easter egg hunt baskets, and just randomly to store things like bits of polly pockets, or pens, or any one of the zillions of odd little collections that the kids have. For a while we had one that contained sparkly bits of asphalt?! I always liked the glass jars with crochet over them thing, but everyone would end up in the ER if I made those and left them around the house. The ones above are made from an old plastic mayo jar and an old plastic cordial bottle, and that way the kids can swing them around their heads and bash them on the floor and no one's going to require stitches. The mayo jar one is my favourite, and it's been used so much. Right now it's full of crayons (you can see Del using it in the background of this pic from the dragon mask post)
You can even make them really small if you have something like a dremel to drill little holes into a travel sized shampoo bottle, and a teensy crochet hook and thread. Very useful for collecting random small objects as my children are wont to do.
This one was for Ffion to use as a trick or treat pot. It was made from an old protein shake plastic jar that a friend gave us.

Anyway, I've been wanting to show you how I make these for ages, because they are really useful for a number of reasons.

1. the kids can see what is in them (if you use clear plastic jars or bottles to make them), and can root around for stuff without having to tip it all out.
2. They hang up places, or can be carried around easily.
3. They are pretty easy to make (very basic crochet stitches) and are really cheap as they are made from old plastic bottles and jars.
4. They are virtually indestructible. We've not had to throw a single one out due to breakage yet, despite them being dropped all over the place and flung around.
5. I think they look pretty, given that they are made from trash, especially if the kids decorate them with stickers or sharpie pens.
6. Because the crochet narrows the opening to the basket, generally if you drop it, whatever is in it doesn't come spilling out all over the floor.

Here's one that I made from a yoghurt pot for Del to egg hunt with last Easter. She was only nine moths old, so she really enjoyed taking the eggs out of it and putting them back in again.

Given all that, and the fact that Easter is around the corner and a few of you that can crochet might want to make kid's Easter baskets with this technique, here's how I make 'em...

You'll need a plastic container, so go rummage around in your recycling. It doesn't have to be transparent, but the plastic does have to be reasonably flexible if you are going to punch through it with a regular hole puncher. If you have something like a Dremel that you can use to drill holes then you don't have to limited by that. You do need to make sure that your crochet hook can fit through the holes you drill though! I've happily used a hand punch on all the baskets that are shown here (except the tiny necklace one) The easiest to punch through was the yoghurt pot.

If you've got a container with labels on then weight it down in some water to soak them and make them easier to peel off.

It's handy to note that if you have a container that has printing on it that you want to get rid of first, then giving it a scrub with a Mr Clean Magic Eraser or similar product will take off the printing (on a transparent plastic it will make it translucent though) here's the yoghurt pot with some of the printing scrubbed off.
Here you can see the base round crocheted onto the protein shake bottle in pink yarn. I joined the round with a slip stitch and chained one before starting the next round.

From here on out you can just wing it really to get the shape you want from your basket top. Each basket I've made has been different and I kind of like the "make it up as you go" way that these come together. With this one it looks like i made two single crochet stitches into each of the base round stitches, but generally if you do just one stitch into each of the base round stitches then the top will start to pull in like the style of the larger ones I've posted pictures of in this thread.
To make the handles for most of these baskets, I started a round and then made a length of chain stitches the size of the handle I wanted and then joined it again to the round with a single crochet stitch, carrying on around with single crochet stitches and then doing the same thing on the other side for the second handle. Then I just continued to do single crochets into each stitch of the much larger round that now included the handles. A couple of rounds of stitches is enough to make the handles really quite sturdy, but you can see that with Del's little purple easter basket I didn't even bother with that and just left the handles as a single row of chain stitch.
The teensy necklace one just has one big loop of chain stitch for it's handle too.
Once you're done with the crochet (which doesn't take that long unless you make really big handles or something) the kids can decorate their baskets with stickers or sharpie pens.

I need to find more little plastic bottles, because they all want one of the little necklace versions now!

Milk Jug Dragon Mask 2 Mar 2013 3:16 AM (12 years ago)

Have you ever wanted to make a dragon mask? Sure you have. Yeah, yeah, you can say you haven't, but I know you have. You'd be mad not to want to make one. So, because you DO have a burning desire to make a dragon mask, and because you are obviously a sensible, frugal individual, and not afraid of a big old mess (because if you are afraid of a big old mess I have no idea why you are here), let me bombard you with a few too many photographs showing you how to make a kick-ass dragon mask out of two milk jugs, some tin foil and a newspaper. Has there ever been a more useful blog post in the history of the internet? No. I'm fairly sure that's what you are thinking.
 I hope that there is someone out there that might actually find this a little bit useful, because although we were sort of making it up as we went along, there are squillions of photos.

