Homemade Playdoh

So it's just home-made play dough, but I love how the colours turned out. At first I tried a jelly crystals recipe, but then I realised I was making something that was full of sugar, and so I started again using gelatin crystals instead (same idea but without sugar and flavour).

Paper Houses and Paddlepop Stick People

These were inspired by the finger puppets from Teawagontales and the free print out house pattern from Inner Child Fun (both via Crafty Crow). Our versions don't look as elegant, but were heaps of fun to make!

Flags of the World Project

Mr 5 has recently been interested in flags. And when he gets interested in something he tends to sit down and study it for hours. This month he was steadily learning all the flags of the world and the countries they belonged to, so I decided to give him a project to do. 

We printed out a free map outlining the countries of the world. I say we, as I got some technical help from Mr Crafty to print it A3 size. I got the map from here (map #3). I then used google images to find and then print out all the country flags on one A4 page (so they are nice and small), and gave Mr 5 his new "project".

He set to work immediately and cut and stuck in perfect happiness, using his kids atlas to identify the flags he didn't know yet, and find the country (or help me find the country). I'm not sure he'll stick with the project through all 260 flags, but really that hardly matters.

Flowers and Snaps

I have been wanting to make something like this gorgeous bathing cap from Llevo El Invierno for a while. I looked for some brightly coloured flowers, but just couldn't find any, so I got some plain white ones instead. 

First the bathing cap. Because Miss 3 wears goggles, I decided the flowers all over would be a problem, so instead I put just 3. The white flowers with pink centres on a blue cap match the design on her new swimmers.

Next a t-shirt. I decided to make a flower garden with white flowers. First I laid out the ribbon until I was happy with the design.

I made some leaves using ribbon wrapped in a figure 8.

I wanted to put some buttons in the centre of the flowers, but I find sewing buttons on to be a pretty tedious job, so instead I decided to use up some snaps (the ones I bought years ago to make my own cloth nappies... in all that spare time I imagined I'd have with only a newborn baby to look after.)

I chose a couple of bright colours and pressed them on. T-shirt done.

 

And then I found the coloured flowers I wanted, so I made a couple of bright shirts. I cut a branch shape from scrap material, sewed it on (first with straight stitch and then with zigzag, I found this was easier to keep it in place). Finally I pressed some bright snaps through the centre of some flowers. It took me about an hour to make these two: