10th December - Candy Cane Growing

So I've been super excited about this one, it completely captures the magic of Christmas and the kids imaginations. However it is a long term investment of time and effort as you'll be the one to help the candy cane to "grow".

So to grow your candy cane you will need:

1. Plant pots, 
2. Magic Snow
3. Elf magic dust (glitter)
4. Candy cane seeds (broken up candy cane piece)
5. Candy canes to add later
6. Water

 First I got Scarlett to pour some magic snow into a small pot. 

 She then put in the seed and sprinkled with the Elf magic dust. Next pour water over the seed to help it grow.

 To Scarlett's great excitement the magic snow puffs up instantly and the seed is hidden. 

The magic of this is every night I will add a bit of candy cane to the pot to make it look like it is growing. Then on Christmas eve they will have a full sized candy cane. I'll update you with photos of our growing candy cane over the next 14 days of advents.
I did think these would make a really fun present for friends kids, Might do that next year!

9th December - Glitter Pinecones

I'm not going to lie, this is a messy one but who doesn't love getting covered in glitter right?

We collected loads of pine cones from a friends garden a few months ago. I wasn't sure what to use them for at the time, but they kept well and feel very festive.

To try and control the mess I set up the craft by putting some blue tac on the end of a straw. We then stuck a pine cone to the straw and it helped to avoid getting super gluey fingers.

You can then easily dip the cone in glue then sprinkle with glitter. As Scarlett demonstrates below.

These look super cute and the girls really enjoyed this one.

8th December - Angel Hangers.

These Angel hangers are taken from an awesome Christmas Craft Book. I bought this book a couple of years ago and I can highly recommend it. We've done loads from the book and there's still so manage pages left to use for crafts it's brilliant. The prints are nice and colourful and the girls love the simplicity of them.

7th December - Christmas Tree Bunting

Thankfully we are back from hospital and Millie is on the mend WHOOP!!!!

Sitting down with them both to do this advent craft was lovely. 

For today's craft I had pre bought some felt tree bunting. Then let the girls add a sparkly star on top of each one. Nice and straight forward but looks really effective, and Scarlett really enjoys seeing this hanging up in the kitchen.

6th December - Mini Cardboard Tree

I used old Christmas cards to make our cardboard trees.

To make the tree's I did the following:

1. On the reverse of the card picture draw a tree template
2. Cut out the tree
3. Use the cut out as a template for 2 more trees and cut out.
4. Fold the cardboard pieces in half with the picture on the inside of the fold 
5. Add glue to the reverse side of the cards.
6. Stick together for a 3D stand up tree.
7. Hand over to the kids to decorate with stickers and anything sparkly. 

I didn't have a chance to take any photos of this craft as I'm still in hospital with Mills. Boo!

5th December - Sticker Book

I'm so glad I pre planned these crafts as today was a bit of a nightmare. Millie ended up in hospital last night and is in for the foreseeable future. So these advent crafts are a great distraction for Scarlett left at home without mummy and her little sister.
She's taken her sticker book along to grandma and grandpa's for a sleep over today.

Sticker books are a great Christmas craft for the advent, because you can't spend every day sat with them doing something and making a mess to clear away, so this type of activity keeps them busy and give you a break.

Struggling to feel in the festive spirit today, but hopefully illie will be sorted soon and we'll all be home together again.

4th December- Snow Flakes

I precut snow flakes..here's a good site for design inspiration Snowflakes

I then let the girls colouring them in then hung them from the ceiling in their bedroom. I have to be honest, I like my Christmas decorations and some of the bits the girls do aren't exactly in keeping with my theme, so these are what I use to decorate their room. It makes for a lovely colourful display.

3rd December - Christmas Cards

Homemade Christmas cards in my opinion are the best.

When you've not got much money and you want to show your love for people they can't be beaten. You spend time and effort (trying to make sure the kids don't mess them up) making them and endure mega hand cramp writing them all out...what more could your friends and family ask for!

So I included our handmade cards into the girls advent calendar to kill two birds with one stone.

So with a simple finger print design we set to work.

 Drying all the cards

2nd Decemer - Clay Hanging Decorations

Today we invited next door over for some craft fun and dinner. This was lovely for all the kids from 2 years to 5 years old. I enjoyed making some too!

I was too busy to take any action shots, but will post the finished results when they are dry.

I bought a 1kg block of white air dry clay and this is what we did.

1. I set out a plate for each child with their name on it to place the finished decorations onto to dry.
2. Cut a plastic folder divider in half for none stick mats
3. Set out rolling pins and cookie cutters.
4. let the kids roll out the clay, cut out shapes and don't forget to poke a hole in them so you can hang them.
5. Leave for 24 hours to dry
6. Paint and display.