First of all, you will be needing two of the British style 4pint plastic milk jugs that you have cleaned out and dried. They look like the ones below. The reason that I used milk jugs to make the base of this is because they durable, flexible, easy to cut with scissors and get a stapler through, and they are just sat there in the recycling bin, so, Freeeeee!

We have made plenty of stuff from the US Gallon sized milk jugs while we were living in California, like the Storm trooper helmet and the batman masks. I bet you could still find a way to use the US ones to make a similar design, because they have a larger surface area, so you've actually got more plastic to work with on those.
 I started with the first milk jug by chopping off the neck (you'll need to keep this because it'll be used later), then I chopped off the base, and the handle section.
The large piece is going to be the main part of the mask (the sides and top). The smaller handle piece has to be cut and stapled to make the dragon's nostrils. The collection of photos below shows from several angles how we cut down the handle and pushed it together to staple it into a shape that looked like it would work for the nose of the dragon. I think this is the hardest bit to explain in words, hence all the pictures.
Next I used a staple or two on each side to attach the nose to the rest of the head.
This is going to be stapled onto the back of the mask to complete the back of the head.
 You still have the handle section from the second milk jug, and that needs to be cut right down to make a piece that can be stuck on over the tip of the nose to make a nice dragony point to it and to cover the front parts of the nostrils that you've made. Here's a series of pictures showing how I got that little bit from the handle.
And here you can see how it fits onto the end of the dragon's nose to complete his face.
You still have the bottom half of the second milk jug, and the sides of that are going to be used to make the little wingy ear bits that go on the side of the dragon's head. I'm not well up on dragon anatomy, so I don't know if these have a proper name. Anyhoooo, here's the picture of the bit you cut them from and how they look before you attach them.
Here they are tucked into the seam where the back joins the side of the head and stapled on. You can see now how useful the curve in the side of the milk jug is to make the ears stand out from the head.
The final part of the milk jug masacre is to use your two neck pieces to make sturdy places that you can have your horns coming out of. I cut the neck pieces right down and used a pen to mark on where I wanted them to go, then I used a pair of nail scissors to cut out the circles and push the neck pieces into place from the inside of the mask. A good squidge of hotglue held them securely.
Out of the two milk jugs that you've used, all you have left are some offcuts and the two bases!
Now for some tin foil and hot glue fun! This is the least documented section of the project, because all it is really is squishing large sheets of tin foil onto your base to make the dragon have the features you want. We used the tin foil on our mask to flesh out the nostrils, to add some head ridges, to add a couple of facial horns, and to sculpt the side of the dragon's mouth. We also added a couple of spikes to the back of his head and most importantly, we twisted up some tin foil horns and stuck them through the necks of the bottles that we glued on the top of the dragon's head. We used lots of hot glue to smoosh the sections of tin foil onto each other, so that there weren't a load of loose bits sticking up when we came to add the papier mache layer. The top image is after three sheets of foil have been added, and the bottom picture is when all the foil has been added (I think we used about five or six strips from the roll that were about a foot and a half to two feet in length, so not that much foil really.

The beauty of using tin foil to do this part is that you can add volume really quickly and easily and it adds very little weight to the mask, and when the tin foil is compacted on it is very sturdy and easy peasy to papier mache over.

The kids really got stuck into the papier mache part of the project, and my job was really just ripping up the newspaper while they stuck it on. The horns would have been harder for them to do with bits of paper, so we wrapped them in crepe paper from a streamer roll and then pasted them with the flour and glue mixture instead. To make it easy for the kids to get at, we sat the mask on top of a ceramic jug, so the back of it was raised slightly off the table.

 All of the project up to here was done on a Saturday morning, but once the papier mache is on, you have to wait for it to dry, so that's going to take about 24 hours before you can get painting and decorating your mask.

Here's a few pictures of the mask with the dry papier mache, before any painting was done.

My older daughter loved the papier mache part the most, but my middle daughter was really into the painting part. I had a tester pot of red paint from a hardware store that I'd planned to paint something for Delyth with months ago and hadn't got around to, so we used that to give the dragon a base coat colour that we could decorate on top of. It gave really good coverage and you couldn't see the newspaper print through it at all, so we only needed the one coat.
Here's Mr Dragon with his snazzy paint job. You can see the structure of the mask really well with the plain paint job, so I took a few pics from a few angles.
Here's a pic of the inside of the mask (you can see that we made the papier mache go over the edges and onto the inside a bit). You can also see the tin foil smooshed ends of the horns on the inside of the mask too, which helped keep the horns anchored while you're papier macheing them.
We used another couple of bits out of the recycling bin to decorate the finished mask. For the teeth and eyes we used a bit of cardboard from a school shirt package and the white polystyrene from a pizza package.
Again everything was stuck on with hot glue. We happened to have a load of red hot glue sticks that a friend found at a charity shop in the US and gave to us last Christmas, so those were perfect for this! and we had some red heart sequins that got smooshed into the glue to add a bit of bling around the eyes.

