Easter crafting: shaving foam marbled paper and Easter hats with Marigold.

We've been busy crafting this past week ready for Easter.

Spring is a great time of year to craft, the sun is out and it's time for lots of bright colours too!

On a day where Alex had gone to a friend's house to play after school I took it as a good opportunity to do some crafting with Sam one-to-one. Which I will admit I've not done enough of over the years!

We collected some cards and papers, chose the colours we wanted and bought some shaving foam. (Please read the bottle when buying...we bought the gel one first time and had to head back to be able to make this project)!

How to make shaving foam marbled paper:

Things you need

• Shaving foam
• Paint (at least 3 colours)
• Thick paper or card
• Cocktail sticks/kebab skewers/fork
• Tray with foil (saves on lots of washing)
• Ruler or something else to use as a scraper

How to make it:

• Make sure you clear a space, thanks to Marigold we had plenty of sponges and cloths to wipe down the table and kitchen worktops. 
• Wear gloves if you want to...this would be advisable if you wanted to use food colouring instead of paints.

• Set up the trays, and squirt a generous amount of the shaving foam all over. 
• Choose which colours you want to marble together and dab small blobs all over. 
• Using the skewers etc, make patterns with the paint. Tip: start off with bigger gaps, when you reuse the same shaving foam over a few times you will get a 'tighter' marble affect anyway. 
• Once happy with pattern made place a piece of paper on top. Don't press too hard, but enough for the paint to take. 
• Gently peel off the paper, place on the table.
• Using the ruler scrape the excess shaving foam off, press firmly when doing this.
• Leave to dry
• Put the excess shaving foam back in the tray and mix with the skewer again, repeat until you want to stop. 

I will admit this is quite a messy make! But it is fun, and I will also admit that we aren't too precious about our table as it's on it's last legs. Again having Marigold to help with the clean up was great-as you can see our table needed it!

We actually used these papers this weekend, the boys used templates and cookie cutters to cut out spring shapes for their Easter hats. 

These were really simple to make as it was simply a piece of card for each hat, cut into 3, 2 stapled to fit their heads, and then the extra piece bridged over the top. The 'grass and box of carrots' were from Asda at a £1/e I thought these were pretty reasonable! Using my glue gun I got them to tell me where they wanted their shapes placed.  

Hope you enjoyed this, let us know if you will be crafting this Easter!

This is a collaborative post with Marigold

Easter day fun

Me and Alex finished off the cards from the painting we did on Saturday this morning which was fun.

We then decided to go to our local big park called Lydiard Park for an hour before heading to my parents. We had a lovely time there-even though it was quite chilly! Alex remembered the giant slide he went on in the summer which is set into the grounds and wanted to find that rather than play in the park. Alex (and me) got a bit scared by some dog off the lead which knocked Alex down, the owners didn't even apologise though and didn't rush to take their out of control dog away either so that was a bit horrible. But we continued to go around the lake, which was partially frozen, so Daddy and Alex enjoyed throwing the stones in and trying to break the ice.

We then went to my parents house where we had a lovely beef roast, my Nana and Grandad had come down too which was nice as haven't seen them since Christmas and they have only seen Sam once. Sadly they have had a rough few months with my Grandad getting prostate cancer and my Nana breaking her wrist (both are on the mend now thankfully). They enjoyed seeing the boys.

We did a small Easter egg hunt for Alex in their garden which he got really excited about, he truly believed the bunny had been (despite seeing the bag of chocolate I had in the car with me-I told him I had to give it to the bunny to hide)! He was very pleased with his goodies!

He also had fun playing in the garden afterwards-bossing my Mum about and keeping her outside to play ball games!

James had to unfortunately leave to work at 5 but we stayed on at mums for tea-and lots of cake. It was a lovely family day, the boys got spoilt too as my parents had bought them some clothes and my Grandparents gave some money to them.

Eggcited-sorry couldn't resist!

Eggstatic on his 1st Easter-starting to giggle lots

Marbled egg cards-Happy Easter!

This morning Alex made the Easter cards from the painting we did yesterday

I drew a big egg shape on some of the paintings and Alex cut around the shape, I was really impressed with how well he did with cutting around the line, it was funny to watch him concentrating so much and with every movement of the scissors he opened his mouth up and down.

Concentrating

Cutting around the egg shapes

Some of the marble paintings we did yesterday

We stuck the eggs shapes onto some sugar paper.

The final cards

And Alex tried to write his name at the bottom of them too. 

'Alex'

We only made two cards today as he got bored of doing it, so will try and get another couple done in the morning as we haven't seen James' parents today. 

 

Marbled eggs

Today we got the paints out, I'll admit I haven't had the paints out for one whole year which I am quite ashamed to admit.

