Quotes To Inspire Around The Home

I don't know about you but I love a good quote. Something positive and inspiring. I find they can really uplift me if I'm down and motivate me when I'm in need of getting something done. So when I finally got my own home I knew I'd want to have these kind of words all around my home surrounding me.

In a bid to add a touch of decoration to our home I decided to take inspiration from the internet and create some word art of my own.

10 Spooktacular Halloween Activities

Tis the season for trick or treating. Yes Halloween is upon us. I've asked a few other lovely bloggers for some wonderful Halloween activities to share with you all, ideas of things that you can be doing with your kids whilst they're off on half term. So below are 10 spooktacular craft and baking activities for you to try.

1. First up are some amazing Halloween candles over on In The Playroom. An activity that might sound complicated but is infact easy to do with spooktacular results.

Get Thrifty And Make Your Own Wrapping Paper

Wrapping paper.

Something we use a lot but also something that tends to just get thrown in the bin after usage, so why do we all spend so much money on it??

The fact that we are in the process of buying a house and that Christmas is just round the corner (yes I did just say the C word), I'm thinking of ways that I can save myself money.

One idea, making my own wrapping paper.

We're Going On A Treasure Hunt

I love the fact that my girls are so creative and that their imaginations are always working on over drive. This means that even when I can't think of things for us to do, they manage to come up with ideas all by themselves.

Last week my eldest two daughters, after watching another episode of Jake and The Never Land Pirates with their sister's, decided to make a treasure map and go on a treasure hunt around the house to find buried treasure.

You will need :

Getting Into The World Cup Spirit with DuckTape

If you hadn't noticed yet, the World Cup has started!! Duck Tape are joining in with celebrations and they've asked myelf and 7 others bloggers to take part in the #duckworldcup.

Each blogger has been given a different group and we have all been sent the colour tapes that we will need to create the flags for each of the countries in our groups.

I was given group B containing : Spain, Netherlands, Chile and Australia. Now I'm not very knowledgable when it comes to football so I don't really know the best team to be supporting but this gave us a great opportunity to learn a bit more about different countries and their accompanying flags.

I decided to make something different for each team so that the girls and I could show our support each time they played.

Netherlands Flag

1. Get prepared with the materials you will need : scissors, sellotape, ruler, 4 straws and an A4 piece of paper.

2. Fold the piece of paper in half and in half again.
Cut along the folds, giving you four pieces of paper.

3. With your ruler measure one of the pieces of paper to find the centre.
Put the white duck tape through the middle of the paper.

4. Using your ruler again to measure out the lines equally, you then place the red duck tape at the top of the paper and the blue at the bottom. This forms the pattern of the Netherlands flag.

5. Turn your flag around. Place one straw on one side of the paper, left or right, it is up to you.
Then stick it down with sellotape. I stuck some sellotape vertically and some horizontally to make sure that the straw was secure.

6. Your flag is now finished. All that is left to do is start waving it around!!

Lets Create a Play Area

I said at the start of the year that after 8 years of living in the same house, it was more than time to start making our house more of home. I'm talking anything drastic as unfortunately we are renting so can't do an awful lot, but a few changes here and there are definitely needed. Last month Layla's room got a Minnie makeover, so this month I thought it was only fair that I did something for the other girls, well it includes Layla too. They tend to play up in their bedrooms but I like to see and hear what they are up to so I made the decision to create a little play area in the living room for them.

This is the area that I chose to redesign :

As you can see, it was empty, plain and boring. It now looks like this :

Homemade Valentine's Flowers

Valentine's day is here, did you remember, are you in need of a last minute gift or perhaps your children want to make something special?? Take a look at my short tutorial on how to make some homemade Valentine's flowers.

You will need :

* Straws

* Paper

* Pencil

* Scissors

* Glue

* Double sided tape

* Ribbon

* Craft Feathers

Hanging Snowflakes

You may have seen that we have been making alot of our own Christmas decorations this year including a toilet roll Christmas tree. Today I am going to show you how to make hanging snowflakes, perfect for adding a touch of Christmas to your windows.

You will need :

* plain white paper
* coloured wool
* pen
* scissors
* sewing needle

1. Take one corner of your paper and fold it over until it reaches the other side of the paper as shown below :

2. Cut along the verticle line you have created and you will be left with what looks like a triangle. Then take your pen and draw whatver shapes you like around the triangle.

3. Open out your triangle to reveal your snowflake. Repeat these steps to create as many snowflakes as you would like, for the purpose of this post I have made three snowflakes.

4. You will now need the wool you have picked out, I suggest the length you need is 1 and a half times the length of the snowflakes when all put together in a row. Tie a not at one end of the wool and then using a large sewing needle, thread the wool through one corner of the first snowflake.

5. Continue to thread the wool through the bottom and top of each subsequent snowflake, making sure to double sew on each corner so that the snowflake won't slip down the wool. You can then tie a loop at the top of the final snowflake for hanging.

6. Hang your snowflakes up and show them off.

To make your hanging snowflakes really stick out you can use different coloured papers or even create your own designs on them.

xxxx

A 5 Year Old Tells the Nativity Story

I've previously had a couple of pieces of work that my 8 year old has created posted on my blog before. Well today I wanted to show you something my lovely 5 year old Freya has been working on. The pictures below are her way of telling you the Nativity story of how Jesus came to be born.

I have posted them in the order that I was told to by my daughter so here goes

Here we have Mary meeting Joseph.

Then the angel Gabriel pays Mary a visit.

Of course they then have to travel to Bethlehem on their (not so little) donkey.

Baby Jesus is born.

Surrounded by sheep,

Camels and elephants?

And they all lived happily ever after, the end.

xxxx

Little Artists

Elise, Freya and Gracie are all very creative and one of the things they love doing is drawing pictures, the other day they were each creating images about films, it was nice seeing the different ways they interpreted that theme :

First up we have Elise's (7) picture,

She didn't pick out a specific movie, instead she focused on what where and how we watch these films.

Next up is Freya's (5) picture,

She chose to draw Ariel from her favourite film, The Little Mermaid.

And lastly we have Gracie's (3) picture,

She decided to make up her own movie called "Where's my mum?"

It is lovely to see how their imaginations work and how different each of their drawing styles are. Do your children like creating pictures, what are their favourite things to draw??

xxxx