Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts

Saturday 22 June 2013

Little green fingers


Moneysupermarket.com sent us an amazing children's gardening set to give us a new burst of enthusiasm for the garden and help us join in the Britmums challenge. The minute my daughter opened the parcel she was sooo excited about getting out in the garden and planting her new seeds! This post is an entry for BritMums’ #KidsGrowWild Challenge. 

So here it is – our gardening story.
This was pretty much the case when we moved into our new build – we lovingly called it "our blank canvas"! One month later our first baby was born and together, little by little, on a small budget, we made it our own. At about 40m2 our garden is compact but we have tried to make the most of it and it works. I love it, my daughter loves it and Daddy is quite proud as he did most of the work!
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So let us show you around...
...my little ones have put their stamp on things wherever you look!
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My little ones love the garden. Baby boy loves to sit under the bamboo with Mummy and watch the leaves blow in the wind, and to watch the windmills spin. My little girl loves chasing bubbles, building tunnels for Wiggly Woo in the stones, making fairy gardens, hiding dinosaurs in the flowers beds and making stone animals. This one is a crocodile!


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And of course my daughter loves helping with the gardening and she couldn't wait any longer to plant her new seeds. We don't have much flower bed space so we decided to use pots and luckily found some round the side of the house looking sorry for themselves.

She got on her gloves and forked the soil and pulled out the old weeds that had been growing in the pots.


Then we explored the seeds we had been sent. There was a mixed packet (she has named everything flowers), sunflowers and some pansies.



She was fascinated by the seeds and their different shapes. We spent a long time looking at them and deciding what they looked like!

Squiggle then sprinkled the pansy and the 'everything' seeds in their pots and covered them over with soil. Then she carefully planted a couple of the sun flower seeds in the last pot.

Last year we planted sunflowers but we started them off on the windowsill in the kitchen. They are a great thing for children to grow as they shoot up really quickly, so they can almost watch them grow in front of them. We had 3 sunflowers last year, so Squiggle, Daddy and I chose one each and had a sunflower race. It was great fun, and of course, she won! I hope these do as well after starting them outside.

Once the seeds were planted I cut out the pictures from the packets for her and sticking them to some lollipop sticks she stuck them in as labels.


A sure way to get any child interested in the garden is to get them a watering can. Once she had planted the seeds my daughter just couldn't wait to get watering. She loves being allowed to fill it up herself in the sink and carry it through the house (with mummy following behind with the mop). She watered all her pots well and instantly asked when they would start growing. Gardening is a great life lesson in patience for a 3 year old.
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One of the reasons my little girl was so keen to get planting is that I promised she could decorate the boring old pots. We took a trip to the DIY shop and I let her choose 3 sample pots of emulsion paint. At about £1.50 each it is good value and you even get a brush in the lid so it's pretty hassle free.


Mess and paint in the sunshine, what's not to love? She got to work planning and painting and soon our garden was full of smiles and laughter... and her legs were caked in blue paint! We have had a pit of rain since painting them and I'm pleased to say they haven't run. She took so much care and pride in painting them that I was terrified we would come down one morning to find pink puddles on the grass.

She has placed her pots with pride in front of her Wendy house, so that it now has it's own, special, vibrant garden. Every morning she is straight in the garden in her pyjamas to check their progress, so please don't let us down flowers! x


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Tuesday 13 March 2012

Mother's Day bubble cards

I love it when the sun comes out and you can get out in the garden to do your painting. 
Sunday was glorious so we did just that!

We did some simple bubble paintings which I had an idea we could easily turn into bunches of flowers for our mother's day cards for granny and nana. I thought Squiggle would love this as she loves blowing bubbles and gurgling her drink through a straw. I was a bit worried she would slurp it by mistake so I tried food colouring instead of paint - worked a treat!


In our mix we had...
A squirt of washing up liquid
A splash of food colouring
Some water.




I'm sure everyone remembers doing this a school 
but just in case you missed out here is what we did:


We mixed it all together in a plastic cup and then using a straw blew great gurgly bubbles till the paint mixture started to bubble over the top of the cup. We then pressed some white paper on top (Squiggle was especially good at this bit). She really wanted to get creative with her straw and add some wiggly lines too!

Once dry I added some simple stalks on with a green pastel crayon and some leaves so the granny's could tell what they are!




All that's left for me to do before Sunday is trim and mount them on the card. Inside the card I'm going to stick a photo I took of my little artist blowing the paint bubbles with the caption "A Squiggle Creation, 18th March 2012". I think my granny and nana will find that quite amusing and will make the card into a nice little keepsake!