Sticky Saturday: Minecraft Masks

Sticky Saturday: messy play fun with kids

World book day was upon us but I was feeling too blue to bother, so I told the boys to sort their own costumes out. Of course they chose Minecraft characters, but since they have more Minecraft books than anything else, I figured they're totally book characters.

I helped them cut the masks out of cereal boxes and then left them to paint them. They did a fantastic job, don't you think? I particularly love Ed's 'warrior' creeper.

Bean's costume will be complete as soon as he fishes his black hoody out of his P.E. kit at school.

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Sticky Saturday: Minecraft Ore Pebble Painting

Sticky Saturday: messy play fun with kids

My apologies for the naked child. It's Saturday and he doesn't get dressed unless he absolutely has to. C'est la vie. I'm sure most of you understand. He also has chocolate on his face having eaten a chocolate spread sandwich for lunch. Not winning any awards today am I? *laughs and carries on with day as normal*

My boys love collecting pebbles everywhere they go and they love Minecraft so, I thought I'd combine the two and give them something they can play with away from screen time, because let's face it, when they're not attached to those screens, they're re-enacting what they'd be doing on them. Running round the house/school playground at pick up/anywhere 'mining', chopping down trees and fighting mobs is all quite normal, so I thought some 'ore' pebbles would be fun.

I mixed up some acrylic paint to get the right colours, added a bit of PVA to help it stick and left them to it. They sprinkled on some super fine glitter to give them an extra sparkle and they look gorgeous.

I may varnish them if I get a chance, I think they'd look amazing with that extra sheen.

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Sticky Saturday: Painting with wheels

Sticky Saturday: messy play fun with kids

This week saw the arrival of a new toy...well...a giant tray. Zander and I had already christened it with some rolling ball related fun but this is what I bought it for; really messy stuff.

Some splonges of paint and some wheelie vehciles...

Zander went straight for the paint splonges.

Then he decided to get in...

He had lots of fun smushing the paint colours together.

Then, knowing they were welcome to join in and knowing I had a bath ready for them for when they were done here...in they came. Zander promptly left, as he often does when they get a bit too wild for him and he watched on the sidelines until I plonked him in the bath.

Just so you know, don't use glitter paint and then expect to be able to wash their hair in the bath water...

On the plus side, I got these amazing prints from Zander's handiwork just before the bigger boys hopped in.

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Sticky Saturday: Roman Shield

Sticky Saturday: messy play fun with kids

I think I'm totally cheating by sticking this on here. On Monday night, Ed suddenly announced he needed to make a Roman shield in time for school the next day. At first I was annoyed but then I was like, screw it, let's do it.

We googled shield designs, learnt about the 'Testudo' manoeuvre and he got on with drawing his design. I made the shield for him with some spare cardboard, making it curved. He wanted to make it full sized but sadly there wasn't enough cardboard.

He then lovingly painted it with lovely bright acrylics and we left it to dry overnight. Thankfully it was ready for the morning - yay!

I do apologise for the sad faced photo, he really isn't a morning person.

Do you know what though, having spent the evening together crafting, I haven't felt this close to him in ages. Painting together gave us time to chat, just the two of us, we don't normally have, especially these days with little Zander taking a lot of my attention. I really must make more time to have more one on one with the older two, it was really special.

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Monday Make: Snowflake String Art

Monday Make: This week's project

I saw this on Pinterest and felt inspired. I love the simple quality of it, and living with Mr Strawberry means there's always lots of wood straps laying around.

Ta-daaa. Random wood.

With some very useful sticky-back plastic, I cut out a tree line silhouette.

I painted the whole thing black and then sprinkled white paint on it by flicking the paintbrush over it from above.

Then I peeled off the sticky plastic and cut out a paper snowflake.

I laid my snowflake over the top of my wood (as soon as the paint was dry) to guide me while I hammered in the pins.

Then I ripped off the paper as I wrapped the string around each pin. 

I just knew if I took off all the paper at once, the board would become a mass of confusion; just pins and no clue where to wrap the string, so I took it off as I went along.

I'm actually really pleased with this. There was a point during the make when I thought it would turn out really crappy, but as soon as the sticky plastic came off, it was like magic, revealing my tree line, despite the fact that I originally wanted to them more like this...

...but thought that a simplified version might be nicer than a cocked up version as I didn't have the patience to do all that cutting out.

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Sensory Sunday: Squish Painting Reverse Christmas Cards

Sensory Saturday: Exploring the world with little fat fingers.

I'll be honest. I wanted to do this with his actual fingers, but since he only puts things in his mouth, I couldn't face it. Instead, I went with the 'seal everything in a bag' technique despite the fact that only four weeks ago I featured this idea in this post.

Having given Zander two pieces of paint splatted paper sealed in plastic wallets, sprinkled glitter over the results and left them to dry for a day or two, I chopped up his hard work. When I say 'hard work', I do of course mean avid scrunching up and chewing.

I had some silver card in my stash so I ran it through the embosser a good friend lovingly bought me years ago, just to make them extra festive.

A lot of painstaking cutting out of tree shapes and a lot of pritt stick later, these are my results. I love them! And I was pleasantly surprised as to how many I managed to make. Yay!

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Sticky Saturday: Squish Painting

Sticky Saturday: messy play fun with kids

I'll be honest, I've been struggling to organise messy play at our tots group lately. Life with a small human is incredibly demanding (as expected).
So I think, for now, I'll mostly be concentrating on sensory play with my little Zander for my Sticky Saturday posts.
I chose something nice and easy (and not so messy) for our first attempt.

Dead simple. I squirted some paint onto a piece of paper, popped it into a plastic sleeve and taped up the open end.

We tried this on the rug during some tummy time first, which mostly got eaten, so I tried it at the table. This attempt also got eaten. Even when I taped the whole thing to the table, he peeled it off and tried to eat it. On the plus side, all that squishing the whole thing in his hands meant the paint spread everywhere but I had envisaged him pushing the paint around, using his hands rather than his mouth and seeing the consequences of his actions. I tried to show him but he didn't seem to care.
Still, he loved the crinkly plastic and he had a lot of fun tried to fit a whole piece of A4 into his mouth so it wasn't a complete failure.

The finished article.

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Sticky Saturday: Harvest Veggies

Sticky Saturday: messy play fun with kids

With it being harvest festival, the church we hold messy play in asked us if we'd like to do something for a display, so of course we obliged.

I lovingly cut out lots of veggies, and put them on the tables in colour groups (and tried not to get upset when people encouraged their children to paint their tomatoes red and green and orange and purple).

When the display is done, I'll post some more photos.

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