We all had fun. Tip- If the clay starts to dry out too early add a splash of water to freshen it up again.

1st December - Letter to Santa

Our Christmas count down has begun and here is the first of our lovely crafts.

I created a template in word for the girls. Very simple but effective. 

I'll be honest, this was a bit lost on little one!

Drawing the frozen characters.

The finished letter. Quite impressed with her drawing of Santa here.

We posted the letters to the address royal main give you as they write a letter back from Santa. Looking forward to seeing the replies. Scarlett will be very excited! 

Crafty Christmas Advent

This year we're going to do a crafty Christmas advent, mainly because the Lego advent calendar we did last year have all sold out in the shops and they cost a fortune £25 each!
So using our family advent calendar I decided to do some kids craft fun instead.

Each day is a simple new craft. Here is my list for each day.
1. Letter to Santa - Made my own personalised design in word. Then we posted them to the special royal mail address so we should get a reply
(Cost 63p for the stamp.)
2. Clay Decorations. - we've invited a couple of school friends over for tea to help us make these (Cost £5 for the air dry clay)
3. Christmas Cards - simple homemade cards are the best kind for friends and family. (Cost £1 for blank cards and envelopes)
4. Snow flakes - I've pre cut these for the girls to glitter up. Then we'll hang them from the ceiling in their room. (Cost free as we're using bits we already have)
5. Christmas sticker book - we're going to be busy this day so a nice on the go craft we can take in the car. (Cost £1 from pound shop)
6. Mini cardboard tree - precut designs the girls can decorate. ( Cost free. Using old box and existing crafty bits)
7. Tree bunting. - felt tree shapes with stickers. (Cost £1.50 for the bunting and £1 for the stickers)
8. Angel hangers. Paper decorated angels. (Cost free as using crafty bits we have around the house)
9. Glitter pine cones. (Cost free. Cones collected from friends garden and who doesn't have glitter glue!)
10. Grow your own candy cane. - very excited about this one. More to follow!
11. Christmas activity book. - another busy day, another on the go craft. ( Cost free as she was given this last year and didn't get around to doing the pages)
12. Moveable frozen characters. - Were going to put on a show with these ones. ( Cost £1 from pound shop)
13. Snow flake dream catchers. - A craft to do when Aunty Sarah is babysitting. (Cost £1 each from hobby craft)
14. Toilet roll Santa. Pre cut sticky back paper shapes onto toilet rolls. With led candles will make nice little lanterns. ( Cost free)
15. Paper plate snowmen. Cotton wool on paper plates nice and easy. (Cost £2 for plates, wool and stickers)
16. Christmas colouring in. So free prints to keep little ones quiet. ( Cost free)
17. Potato stamp baulbals. This is potato stamps made from Christmas cookie cutters. These will make nice pictures for the girls RM ( Cost free)
18. Mince pies.
19. Reindeer food. Bird food and glitter all put in a little bag.
20. Hanging heart Decorations.
21. Ginger bread house.
22. Frozen fuzzy felt scene. (Cost £1 from poundland)
23. Tealight holder. (£1 from hobby craft)
24. Olaf build a snowman (£1 poundland)

Each craft is wrapped for extra excitement. 

Tot Friendly Christmas Tree

Today is the 1st December so I can finally share with you all my Christmas crafts!

This year I needed to think outside the box when it comes to Christmas decorations as Millie is 16 months old. She's a walking and climbing whirlwind of destruction and chaos, which means your traditional tree is totally out of the question. It would be no time before she would have taken off all the decorations, and pulled the entire thing down on herself.

I'd seen these felt Christmas trees online and in hobby craft so I decided to have a go at my own. This was much cheaper than buying the premade ones. I bought the 2m x 1.5m roll of green felt off ebay for £5 delivered, and all the extra felt and lights from the local pound shop. Overall this has only cost me £17. Much cheaper than a tree anyway.

I cut out basic felt shapes for decorations and stuck them together with a hot glue gun. I then added Velcro dots to the back of the decorations and the Christmas tree cut out. This will allow the girls to take off the decorations and re arrange them as they please.

I then added some twinkly lights to the felt tree. I bought the battery operated copper wire lights which are safe enough (not plugged into the mains) and tiny enough to not add too much weight to the tree. I cut a little hold in the felt, hot glued the first bulb in place, then worked my way down the tree.

This is the back of the tree where you can see the light wire.

This is how the front looks.

