More charity shop finds!

My very late entry for magpie Monday has had me smiling today, I have been looking for some pink transfer printed plates for absolutely ages. My daughters (and me, if I'm honest) would love to have 'proper' tea parties in a kind of romantic, bohemian/eclectic style. So we wanted a wide variety of different plates, some flowery and some like the ones below. They cost £1.00 for six plates, what a bargain!   On the back it says they are from the Constable bicentennial series.

This next item I found in a box of photograph frames, and it has my heart all a flutter, it is so romantic.... and very heavy!  It is a solid pewter frame and I'm thinking of either putting in photographs of the children or photographs of my husband and I on our wedding day and standing it on my dressing table. This also only cost £1.00.

Then I found this slightly out of season book also for £1.00 it has 200 Christmas recipes and craft ideas inside, just what we need for seasonal preparations later in the year, plenty of things for the children to try out.

Lastly today, a trivet for 50p, it needs to have a little attention paid to it but a welcome addition to the kitchen for placing hot things on and I really love the shape. So these are my finds today the first two items I'm especially excited about, can't wait to put them to good use.

to visit other magpie Monday posts click the link below.

Easter Egg Baskets

My youngest daughter has recently expressed an big interest in making an Easter egg basket to put chocolate eggs in, so we thought we would have a go at making one. As we are keen to re-use and recycle things we have decided to make the egg basket from an old juice carton.

As you can see in the photograph, I have cut the top off a juice carton and used a piece of stiff card for the handle, fixing it to the basket with a paper fastener at the side. The base of the basket can be made from many things like boxes or plastic milk bottles, if you require a bigger basket the juice carton can be cut length ways.

Now for the decoration... here your choice is unlimited, we have decided to liberally smear watered down PVA glue over the basket and stick little pieces of multi coloured tissue paper to it. This will hopefully cover the pictures on the juice carton, if you wanted an older theme this could be decorated with decorative scrap book paper or indeed fabric.

These are the finished baskets, the children have scrunched up little balls of tissue paper to decorate the handle, after the basket is dry you could decorate with little Easter pictures of chicks or bunnies. We have put some spare tissue paper inside the basket to rest the eggs on, but shredded paper would work well too.

Then you just fill with little chocolate eggs and you have very happy children, these little baskets are ideal for the egg hunt.

Fishy Farewell

I have had a pond in the garden for more than ten years, it started as a very small wildlife pond so that the children could see the frogs and rapidly progressed into a very large fish pond, containing many different types of fish including koi carp. I'm not sure how this happened it just did! When we moved I intended to donate the fish to someone else's pond but couldn't find anyone to take them on in time for the move, So we moved with them, that was a very stressful day and I lost my two biggest koi.

We lost another couple of our largest koi in the cold weather over winter so the pond population was much smaller and this prompted us to finally make the decision that it was time to re-home them once and for all, they should now be in their new home swimming merrily around. The photograph below is of one of the fish during transportation.

We now have a large pond to fill, in the area of the garden which has become known as the grotto mainly because it is segmented off from the rest of the garden by willows, fruit trees and overgrown ivy. It is a very Zen like peaceful area, where it is nice to relax with a cup of tea and a book. As every piece of space is well used here we are hoping to transform this area into a new home for chickens, once we have done some more research. Kind of a sad day but with a hint of looking forward to a new life stage as chicken keepers.

Enjoying the Sun

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, really must try to keep up, we have had a very busy few weeks enjoying the lovely weather and spending most of our free time outside. During the week we went to the seaside by train, and we happened to pick the most glorious day for it, apparently it was the hottest day of the year so far. 

We spent half the day on the sandy part of the beach, looking at the things that had washed ashore and intended to visit Amazonia, a reptile house, in the afternoon but unfortunately it had not opened for the season yet so we will have to visit again another time. Not wanting to waste the rest of the day we walked through the sand dunes to have a closer look at the offshore wind farm and the sand bank, which usually has seals on. 

We have been for nature walks in our local woodland and spent a few days exploring our local nature reserve, on one day it was so lovely we walked round the entire great broad. There were so many swans here that some times it got a little scary when they came charging up to you, especially with the little ones about. My daughter however, was not phased at all being surrounded by about 7 or 8 swans much taller than her! We had to throw food at them and make a hasty retreat.

On the home front we now make our own yoghurt all of the time, and we have also been experimenting with cheese production. My son has been fascinated with the whole concept of making these things ourselves and has helped out too. So far we have just used a simple recipe to make cream cheese, but my husband is hoping to increase our range so that we can also make mozzarella and ricotta too. We will be posting soon about how we make these things in more detail.

