Halloween and Autumnal Crafts from Baker Ross

We really enjoy receiving arts and craft goodies from Baker Ross and our latest delivery of Halloween and Autumnal craft kits has provided Freddy and the friends, with lots of creative fun!

We received  the following selection to try out:

Top Hat Craft Kit  Pack of 3 £2.70

Day of the Dead Foam Stickers Pack of 105 £2.99

Scratch Art Haunted Houses Pack of 8 £2.95

Woodland Animals Cross Stitch Pack of 5 £3.49

Hedgehog Cushion Sewing Set Pack of 2 £4.70

Year of the Monkey Stained Glass Monkey Decorations Pack of 6 £3.96

Wooden Trophy Magnets Pack of 8 £2.79

The Baker Ross craft kits contain almost everything required to create some lovely crafted pieces. With impressive end results, they allow children to feel confident in their creativity and help develop their skills. Freddy really loves to invite his friends over to share the fun and help him to test out the Craft-it! sets. Having a Craft Party is a great idea for entertaining children, and the Baker Ross sets lend themselves perfectly to this.

The first activity they enjoyed was the Scratch Art Haunted Houses. The pack includes 8 black house shapes and the tools for scratching away the top surface. Underneath the black is a shiny holographic style, silver design, which contrasts really well giving a striking effect.

The top layer scratches away really nicely so you don't damage the under layer when creating your design. Once completed, the houses are made free-standing by slotting in semi-circular cardboard feet. This was a little bit fiddly as the slotted feet are quite easily ripped, but with an adult's help the display of Haunted Houses made a dramatic and spooky Halloween scene!

This year is the Chinese Year of the Monkey. The Stained Glass Monkey Decorations are a lovely way to celebrate that fact. The set comprises of 8 pre-cut monkey shapes in black card, with push out, pre-cut holes. There is also a bag of coloured cellophane squares in assorted colours and some ribbons for attaching to the hanging decoration.

You need to use glue to attach pieces of cellophane to the back of the monkey shape, which show through the holes in the design. The boys enjoyed doing this, but it was very messy with glue going everywhere! They made some very colourful (and very sticky) monkeys that look very pretty hung in front of a window with the light shining through.

Older children would be able to take more time and cut smaller pieces of cellophane to make a more multi-coloured and neater effect. But even when done by a 4 year old and a 6 year old, the end results are still pretty good!

The Day of the Dead range of products on the Baker Ross website is absolutely brilliant. I love the colours and the designs. The set of self adhesive Day of the Dead foam stickers are lovely. There are 35 assorted designs including skulls, guitars, hearts, flowers and maracas in each pack of 105 stickers. They lend themselves to a whole host of crafting activities from card making to decorating jewellery boxes or photo frames.

The boys used them to decorate some cool Halloween Top Hats.

The Top Hat making kit comprises of pre-cut, thick black cardboard pieces that are glued together to make the rim and the top of the hat. There was no way the boys could do this unaided so the adults stepped in!  Given time and a good glue and something to hold everything together while it dried, I think you could make a pretty good and sturdy top hat. However, trying to get it done quickly so the boys could get sticking with their Day of the Dead stickers, meant the end results were not as good as they could be. This is not an activity to be rushed.

The materials themselves are good quality and well cut. In hindsight, I think using glue dots would have been a better way of assembling the hat. The hats would be a good addition to a Halloween costume and can be personalised using any decorations you like.

Freddy and his friends decorated their hats with the Day of the Dead stickers and they looked pretty cool and ready for a Halloween party! The foam stickers have a peel off back making them easy to stick on. They are such good quality and give an impressive effect.

As ever with Baker Ross, I was impressed with the quality and the designs of the finished crafts. I love that everything comes pre-cut or pre-punched and ready to use with minimum preparation needed. Almost everything you need is included, we just used our own glue and scissors to complete the crafts. The activities are quite straightforward and can be completed by children with varying degrees of skill. Even the youngest children will be able to participate in many of the crafts with supervision, while older kids can unleash their creativity independently and put their own artistic spin on the finished results.

Baker Ross products, including the ones we tried out, can  be found on their website at www.bakerross.co.uk.

Valentine's Day Crafts from Baker Ross

Baker Ross sent us some great crafting goodies for creating some lovely Valentine's Day or Mother's Day gifts. 

The children really enjoyed decorating heart shaped ceramic trinket boxes using some lovely, pastel coloured porcelain paints.  The heart shaped boxes are £3.49 for a box of four, which is excellent value.  They are 8cm in size and come with a fitted lid.  They can be decorated to create very personal gifts for loved ones.

The Hobbyline Brights Porcelain Paint Pots come in six bright pastel colours: orange, rose, ice green, opal blue, reseda and white.  They cost £10.99.  The paint goes on really nicely and can be baked to heat fix the design. They are the perfect medium to decorate the ceramic trinket boxes.

The kids enjoyed coming up with different designs for each of the ceramic heart trinket boxes that they decorated. Freddy wanted to make one for his big sister Ella with her name on!  Other designs involved stippling, geometric designs and dots.

The paint dries with a nice sheen, giving a great end result.  I loved Freddy's pot with a pink snowflake on top.  It is such a good way to bring out a child's creativity.

Painting the heart shaped trinket boxes was a really lovely craft activity with good end results.  They are a really great idea for making presents for mums, grandparents and other loved ones.  It would also be a lovely activity to do at a birthday party.

