A new little friend/salt jars

I spent way too long try to work out what to get Jumeirah this birthday... and everything from boogie board LCD tablets ( way cool especially for a techno savvy kid like mine) to theatre tickets, I just couldnt settle on one thing.
Then at music the week before her birthday, she rescued a baby bird that had fallen out of a tree. With such tenderness and concern she tried to help this tiny creature, until its mother came and helped it too.

She was pretty dissapointed when I told her we didnt need to take it home now that its mother was looking after it. I had a brewing thought that a pet bird would be a perfect gift for this little animal whisperer of mine :)
Daddy took a little bit of convincing but finally came around. After a very rude encounter with a pet shop (its a story for another time) I found myself out the back of nowhere looking for an aviary.

What finally happened was we introduced this beautiful boy into our fold :)

His name is Thomas and Jumeirah is absolutely besotted with him, teaching him to talk, eat from her hand, and he spends most of his days perched on either hers or my shoulder.
Hes really very sweet!

So we had her party on the weekend which was incredibly stress free and easy. 8 little friends, an easy beach location, simple party food ( outdoors and not at home means no hot food!), 8 water pistols and a blow up boat made for fantastic fun for such a lovely group of girls.
I had a few backup plans incase of rain but we were incredibly blessed with a brilliant afternoon.

After a swim and food, they asked if I had a cool craft to do ( some of them know me well) and of course I did!

I set them up with a jar each, a piece of carboard, chalk and salt. I showed them how to tint the salt with the chalk by rubbing it. The more you rub it, the darker the colour becomes. Its really very cool :)

For each section of chalk they coloured, we then poured it into their jars. They then repeated the process with another colour and another lump of salt.
Its takes a little while to do which was perfect for me. But they could see how awesome the colours looked layered up in the jar that it kept them working on it till it was done.

Currently Im still trying to find a way to seal the jars so the salt doesnt come out when "encouraged"... think a trip to the hardware shop might be in order tomorrow :)

bubble awesomeness

This weekend, my littlest sprite turns 3. Yes she actually made it ;)

And to celebrate we are having a little party on the beach for us and a few of her friends. Today, and actually over the past few days, I have been busy planning, preparing and creating masterpieces.... in the form of bubble wands. What more fun could you ask for than giant bubbles on a beach??!! I mean really...

This is the final result after much tweaking, refining, and a heck of a lot of dishwashing liquid.

The wands themselves are really easy, the mixture is not.

But here are some photos from this afternoon to show it totally worked and our beach bubble party is going to ROCK :)

Ill give you the tute next week!

( or you can google giant bubble wands, its everywhere really!)

squeezee painting

Yet another wet school holiday day here... Im having a little bit of a meltdown as Im shooting my first "official" non family wedding on Saturday and the forecast is 90% rain. Oh crap. So today I spent much of the day bargaining with God that it can pour the WHOLE of next week if it can just stay fine from now until saturday at 5pm ;) See how that goes....

Today I got out a special activity for Jumeirah. Just something crafty for her as she spends as much time as I do in the mornings helping me tidy up before we start the day.

So today I got out some black paint and white glue to make a cool picture.

All that had to be done was for her to draw a picture, then I made the mixture with about a quarter full container of white glue with a decent addition of black paint. She then traced the owl picture she drew and let it to dry. Tomorrow we'll be able to watercolour the background :)

She also did some beautiful swirl style art that can also be watercolour painted the same way so Im pretty excited to do that too!

On seeing the fun Jumeirah was having, two other little people wanted to squeeze too. So I got some sauce bottles and filled them with paint.

It began as just squeezee painting, and we very quickly went through a huge amount of paint and doznes of pieces of paper that would NEVER dry.

Jumeirah suggested we make butterfly paintings which was met with a very excited " YEAH!!!!" and so we scooped off some of the paint back into the bottles and did some beautiful black and red butterflies. The results were amazing but what was more photo worthy was the expressions on seeing the result of their squeezing and folding..... :)

One very busy day :)

Stay tuned for the second half of Jumeirahs art :)

Mondrian art

Today I had all three cherubs at home... ear aches, runny noses, normal, neverending winter stuff which I am truly over...I think for the first time in my life I am longing for warmer weather.

Watch me complain in a few months time :)

This week I am changing things. Last week I was so unorganised that they week past in a slow boring blur. I didnt really have any rhyme or reason to anything and it left me feeling Blah. So I stepped it up, got myself sorted for some fun activities and began the day with a sunrise walk to clear my head.

Twas perfect :)

At home, I got out some pencils, paint and paper and asked them to come create with me. Jared beelined for the mobilo but I let him go today, if he was going to create with something else, I was happy. The girls were up at the table faster than I could get the invitation to create out :)

Amahli, wanting no direction, was straight into it. Painting and chatting about what she was doing, being or so meticulous with her brush strokes, shes just so entertaining to watch.

I had something different for Jumeirah to do and she was keen to see what it was.

A friend of mine, who is a Kindy teacher, showed us his classes work recently that was inspired by the artist Piet Mondrian. I showed Jumeirah their work and asked if she wanted to give it a go.
We started by drawing straight lines on the paper with a ruler, both horizontally and vertically, making squares and rectangles.

Once drawn, she began to fill in different squares with colour. Its something that had to be done carefully, she took her time and did really well.

Once that stage was dry, each line is then painted in black paint. Another part that takes a steady hand and careful painting, she did get a bit frustrated by it but worked through it with me to complete what turned out to be a masterpiece.

The result is really striking and looks fantastic on the wall.

Im hoping she'll do one on a canvas for me :)

Thanks for the idea Mr Scott!!!

Make your own floating candles

Wow is it Monday already?? How a week flies when you are having fun :)
And boy did we have fun last week. Finally (!!!) we were able to take a trip to Sydney to see Ma and Pa and to enjoy some family time. We actually came home tired so not much relaxing to be done but we had a blast and Amahli is already asking when we are going again.
The craft Im posting about today is one I managed to sneak in the day before heading to Sydney after Jumeirah had begged for a week to do it... its fairly easy but takes a bit to do but I had promised so it was time to deliver :)

Make your own candles

Yet another craft that didnt get done in the holidays, I had bought the wax and candle wick beforehand but was too sick to actually do it.
You also need the ability to double boil ( we used an electric fry pan and a cup), and some kind of mould to pour the candle into. We went for something a bit different and made our moulds using wet sand in a paint container. It worked well and was something Jumeirah was able to shape herself. We also tied pieces of wick string to a skewer to hang into the wax to keep it sort of centred in the middle of the candle.

Our double boiler

The sand moulds

To start with, you need to melt the wax. We did ours outside, and added a piece of pastel crayon to colour it. ( you can leave it white but we wanted to see if pastels would work.
Wax melting with piece of pastel

Skewers and wick

Once melted, carefully pour the wax into the sand mould. This then needs to be left to dry for a few hours ( we left ours over night). Once dry you can gently take the candle out, dust off the sand and untie the skewer and you are left with a few cute floating candle :)

I think this would make a really cute gift for a teacher or Mothers Day!