Our mask at this point was ever so slightly front heavy, so we added a winged cape and dragon tail to the back of it, which weighted it perfectly and also meant that our costume was complete with just the one item.

Extra decorating included painting on some darker red paint and gluing more sequins on, plus hot glue and glitter scales in places. We weren't too neat about it, but the results are pretty good.

The material all came from two 60p bundles that we found outside a fabric remnants place not far from here, so this has to be one of the cheapest costumes we've made.

Here's the back of the mask where the cape is attached.
and here's how it all looks from the back with the cape and tail...
The fabric bundle also had a little bit of red fleece in it, so I lined the mask with that to make it really comfortable to wear (again it was all hot glued on).
Here's kiddo rocking the finsished mask.
She's so happy with it! And very proud that she was so involved in it's creation. I know this is is ridiculously involved and detailed tutorial, but I'm hoping that there will be some people who find the techniques we used useful in building other types of masks on the cheap, for example it wouldn't take much alteration to make this be a horse mask, or a unicorn mask, and with a change of underlying plastic milk jug structure and a bit of imagination I'm pretty sure you could make any kind of mask you want in this way. There we go, that made me feel a little less like a nutter for posting all this. We had fun making it, and I think that's the important bit!

Welsh cake recipe and printable 28 Feb 2013 11:18 PM (12 years ago)

Happy St David's Day! Or Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant. I have another post for you over at Alphamom today. I've mentioned St David's Day on this blog before a couple of years ago, in this post. We do try to do something little to celebrate each year (partly to try and share some traditions from home with the kids while we were in the US, because they only really saw St Patrick's day being celebrated there), but this is the first year in almost a decade that we've actually been back in Wales for March 1st! and for the kids it is their first St David's Day in the country!

We made Welsh cakes for the family this year, and I have written about it over on Alphamom.com, where you can find a free printable recipe that is very kid friendly, along with a lot of photos and tips on changing up the recipe if you want to suit your family's tastes. Del can't get enough of them! I love them because they are delicious, so quick to make, and freeze really well too. There's also an example of a savoury "not really very welsh cake" that my kids love too.
Check out the old St David's Day post if you fancy making some kitchen paper leeks for your imaginary grocery store.
I'll be back very shortly with another post, because we just made a dragon costume out of two plastic milk jugs, tin foil and newspaper. It's way cooler than I thought it would turn out, and the kids were really into the messy papier mache and painting. I was making it up as I went along, so hopefully I have enough photos that it makes sense when I write up how to do it. In the mean time, here's a picture of a little Welsh baby in a Welsh field with a bunch of Welsh sheep.
Last thing... Exciting for everyone here...Ffion lost her first baby tooth last week and we had a visit from the tooth fairy again (you can read about the first tooth fairy visit for Carys in this post). This was our first UK tooth fairy experience, and Ffion decided to make her a little Lego chair to rest on, with a little drinking fountain, after she'd dropped her miniscule tooth into the box of Lego and freaked out that she would never find it ever (we found it).
Weirdly, the Conwy Tooth Fairy Co-operative use the same stationery as California Tooth Traders Inc. I went with a reader suggestion from the last post about tooth fairies and Ffion's fairy's name was Enamelie. The pixie fire stone mentioned was a tiny pendant that I've had for years and never worn. Ffi thinks it's awesome. It was so small that it could be taped to the bottom right hand corner of the letter and folded up in it, and the letter is only two inches wide.
We've got a total of four wobbly teeth in the house at the moment, so I have my work cut out! Anyway, hope you're tempted to try cooking a few Welcakes :)

Hershey's Kiss Lighthouse Valentines 9 Feb 2013 8:20 AM (12 years ago)

I've designed you a printable to make these sweet little lighthouse valentine favors. You sit a Hershey's Kiss in the top of it as the light and then, if you are my kids, you make a "SQUEEEEE!" sound because they are "so tiny and cuuuute!" The message reads "You light the place up!"

You can find the free printable and easy instructions on how to put them together over here at my post on Alpha Mom. Each printed page makes three lighthouses.


Hope you have a lovely love day!

Decorations from recycled holiday cards. 1 Feb 2013 5:22 AM (12 years ago)

OK, so this is a bit late for a Christmas craft (or is it just very very early for a Christmas craft?), but I just wanted to post it in case you had cards left around from the holidays. I remember making these with mum when I was about eight years old. Mum would take down the Christmas cards after the holidays and stash them away with all the decorations so that the following year we could make these globe decorations from them in the run up to the holidays.

They are pretty simple to make. You need twenty identically sized circles cut from your cards to make each one. The circles have their sides folded to make triangles. The shape that results from sticking together these twenty triangular sides is an Icosahedron. If you want to, then it is possible to make smaller ones in the shape of an octahedron very easily with just eight circles, which would work better if you had smaller kids that wanted to join in too.


We used a roll of sticky tape to make our circles because that way we could see well to center the design that we wanted. It would work just as well to use a glass to draw around, but my kids are less likely to smash a roll of sticky tape!


I've made a little printable so that you can easily mark on your circles where they divide in thirds, because this part needs to be reasonably accurate if they are going to glue together nicely with no gaps. If you click on the little thumbnail image of the print out below then it should bring it up full sized for you to print out.




To use it, you line up your card circle within the nearest sized circle outline and then use the three lines to mark three dots on the edge of your card circle.


You can then use a ruler and something like the back of a butter knife to score between these dots. This will get your little triangle shapes folded neatly and evenly.


I suppose you could stack up all your pre-made circles and pop them in with the holiday decorations like that, as a ready to glue together holiday project come December.


We put ours together though, so that I could photograph it to show you. The easiest way to construct the icosahedron is to start off by making a panel out of five pieces like in the photograph below. We used regular white glue to do this, but it probably would have been a little easier with a glue stick, only we didn't have one handy.


So, with ten of your pieces you make two of those panels, then with the remaining ten pieces you glue them together in a long line like in the photo below..


Then you take your long line of ten pieces and glue it closed into a ring. This is the central part of the icosahedron, and the two other panels now can be glued to the top and the bottom to complete it.


Here it is with just the top panel glued on.


If you're having trouble with the glue not drying fast enough, just put a bobby pin/hair grip on to hold the pieces until the glue sets.

Here are the two that we made, one big one and another that was slightly smaller.


 I would love it if we managed to make at least a couple of these each year and eventually we'd have enough to decorate a whole room with multicoloured, recycled, holiday globes! I hope you like them. I think I might be extra fond of them because mum showed me how to do this as a kid. She used to cut her circles out with pinking shears, so they were all zig zaggy edged and that made them look a bit snowball like.

...and with that, I promise that I will never again write a Christmas themed blog post in February ;)

Candy rope friendship knots. 31 Jan 2013 12:58 AM (12 years ago)

Happy new year! Am I the last blogger out there to wish you that? At least it's still January eh! Only just though! Anyhoo, I have a printable and craft for the kiddos to make this valentine's day. I know we're in the UK now and over here we don't give valentines in class, but I figured we'd do it for our first year here just as a little novelty (the kids are still very much the yanks in class, and the accents have only faded very slightly after six months).

These friendship knots are really easy to make from any sort of rope candy, and I've made a print out that you can download to make cute little bag toppers with instructions for tying the knots, so that they look like more of a little gift.

The full instructions and printable download are here on Alpha Mom, so pop on over to have a look and see if these will work for your children. Ideal for both lads and lasses, as I'm pretty sure all children like candy and tying things in knots. I know boy scouts sometimes use this knot if they haven't got a woggle handy, but it makes me think of holding hands like this...

I've got another craft here ready to post too. It's something that my mum used to do with me, using left over Christmas cards after we'd taken them all down. Do any of you actually have left over holiday cards lying around anymore or have they all been recycled by now? I guess it's handy to have the idea for next year though right? I'll get to posting that tomorrow!

In the mean time, here are a few links to older Valentine's day projects that we've done here in the past...






Awww, I can't believe that photo above is almost a year old. Del looks so teeny! She's nineteen months old now and is all over the place running and climbing and jumping! Her hair is as wild as she is too :)

I hope you all had a lovely winter break. My epic mission to cater Christmas dinner for both sides of the family worked out in the end. Space was tight, so I did two sittings. Yes, that's right, I cooked Christmas dinner on Christmas day for one side of the family and then did it all over again on boxing day for the other side of the family! Our tiny little oven didn't know what had hit it! Then we started off 2013 with some wild and wooly Welsh walking over by Llyn Idwal. We've had a photograph of Llyn Idwal on our wall in America for years, and this was the first time we had taken the kids there. They have seen that photo pretty much every day of their lives, so it was fun for them to figure out where it was taken from.

Here's hoping that the rest of 2013 is just as lovely!

Paper snowflake fun 25 Dec 2012 3:45 AM (12 years ago)

Yule tide festive vibes to all!

Just popping in to give you a link over to my post on making paper snowflakes at Alpha Mom. Folding tips to make an easy six sided snowflake, plus some ideas for using them to decorate. Here's a piccy for you to see how we used a big one to conceal the fact that our table is not really one table, but two folding leaf tables next to each other. Just a big strip of wrapping paper and a snowflake and it looks like a giant present (I can't do table cloths at all at our house because they would get stained immediately or everything would get pulled onto the floor by Delyth).

We popped some big snowflakes made from wrapping paper up on the wall too, as well as the usual white paper ones on the windows. So, if you're interested in upping your paper snowflake making game, pop and have a look at the folding instructions and tips over on my post here.
 Happy Holidays and wishing you all a cracking 2013!