As you can see in the above photograph some of the things we have planted are coming along very well, the children have been watching the new vegetable plants as they come up very closely. We have had good results so far from the peas and beans, and due to the lovely weather some of the other things like the corn and potatoes are also starting to show. The lovely wooden row markers that you can see were made by my husband, who has been very busy and has also made raised vegetable beds, a new desk and a new book shelf for a wall I'm hoping to turn into a wall of books. If you would like to see how some of these things are made visit his blog here.

Spring Blossom Craft

One of the things that tells you Spring has definitely arrived is the blossom appearing on the trees, the children love running under the trees and playing in all the blossom as it falls on them like confetti or snow. So we thought we would recreate the spring blossom branches.

First we collected some small twigs or branches from the pile offcuts pruned back earlier in the year. Then I have cut out some blossom flower shapes from pink tissue paper, the cut out flowers and the twigs can be seen above.

Then take a couple of your cut out flowers and push down in the centre with the end of something like a paint brush and twist slightly, this gives you the blossom shape, as seen above. Once the brush is removed the piece left in your hand is the piece glued on the stick.

This can be a craft adaptable for any age group, as you can see above my daughter put loads of glue and blossoms on her stick. We have just used normal PVA glue.

Or you can use less blossom and try to arrange it naturally to try and look as much like a real branch as possible.

Above is a photograph of the finished spring blossom twigs drying in a vase, I think they will look lovely on the mantelpiece or on the window ledge, they really brighten the place up. The children had a lot of fun with this.

It even looks quite realistic close up.

Egg Shell Candles

The spring equinox falls tonight and we have decided on a craft to celebrate Ostara, although it would also be a good craft for Easter. We really loved the look of the egg shell candles but as you know, I have really small children and I was not keen on melting the wax to make the candles as they both get very enthusiastic at craft time and hot wax could be a bit dangerous for them if it spilt. So we have decided to make egg shell candles in a totally safe way even for the smallest of children.

First, save some egg shells, I tried to break the eggs in a way to leave one side slightly larger to accommodate the candle. I used a knife to try and get the right size and make it as clean a break as possible and no eggs were wasted, we used them all. I then gave them a quick rinse out and left them to dry.

We put the egg into an eggcup to steady it and to stop small fingers from accidentally crushing the delicate shell. If you choose to you can neaten the edges of the shell with some scissors but we decided to leave them.

Next we used colourful candle sand so that we did not have to use hot wax, this is available at craft shops or you could use wax beads as an alternative if you have some. Aim to fill the egg shell about half or two thirds full, my children decided to fill the shell right up.

Next is the cheating bit, everyone who has small children will have lots of these laying around in the back of the candle drawer, well if you are anything like me that is. Half used birthday candles make excellent emergency wicks, just push the candle down into the wax sand until just the wick is visible. You could use wick if you prefer but I was thinking of the simplest thing for small children.

This is what the finished multi coloured candles look like, you can't see the birthday candle at all, I think they look quite beautiful and it was absolutely safe for small children to make.

As you can see they look lovely alight too...

Crocus experiments

We recently bought a couple of new science experiment books for the children, one containing nature experiments and the other was just a general science experiment book, covering many different topics. As the sun was out today we thought we would venture out into the garden to perform one of the easy nature experiments but things did not go quite as planned! First we chose what we were going to do, gathered what the book said we needed and discussed what outcome we expected to achieve, all good so far.

The children had just chosen the perfect crocus for the experiment, then something extraordinary happened, the crocus had an encounter with our very grumpy cat who just strolled up and sat on it and then promptly tried to chase us out of the garden. So we were off to a bad start, that should have been a sign.

Another crocus was chosen and the book told us to cover the open flower with a shoe box, hence blocking out the sun and set a timer for 5 minutes, which we did. Unfortunately, the crocus did not understand the experiment and it just opened wider, so we repeated it with a different crocus and the same happened again.

As you can see in the above photograph it opened as much as it could, the book states that the flower should close, so we thought for a moment, discussed this conclusion and wondered whether the fact we had used a black shoe box had any effect. Black absorbs more heat, so we changed to a white box hoping it would now work but alas, still no joy. We had changed all variables that we could think of different flowers, different colour boxes all had the same result... the opposite to what the book said, by this time the children had got a little fed up and went off to explore the garden. The only thing left is the time, maybe 5 minutes just is not long enough to reach the desired result, so the next time the sun comes out we will test this theory out.

In the mean time the children checked the garden to see if our vegetables had started to grow, helped with some weeding and found a stash of snail shells by a rock. We assume this was left by a thrush, but it gave the children the opportunity to examine the empty shells more closely, especially the inside spirals.

So we had quite a busy day, my son was concerned that the experiment failed but it really didn't, experiments don't fail at all they give you opportunities to learn, to re-think your expectations, to test out many different theories and even if you don't get what you were expecting the journey has probably taught you a lot.