Jellyfish Jelly – Creative Kids

More plastic bottle craft! This time I’ve made a little rainbow pot of gold. For this project you will need a small plastic bottle, tissue paper, coloured paper, PVA and cotton wool. I cut the bottle down, leaving 2 strips up the side to make the rainbow handle. The surface of the bottle is covered in blue tissue paper and PVA. The rainbow handle is decorated with thin coloured paper strips and cotton wool forms the clouds around the rim. I used chocolate coins to fill the pot. Perhaps these would make a nice party favour for our next birthday. To save time, they could be made out of blue card.
Click here for full instructions(Pdf)
More of my plastic bottle crafts:

Cardboard Chandelier

Bottle Birdhouse

Plastic Bottle Basket

Try these easy hot chocolate dipping spoons for deliciously gooey treat. Choose your favourite sweet or mini chocolate to place in the chocolate. Pictured below is a Mini Oreo. Scroll down for more ideas.

Spoon a dollop of melted white chocolate onto a teaspoon. Place a small treat into the chocolate and chill to set.

Dip the spoon into milk or dark chocolate, covering half the treat (or all if you prefer). Scrape the bottom of the spoon to remove any excess. Chill to set.

Dip the spoon into a hot drink to make it melty and wonderful.

Teds in Bed: Give a Tiny Teddy and yummy blanket of milk chocolate and sprinkles. Click here for full instructions (Pdf)

Marshmallow:

Soft centred jubes:

More of my edible crafts:

Easter Dipping Spoons

Strawberry Stars

Tropical Island Trifle

And so ends the first week of school holidays. I don’t know about you, but we spent a large part of it trying to make a guitar out of a plastic juice bottle…obviously.

It took us 4 attempts (and lots of juice!) to get this guitar to look and sound like* an instrument. The body is covered in PVA and crepe paper and the strings are rubber bands secured at the top with the bottle lid.

Click here for full instructions (Pdf)






Too hard? For a simpler, yet similar sounding guitar, try stretching rubber bands around a plastic takeaway container. Cut a hole in the lid to amplify the sound of the bands. To alter the pitch of the strings, twist matchsticks into the bands. Tuck the end of the matchstick into holes punched into the side of the container. The tighter the string, the higher the note. Use the left over plastic from the lid to make a pick.

Even easier, stretch the bands around the container and insert a thick marker underneath the strings. Position the marker at an angle to change the pitch of each string.

*Emphasis on the word “like”. You will not sound like Hendrix. Unless Hendrix ever played a guitar made out of a juice bottle and rubber bands. In which case you’ll sound just like him.

Ingredients: Milk Arrowroot Biscuits (or any oval shaped cookie), white icing, white marshmallows, pink sprinkles, lollies/candy and black writing icing. To make the ears, cut a marshmallow in half and dip the sticky centre into the pink sprinkles.


Ingredients: Milk Arrowroot Biscuits (or any oval shaped cookie), Sour Strap lollies, Mini M&Ms, icing tinted with food colouring.

More of my Easter crafts:

Easter Dipping Spoons

Plastic Bottle Basket

Easter Foam Eggs

Click here for full instructions (Pdf)


More of my party foods:

Mini Party Cups

Party Spoons

Coconut Xmas Tree

Easter seems to have crept up on me this year. Suddenly I have too many projects and too little time to post them. So here are 2 projects crammed into one.
The first is a basket made out of a plastic soft drink bottle. An adult will need to assist in this project as it requires some fairly heavy duty cutting and a burning candle flame. I used the flame to heat the petals of the flower basket in order to keep them in place. This isn’t as difficult or dangerous as it sounds! You simply bend back the petal and slowly bring the folded part closer to the flame until it slightly buckles and stays in place. I then covered the basket with tissue paper and PVA, but you could also spray paint it for a faster finish.
Click here for full instructions (Pdf)

The next project is a quick and easy Easter Bunny face that doubles as a treat bag to store your eggs.

To make this bag, you will need 3 x paper plates, ribbon or string, a stapler and items to decorate the face. Click here for full instructions

More of my Easter crafts:

Easter Suncatcher

Easter Foam Eggs

Paper Plate Basket

How to make a life-like 3D garden with little critters and flowers that really move and grow!

The flowers ‘grow’ via satay stick stems threaded into straws at the back. The bugs climb up and down the leaves via pipe cleaner handles behind the leaves. Click here for full instructions (Pdf)

For more instructions on how to cut these flower shapes:

Perfect Paper Cutting

More of my floral art:

Flower Pot Cakes

Crepe Rosettes

Cake Case Roses

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.” Japanese Proverb

I make no progress if I do not fail occasionally. It’s been one of those weeks. Due to the disappointing failure of this week’s project I had planned on skipping the blog post. But then I thought; why not post some projects that haven’t worked out? Let’s peruse the ideas that seemed brilliant as they dwelt behind my eyes, but were spectacularly dismal on execution.
This week’s failure: A Paper Mache Canoe

It seemed fool proof: make a mold out of play dough, cover it with cling wrap then paper mache and, voila!, your own mini canoe. If I layered it in a ton of PVA and acrylic, what could go wrong?

It could sink, that’s what. Turns out, no amount of PVA can waterproof kitchen towel.
 
Next failure: My Beaded Mirror Platter. Take a round vanity mirror and painstakingly glue segments of cheap plastic pearls around the rim. Then try to move the platter and shriek as each bead strand snaps off. Terrible.


How about a lovely bunch of Easter Egg Blossoms? Why don’t I spend hours making flower stems from egg carton cups, straws, pipe cleaners and patty pans, then glue Easter Eggs to the centre? How cute! Except, the eggs were far too heavy for the pipe cleaner stems and fell off instantly. Plus I used PVA to glue them on and it seeped under the wrapper and onto the chocolate. Yum!

And finally, my Snowball Snowmen. Snowballs are made by crushing up sweet biscuits and mixing with sweetened condensed milk. I stuck the balls together with toothpicks and carved little hats and faces from liquorice allsorts. I even made some Coconut Christmas Trees for the photo session. Unfortunately these snowmen are like the real deal and melt rather rapidly. Our Australian Christmas turned my rounded snowmen into strange ovular shaped creatures. You can see them sinking in the photo.

I have lots more failures, these are just the ones I happen to have photos of!

This week we had a go at weaving using a small homemade loom. To make this loom you will need sturdy box cardboard – the type with internal fluting. I used the fluting to thread the warp threads in and out of. For your interest, the strings that go up and down on a weaving loom are called the ‘warp’ and the horizontal threads that you weave back and forth are the ‘weft’. Weaving Loom Instructions (Pdf)


Make sure you have an odd number of warp threads. At the end of each pass we wrapped the thread around the border of the frame to prevent the sides of the weaving from tightening inwards.

Younger children will find it easier to weave on a more open loom. Space the warp threads further apart to make it simpler. My 6 year old made the weaving above right.

For something a little more complex we wove shapes into the picture by weaving threads halfway then weaving them back to the same side. To finish we decorated card frames and glued them to the whole loom.

Make your own outdoor birdhouse using an ordinary 2lt soft drink bottle. Besides the bottle, you will need some string, thick twine and PVA glue. I wrapped the twine around the bottle to form the walls of the birdhouse. Of course, you could decorate the bottle however you please. Small children may find it difficult to wind and glue the twine to the bottle. An easier option may be gluing on craft foam, leaves or bark.

Click here for full instructions (Pdf)





*Postscript: Ok, so I did some research (i.e. typed stuff into Google) and it turns out this is a bird feeder not a bird house. I must admit I didn’t know there was a difference, but it does seem rather obvious now…. Thanks Teresa!*

More of my mini houses:

Gingerbread House

Fairyland

Tooth Fairy Door