Star of treats advent craft 1 Dec 2012 3:51 AM (12 years ago)

Wow, welcome to December! That snuck up on us didn't it! As usual I'm a last minute kinda crafter and yesterday we put together our advent calendar for this year. It's fabulously cheap to make and you can re-use it next year too, so it may be entirely possible that next year I actually have this advent calendar thing all sorted without the usual night before flurry of glue and recycling. Yay! It's a double sided star with 24 little containers that can be opened and closed again.

I've posted all about how to make it over at Alpha Mom. Here's the link. There's a printable that I made available over there too, so you can print out the numbers to go on it and also the little center circle that the kids can decorate. You can't see the numbers on the photo above because they are hidden in the tinsel (you have to hunt for the number that you are opening each day). You can see the numbers in the photo below before I put the tinsel on.

I'll get to posting some links to a few of our older Christmas/winter crafts in the coming week, but in the mean time, here are a couple of advent calendar posts from years gone by...

Tissue paper and condiment cup advent calendar from 2008 (first saw this idea by Brenda Ponnay as a November calendar on Alpha Mom, years before I started writing for them, Brenda still writes for Alpha Mom by the way, and did her own advent calendar craft for them this year as well, link here)

Last minute count down calendar for slackers (see, I don't even manage to get my act together for Dec 1st some years!)
Happy Holiday planning you guys! Now that we're back in the UK, this will be the first Christmas that we can have our parents and siblings over to our house for the holidays and I can't wait! There will be grandmas and grandpas and aunties and uncles and cousins. Question is, can I rise to the challenge of Christmas dinner for all those people? Place your bets!

Free pharaoh's mask and collar printable 23 Oct 2012 12:38 PM (12 years ago)

We're gearing up for Halloween here. It's not such a big deal in the UK as it is in the US though, so sadly there will be no parade in costume at school for the kids. We'll likely do a minor amount of local trick or treating though, and I'm sure the kids will be excited to embrace the UK tradition of Guy Fawke's night five days later, what with all the fireworks and toffee apples!

This year what we needed was a costume that captured the kid's current fixation of ancient Egyptian mummies, and allowed them to get involved in creating their own costume at a very low cost. So I set about making a 3D Pharaoh's mask and collar from paper that we could combine with a lot of toilet roll to jazz up the classic, low effort, loo roll mummy costume. The head dresses were just improvised by sticking a long sleeved t-shirt on our heads with the arms hanging down in front. Easy peazy lemon squeezy.

The kids loved it, and I've written up a tutorial with photos and all the print outs for both the mask and the collar, available as either A4 size, or US letter size pdfs over at Alpha Mom. If you think your kids would also get a kick out of this then pop over there to read the post and print your own copies. They are black and white line drawings, so that the kids can colour them any way they like and it is low on using up printer ink too.

I'm hoping that some home schoolers might find them a useful resource when studying ancient Egypt too (you can probably tell that I based it heavily on the mask of king Tut) Interesting fact: According to Wikipedia, on November 4th it will be 90 years since the day that Howard Carter's team discovered the steps leading down to Tutankhamun's tomb! I may put on a suit and a stick on moustache to be Howard Carter when going trick or treating with the kids. Maybe I can get Paul to go as zombie Lord Carnarvon with a tiny piece of bloody tissue stuck on his face. Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.

While I'm posting about halloweeny/fall/autumn type things, I thought it would be useful if I put a few links in here to some older posts in the Filth Wizardry archives, that might be useful for either costume making or just plain crafty fun on the theme.I'm sure there are more if you go digging, but these are the ones that sprang to mind.

Costume posts:

1. Star Wars X-wing fighter pilot's helmet from recycling.
2. Star Wars X-wing flight suit iron on printable.
3. Roman centurion costume from cardboard and crepe paper.
4. Storm trooper's helmet from two milk jugs.
5. Mermaid tail from old pants and skirt.
6. Gift bag robot costumes.
7. antennae from cable ties and felt.

Halloween/Fall/Autumn craft posts:

1.  Toilet roll bat.
2. Halloween card printable by Carys.
3. Laminated fall leaf magnets.
4. Trick or treat pumpkin pots from milk jugs.
5. Collaborative fall leaf rubbing mural project.
6. 3D colourful skull and monster sugar dough cookies.

Hope there's something in those lists that will be useful to you this year. If anyone does make the storm trooper mask or Egyptian mask or the X-wing helmet, any of it really, I would so love to hear about it or see photos! The idea of people out there embarking on similar projects with their kids as a result of us blogging about our antics is such a lovely thought!

Have a lovely Halloween, and here's one last link to the Alpha Mom post with the Egyptian mummy mask, so that you don't have to scroll back up ;)

Autumn woodland treasure sculpture 8 Oct 2012 1:21 PM (12 years ago)

Thought I should post about this project we did over the weekend, because the kids had a lovely time doing it, and the gift recipient (Grandma) really liked it too, so a win-win!

The making dragonflies using maple seeds and twigs appeared in Family Fun magazine a month or two ago, credited to a Shanti Nordholt. Here is the link to the originals (that also have glass bead eyes). As you can see in the picture below, we didn't do the glass bead eyes. I think we might have some somewhere in the shipping, but right now, a craft that we can do with just hot glue, paint and stuff we found on the ground on the way home is where it's at!

We had a couple of different sorts of seeds, so maybe one type was maple and one type sycamore? Not sure. We also picked up a load of twigs, and a small dead branch and a few conkers and leaves.

The conkers became the centers for the big flowers, with the sycamore seed petals hot glued around them, and the dragon fly bodies were a twig that had a natural little Y shape at the end to be the antennae. We used more twigs to make the flower stems and glued fallen leaves onto those too. We ended up cutting the lumpy seed bits off of the sycamore seeds with scissors to make gluing the wing bits onto the twigs a lot easier.

The kids painted them all up with acrylic paint. Some of them came out absolutely gorgeous, which is always an unexpected happy surprise when you've got little kids making stuff. I was kind of expecting that we might have really odd, crushed and weird looking insects and flora, but nope, it came out great.

All we did to give it to grandma was stick the twig in a glass full of rice to hold it. If you've got a vase and some proper floral glass nugget things it might look a bit classier, but given that it's made from hot gluing together stuff that fell out of trees, I think the glass of rice works just fine.

We are so making more of these, because I want one to stay in our home too! Something about it sort of reminds me of the victorian fixation with things like fire screens that hold stuffed bird displays or butterflies made out of feathers, or even the weird gluing seashells together to make freaky looking animals. I really do like it though, and because the seeds are so very thin, the light shines through them in a lovely way. It would also look much classier if it was done just in it's natural fall colours, but painting it all crazy was at least 50% of the fun.

Talk Like a Pirate Day Printable 19 Sep 2012 1:12 PM (12 years ago)

Hello again! Dust is settling around us as we unpack our shipping here on the UK side of the Atlantic. It was a busy couple of months, but we're just about catching our breath now, and although everything isn't exactly unpacked or even in the room that it should be in, we are somewhat settled. More on all that later though. Right now I'm popping in to give you a link over to a post I just wrote on Alpha Mom for "Talk Like a Pirate Day", which is supposed to be September 19th, but really, honestly, any day is a good day for pretending to be a pirate, right?

I put together this single page printable that you can colour and cut out to dress up your soft toys and give them some piratitude. Ffi and Carys had a lot of fun dressing up their toys and Del had a lot of fun undressing them and sticking the eye patches on her legs (whatever floats your boat matey).

There are also instructions on how to make the nifty little removable pirate hook hand covers for your toys too, so, pop on over to the post (here is the link), download the free printable and have half the toys set sail in the laundry basket with some pillow case sails! It's available as an A4 size or letter size download for ease of printing by pirates from all corners of the seven seas.

Nothing says piratitude quite like a one eyed, golden toothed, bearded Pikachu brandishing a cutlass! Yaaaarrrrrr!!!

If you're interested in more piratey posts that I've done, these are from Talk Like a Pirate Day 2011 and 2010.

Transatlanic mayhem 8 Jul 2012 6:19 PM (12 years ago)

Oh my goodness me! So much I wanted to find the time to post about, but long story short- we're moving our family from California back to the UK this week! So so so much to sort out. We've been planning the move for nearly two months, but well, it turns out if you've been living in the same house for nearly seven years and you have the same sort of making stuff out of things lifestyle that we do, then there is a whooooole lot of sorting out that needs to be done before you can emigrate. I've been a little wild eyed and panicky the last couple of weeks and have been making a few too many jokes about throwing everything out on the lawn and setting fire to it, but as we get closer to the day we fly, it is actually coming together thank goodness!

There's been garage sales with friends and lemonade stands:

There's been plenty put on Craigslist. After a year of taking photos of Del in our rocking chair, we sold that a couple of days ago too.

There's been a lot of stuff to donate too. We're in luck that not far from us in San Francisco there is a fabulous school that does a lot of this open ended making and inventing and experimenting malarky with their students, so we've been up there with a couple of car loads (another couple to go this week too). Brightworks has been open for a year now and I hope they will grow and grow and allow many many more children to have this sort of experience, because it's lacking in the world today. Makes me happy to know that our tools and glue guns and soldering irons and low tech light table and paper and all manner of other makey things will be used and enjoyed some more by children. Here are the big 'uns enjoying the creations made by last week's group at Brightworks, when we popped in at the end of the day to drop things off. It was lovely to have Ellen and Justine be as excited about things like our elderly leaf blower as we were when we first picked it up at a garage sale and thought "Yes! Giant Bernoulli effect demo with a soccer ball!" Back to ping pong balls and hair dryers for us!