We also received a Spring Card Activity Set, which sells for £6.99. Each pack includes patterned and coloured card, corrugated card, pre-punched card baskets, textured and tinted paper, ribbon, decorative crystals, split pins and stickers.  There are 88 items in the pack, making it really good value. There are also instructions for projects.  

It is a kit that will let children have some springtime crafting fun, making cards, decorations, models, displays and other crafts, such as this cute birdhouse.  

There is so much potential for creativity and the colours and designs of the card and paper are really subtle, seasonal and nice. It is a really versatile kit encouraging children to try card and paper crafting.  

You can find all these crafting products plus hundreds more on the Baker Ross website at www.bakerross.co.uk.  They have craft sets, accessories and products for all seasons and special events.  I love their stuff and so do my crafty kids!

Making a Seawig!

Sarah McIntyre is a writer and illustrator and a larger than life character who is simply oozing with creativity and talent.  I was lucky enough to see her talk at Blog Summit and I thought she was amazing.  A true inspiration who made even me feel that exploring my artistic talents was not an impossible venture!  

So when Tots 100 announced details of a competition inviting entrants to make their very own Seawig with their kids, I was delighted to challenge my children, Ella 17, Kizzy 11 and 4 year old Freddy, to get creative. Ian cut a Seawig shape out of some heavy duty cardboard, then we set the kids off, armed with plasticine, paints, seashells, pipe cleaners, pompoms, paper, pencils, googly eyes and other arts and crafts bits and bobs, to decorate the Seawig.  

I love watching the three of them working together as a team, having fun and working to make a creative project. I absolutely love Kizzy's "The World is our Oyster!" speech bubble.  A fantastic sentiment filled with positivity from my 11 year old.  The plasticine sea monkey, based on one of Sarah's characters is another favourite addition.  The starfish family with their quirky expressions made me smile too.  Freddy was in charge of sticking on googly eyes!

The big seashells they used were from a collection of shells they found on the beach in Normandy where we went on holiday last summer. It was so nice to see them used in their Seawig.  It brought back memories of a wonderful week away!

The end result was a magnificent Seawig which features shells, a sea monkey, crabs, starfish, seaweed, multi-coloured seagull feathers, pompoms and curls.  Everyone was very keen to model it!

This is my favourite photograph of the Seawig project, 4 year old Freddy proudly donning the Seawig and showing exactly how much fun it was for him to spend an afternoon doing a wonderfully, creative art activity with his big sisters.

This post is an entry into the #Tots100Seawigs competition in association with jabberworks.co.uk.

Hand Print Angel Christmas Cards

I love doing Christmas arts and crafts with the children.  This year we have made hand print angels using 3 year old Freddy's lovely little hands to make prints for the body and wings.  They make a lovely keepsake, and a perfect card for grandparents and other loved ones.

It's really easy and lots of fun to do!

1. Put some poster paints onto plates.
2. Using one colour, paint the hand and make a print onto the paper.
3. Wash hand!
4. Using another colour, paint the hand and make two prints, one on either side of the first one, to make wings.
5. Using their finger, the child can make a circle by swirling a blob of paint for the face.
6. Use little fingerprints to make the hair.
7. When dry, put on some stick on googlie eyes.
8. Draw on a smiley mouth.
9. Cut out and stick to the front of a card.

I love this activity because pre-schoolers are able to do the majority of the artwork themselves with just  a little guidance. Keeping hands clean between colours is really important!  Freddy really enjoyed making his cards with a little help from daddy.  It is such a fun craft idea and the end result is a lovely way to preserve their hand prints forever.

Here is one we mounted on some funky leopard print card, his Nana's favourite design!  I think she'll love it!

Or you can use plain white card and let your pre-schooler brighten it up with some stick-on stars or glitter!

*****

Another craft project that Freddy loved doing was making footprint Rudolphs.  He loved the squishy squashy feeling of paint between his toes!  He then used his thumb print for a nose and finger painted antlers. Googlie eyes finished the pictures!

This is my entry into the Moneysupermarket Christmas Card Craft Off.

Artzooka and Style Me Up

We were sent some craft sets from Artzooka and Style Me Up to test out.  Now the kids are back at school, it is nice for them to have some art projects to enjoy in the evenings and at weekends if they are at a loose end.

Artzooka is a creative brand designed for kids aged 5 and up to get crafty and use their imagination to make masterpieces using bits and bobs around the house.  Each kit contains what you need to create funky and inspiring artworks.  Artzooka has a theme based on recycling and reusing and little ones are inspired by the enclosed booklet to make models, puppets, mosaics and other art projects.

We received Paper Tape Pets which uses shaped bases to build a model using paper and wrapping tape.  The paper model is then painted and given stick on eyes to make a unique creation.

Style Me Up is a fashion brand for tweens aged 8-14.  With inspirational illustrations and fun creative activities, girls will love to explore their sense of style and express their personalities.  The collection is full of ideas to allow their creativity to blossom.

The Lip Balm Set and Funky Scrunchie Set are just two products in this extensive and exciting range.  They contain everything needed and clear instructions to make fashionable and fun accessories which girls will love.  Perfect for doing alone or with friends, Style Me Up is something that any fashion conscious and stylish tween will love.

Here are some photos of Kizzy hard at work getting crafty to make some cute personalized scrunchies embellished with beads, ribbons and buttons.

The Finished Scrunchie

The Artzooka and Style Me Up craft sets are perfect for presents.  If you are beginning to think about Christmas, these craft sets would make brilliant gifts for creative kids!

For more information take a look at www.artzooka.com and www.stylemeup.com.