Alex LOVED it and I felt quite bad I hadn't done anything like this with him for that period of time, the things I would have done had I had not felt so ill during my pregnancy last year :( feel like he's really missed out and I didn't give him the attention he needed.

Anyway...

I chopped one side of the cereal box off to make a deep tray, placed paper into it and blobbed paint randomly on the paper. We then put some marbles in the box, Alex was first unsure of what to do but soon got the hang of it and loved making lots of patterns.

This first attempt was so wet with paint I placed another piece of paper on top to make a print of it too!

Then after we used the marbles that were covered in paint on a plain piece of paper without any added paint which gave really good patterns and not too thick and gloopy. 

Then we put the finger paints to good use, Alex wanted to make lots of lines with them rather than printing. 

We have some great painting tools from ELC, he really liked the circle stamper-as you can see he was moving fast!

Who needs finger prints when you can use your whole hand?

Making lots of 'dots.

Messy hands. 

We had a great time, I really liked using marbles and actually that part of the painting was not too messy if you wanted to try it. 

We will be cutting the paper into egg shapes tomorrow and sticking them onto cards to give to the Grandparents tomorrow. We couldn't do it tonight as the paint was still so wet at 7pm and Alex was in bed way before then as he was so tired!

So look out for the finished results tomorrow!

UPDATED:

Linking up with the fab new linky by Jennie from Edspire in memory of Matilda Mae, there are some great ideas, so head on over!

Our final cards can be found on some of our later post which have some better photos of painting results!

                                   

Shaving foam Easter egg marbling

Last Easter I grabbed a load of craft supplies and put them outside for me and Alex to do some marbling for our Easter cards. It was probably the last messy thing I did with him before feeling the side effects of pregnancy-how awful it has taken a year for me to get back into crafting with him again. :( I never got around to blogging about it so I am using the photos from last year. I cannot believe we were out in shorts and t-shirts outside in the sun the same time last year-really hoping spring kicks in soon!

Marbling with shaving foam is incredibly easy and leaves great results.
1.You need some sort of tray to squirt out and cover with shaving foam, then use either food colouring and/or paint and blob either one side or all over (I think if I remember correctly it worked much better with the paints).

2. Using pencils/paint brushes/cardboard swirl patterns into the shaving foam and paint mixture creating wonderful patterns.

3. Once you are happy with the patterns place a piece of paper (we found normal white printing paper worked best) on top and lift it up carefully, it might look like a mess now.

4. Use a strong long piece of cardboard or ruler and scrape the shaving foam mixture off the paper.

5. Leave to dry you should be left with something looking like this...

I then cut the paper into egg shapes, Alex also had some practise at cutting with his scissors too, I was very impressed at his co-ordination doing so.

We then stuck these onto some card, I had picked up some Easter foam shapes from ELC  that Alex stuck on too, unfortunately I didn't take a photo of these. 

This was Alex after doing the marbling last year, he wanted to just paint his hands and do hand prints!

When Pinterest gives false hope!

I admit I have spent many hours of my life looking through Pinterest pages, and I often pin things that I know I will never really get around to do, but when I saw these cute looking bunny buns I couldn't resist trying them for Easter.

Source

 Now I have never had luck when it comes to bread making, I am impatient, I don't like baking when you have to wait around, so waiting for for things to prove isn't something I'm usually prepared to wait the recommended time for! I thought I'd try to day though, just bought some bread flour that only needed water added to it, and left it covered in the airing cupboard. I didn't have a choice about giving in to putting it in the oven too early as Sam needed feeding so that worked out quite well, and for once the bread dough had doubled in size. 

I used scissors to snip the ears into the dough, and a cocktail stick to prick the eyes. Already they didn't exactly look great...

More like road kill bunnies!

I thoguht hoped something magical might happen in the oven...umm it didn't happen

Attack of the zombie bunnies!

So not all Pinterest makes are a success, especially in my case when it comes to bread!

Still they tasted nice and it was lovely to have warm rolls for lunch!

I thought Alex might have liked to have made these with me, but he wasn't interested as Daddy was home and had got his old scalextric set out of the garage so that was much more fun!

Hope you don't mind but linking up with PinAddicts as not all pins turn out nice and thought it might give you all a laugh!

Happy Easter-A day late!

Saturday evening I spent baking between 8-12pm!

3 baking tins, 2 cupcake trays, 2 mixing bowls, tonnes of ingredients later I had lots of these goodies...

Butter biscuit bunnies, chocolate crispies, & pistachio biscotti.

I have 5 big tubs full of these 3 different things...even when we give some more of them away today I feel we will be eating these for a while to come...my waistline might be considerably bigger! I am going to post the recipe for the pistachio biscotti some time in the next week as it's to die for and really easy to make!

I hope you all had a lovely Easter day yesterday, and hope you manage to enjoy this soggy wet Monday (at least it's horrible and wet here) typical for Easter Monday really isn't it!