If you want to see more of what the kids at Brightworks get up to, Josh writes a blog daily for them with lots of great photos. They were building a harmonograph last week! Harmonographs are cool! We gave them the weights from ours, but their set up is much bigger and capable of more degrees of freedom, like the one at the Exploratorium. I'm kind of hoping that it will still be up when we call back next week to drop off the last of our tools and things.

So, things are winding down here. I'll still be posting here on Filth Wizardry in the future and I'll still be writing posts over at Alphamom.com every month once we get settled, but for the next few weeks we're going to be hopping about and kind of nomadic while we get rid of the last of our belongings here and then attempt to re-accumulate the important ones on the other side of the Atlantic. Oooh, and for those of you that are interested... After several years of staying up and being lovely and colouful, the tissue paper stained glass window came down really fast and easily without leaving any mess or damage to the window. Yay! Here's a pic I took with it all half peeled off. It was sad to see it go, but the peeling was fast and fun to do.


The kids dug up the purple potatoes yesterday and washed them off. I took apart the planter we made and painted, and the kid's lovely kindergarten teacher (who we will miss very much) has adopted the strawberry plants. Our neighbour took the twelve bags of soil over to his place for more veggie growing, so even in this rush and chaos it feels nice to have this community of help and mutual benefit surrounding us, with very little going to waste. Even the giant geoboard was taken in by my oldest's second grade teacher :)


What else, what else? Oh yes, totally awesome accidental timing on our part, but we are arriving in Manchester only a few days before they are holding a Manchester Mini Maker Faire! Yippie! Will we see any of you UK peeps there? It's Freeeeeee! My favourite price! I'm sad that we will unlikely get to all go to the Bay Area Maker Faire again any time soon though. We had such fun there the last three years. The kids were excited about it for weeks before hand this year.

Right, baby is awake and I've got to do more packing! There's so much more that I want to share. Maybe I will have time to write more when we're back in Wales and still living out of suitcases before any shipping arrives. Hope you're all having a good summer!

Coffee Cup Sleeve printable for your Teacher 26 May 2012 8:26 PM (12 years ago)

It's nearly the end of the school year here in our bit of California. The kids actually only have three days left of school, which is shocking to me. I'm sure it was last week that Ffion went off to her first day of kindergarten with her "writing arm" in a plaster cast. Here we are though, on the brink of the summer vacations (this year's is going to be a pretty epic and challenging one for our family, but that's for another post). I just wanted to share with you the printable that I made last week to personalize the kid's teacher's gift cards that we got them.

The teachers that my girls have had so far have all been fanbloodytastic. Really really lovely people with a genuine passion and drive for what they do. The kids don't get the issues like the chronic lack of funding and curriculum difficulties, but they can feel the dedication these teachers have and boy do they love them for it! The last couple of years I've knitted something for the teachers, but this year time has been tight (plus all knitting has been directed towards friends and family that have been relentlessly making tiny people that all need cardigans damnit!). So this year for each teacher I got them a Starbucks gift card and made this "Top Teacher" print out sleeve to cover a take out coffee cup that we put the gift card in. Pretty simple, but both teachers this year love Starbucks, so everyone's a winner baby!

If you'd like to do the same, you can find the printable download (for free of course) over at Alpha Mom, here.

I also wanted to let you know that the bloke I am affiliated with has written the post he's been meaning to for ages over on his own blog, that shows the birthday present he made for Ffion this year. (he wrote about the house he made for Carys last year here).


In other news... Delyth started walking and is all over the place and into everything. It's very very cute but she's really keeping me on my toes here. I had to tape some wood to the bottom of the ladder to the kid's loft bed yesterday to stop her trying to climb it! No sitting still for pictures any longer.


Back to explain our summer plans when I get a mo :)

A new Easter hunt challenge 9 Apr 2012 11:08 PM (13 years ago)

I know this is a little late to be of use to anyone for this year, but given that I have the template files to hand from making these on Friday night, I should post them before I either loose them to the depths of my hard drive file structure, or just forget to blog about them altogether when Easter comes around next year. If I'm still around and posting this time next year then I'll try and remember to link to this again to remind folk that it's here.

I've written about how we do egg hunts here before, and we did that again this year, but we added another game into the mix at the last minute. My friend Jennifer had got all the kids a chocolate Peter Rabbit each, so the plan was to have them "earn it". I wanted to sort out some kind of challenge that they could complete in their own time. I had seven kids doing this that were between six and nine years old and I only had the idea to do it the night before, so had to make the answer sheets and bunny clues rather hurredly.

I've drawn these little bunnies in this specific way since I was a kid, and I used to draw them exploding up into the air as if they were farting themselves off the ground like this...

That's how mature I am, and they made my mum giggle, so of course I kept doing it!

I decided to chunk up my "classic bunny" to give enough space to put the challenge clues on his tummy, and remove his signature propulsion system to make little rabbit markers that could be "hidden" around the garden for the kids to find and collect clues from.

The clues I came up with were to have each rabbit have a "clue letter" that you would have to write down next to the rabbit's number to spell out a password to get your chocolate bunny. To make it a bit tougher for the older kids, so that they couldn't just find a few rabbits and then guess the rest of the letters to complete the password, I also put a different famous rabbit on each marker that they had to make a note of next to that marker's number too.
Being extra fancy like we are around here, I used some little bulldog clips to attach the answer sheets to some hard backed kids books we had on the shelf and then used a bit of yarn to tie a pen to each, so that the kids would find it easier to go around gathering and writing the clues down.

The kids did a grand job on this challenge. Everyone completed it and got their chocolate bunny within about 20 minutes, which worked out really nicely. They had twelve bunny markers to find and the twelve "clue letters" when put together spelled out the prize password: "Hot Cross Buns".

If you wanted to make this easier then you could omit the extra step of having to name each rabbit found, or to make it harder you could have the code letters not be in order and they would have to figure out the password like an anagram puzzle at the end. Lots of ways of tailoring this to fit your crowd.
Leave it to Paul to hide eggs in a tree...

I've put a few printables here for you in case they turn out to be useful for someone next year. The first three are print outs of the markers I made for the hunt (they were cut out and taped to popsicle sticks to stick in the ground). I've removed the clues we used so that you can make your own hunt the way that you want it to be. Just click on the thumbnails to get the larger version to print.

Next is the answer sheet for the kids to fill in. The code letter boxes are coloured the same as the rabbits they go with so that the kids can more easily see which is which when reading across from the numbers. Two of these answer sheets fit on one US letter sized piece of paper.

Lastly, I threw together a page of smaller, plain, uncoloured, and unlabelled bunnies in case anyone wanted to use them as gift tags or use them to cut out and make into a card game somehow, like a matching game or something, or just let your kids colour them. Just thought that might be useful.
We had some seriously nice weather for this, which was lucky timing because it's due to start pouring down again tomorrow. Went on a wander with the family later in the day and found the world's best field of daisies for making head dresses with!

Also, I am happy to report that a couple of years later and they are still happily rocking the superhero ponchos I made them and blogged about way back here.

If you've got any of your plastic eggs left over then you might want to make some toadstools with them like these,

Or use them to make R2D2 secret storage boxes, or hang on to them because I have another craft that I want to post about that we did with them too.

Hope you all had a lovely weekend too and that this post might be useful for Easter time next year :)

Tooth Fairy Fun 5 Apr 2012 10:35 PM (13 years ago)

Squeee! My first kid lost her first baby tooth, and has her first gigantic horse sized adult tooth in her tiny mouth! So I haven't posted the two Easter/Spring type posts I meant to this week because after the kids went to sleep I was instead forging correspondence from the tooth fairy. Kiddo decided she wanted to try and scam the tooth fairy into letting her keep the tooth, but still give her money, because she said "The thing is, I just really don't want to not have my tooth anymore". In response to that letter, she found this letter that I typed up and printed out all teensy weensy...

The next night she left this letter and her teensy tooth for the tooth fairy...

So, I forged another letter from Sparkle Fangs and left it with her $1.02 (an amount suggested by one of my friend's children as a fair price for a baby tooth) If you click on the image you should be able to see it large enough to read...

The dollar bill I folded into a little basket to hold the note, the two cents and some glitter. I used this really nice and easy to follow video instruction I found on Youtube.

I'm looking forward to trying more dollar bill origami as more of the kid's baby teeth gradually fall out. This one to make a ring looks cool.

Maybe they could each have their own tooth fairy from Tooth Traders Inc assigned to them. Not sure how I'm going to top Sparkle Fangs though. Ffion will want a girly named fairy for sure. Enamelina? Flouridella?

Both the older girls (who are now six and seven) are quite excited by it all and are keen to lose more teeth so they can write to the tooth fairy again. They did almost bust me though. Carys said "I think maybe you wrote the letter mum", but then when I showed her my smallest hand writing, she was all "Wow, you can't write that tiny at all, so it couldn't be you". Mwah haha haaa! Also, the tooth fairy can only seem to write upper case letter Rs. (and can't spell the word ballast). I wonder if she finished fairy high school? Maybe she just needs a good night's sleep ;)

In other news, the littlest poppet is now nine months old and still no teeth! We were wondering if her first one would make it's appearance as soon as her biggest sister lost her first one, just like Junie B Jones and her brother Ollie had happen, but nope, she's still all gummy and yummy.