I then hung the tree on the wall using blue tac and it seems to be sticking quite well. The girls are having fun with it already!

 And what have we done with our normal decorations?? I still wanted to show them off as they are so pretty. So I've done this around all of the windows too. A branch from outside, Hung the decs off the branch using different ribbons and wrap around with lights. WAY out of Millie's reach!

Bonfire Night Crafts

Fireworks night is one of my favourite celebrations of the year. It always brings back fond family memories and we always make the effort to go to a display, whatever the weather.

Scarlett has been off school sick for the past couple of days but thankfully has recovered in time this year to go to the village display.

So to keep her busy this morning we made a couple of crafts to celebrate the event.

Firstly we made a lantern to help light the way on the dark damp walk to the fireworks. These are fun and practical. They also save you from having to pay out for one of those crappy flashing light toys they always flog at these events.

Firework Rocket Lantern

So to make the lantern you will need the following:

• Clear plastic tube, I used a tennis ball tube.
• Battery powered fairy lights or torch
• Stickers
• Sparkly things
• Ribbon/ create paper

So this is really simple. I let Scarlett pick as many bits out of the craft box she liked to fill her tube.

We then tied together different lengths of colour ribbon. I pierced a hole in the lid and fed the ribbon though. I then sellotaped it to the inside of the lid. 

Scarlett then covered the tube in stickers...lots of stickers. 

Lastly we put the lights into the tube, put the lid on and we were done. This was great as Scarlett did most of this herself and was very happy with the finished product. 

Our second craft was indoor sparklers. Safe, colourful and fun.

You will need:

• Scraps of foil, ribbon and coloured paper
• Straws

Firstly cut a slit into one end of the straw. Place strips of foil, plastic, ribbon and paper into the slit. Seal the slit with tap, securing the sparkles. Millie was a fan of waving these about. The foil makes a nice crackling sound a bit like sparklers too.

DIY Dolls House

This has been by far one of my favourite craft projects so far!

I have decided to make a dolls house for the girls as a joint Christmas present. Its not totally DIY as I did buy the basic shell. I bought this really large basic Dolls House from ToysRus. It's super cheap at £50 for a wooden house with accessories and figures. But it's plain and boring...hence the price.

Cute toilet before make over

So if you fancy giving it a go, this is how I did the girls one on a super tight budget.

Firstly I painted the house parts before assembling it. Its much easier to paint before screwing it together. I used a some left over matt paint for the exterior walls and added white gloss to the raised areas for definition. I painted the door in a slightly darker blue to the walls just so it stood out.

Secondly I managed to decorate the entire interior walls and floors for free...how?
I searched the internet for a few hours and ordered every free sample of wall papers I could. Most major shops do free samples with free shipping, next, john lewis, homebase ect, but lots of high end designers do them too. The living room wall paper would be over £100 per roll to buy, but I got a large A4 sample for free. You also get the free sample rolls in most DIY shops, I just visited one and took some free strips. I used wood effect wall paper to create wooden flooring in the dolls house too.

I had to wait a couple of weeks for them all to arrive but once they did I got cracking.

Lastly the finishing touches. I used a home catalogue and cut out pictures of photos in frames to sick on the walls, fire place photos, mirrors, lights, plants. Once they were all stuck on they added character to the rooms.

So here are the finished rooms.

This is the master bedroom. This is wall paper glued to the walls and floor. Note the added picture on the wall of a rose from a catalogue of home décor.
I also covered the bed with a scrap of material and made a new bedding set.



The kids bedroom .I used wall paper on the walls and floors again here. I also cut out some kids cartoon pictures from a kids magazine to show it as a kids room. I added coloured paper to the stairs to add extra colour.

This is the living room with the super expensive wall paper. I've use the wood effect paper in here to look a bit like wooden flooring also.

You can see some of the added details here with the photos hanging on the wall, the fireplace and the clock. These were all taken out of a home style magazine.

Next my favourite room. The toilet. But mostly because I managed to find this awesome wall paper. I think this was from a DIY shop, which I took from the free sample roll.







This is the kitchen, again this was an expensive wall paper which I love. I pained the kitchen appliances and put some silver wall paper onto the pretend fridge. I also added some pictures of kitchen house decor stuff like the chalk boards on the left and house rules on the right.

Lastly here's mum in the dinning room, with a drink. I tried to make this as realistic as possible after all. I used fabric on the floor here to create a carpet feel and another square of carpet for a rug


Overall this is now a fun, colourful and hopefully something they will have fun with and play with for a long time. Plus if /when anything gets inevitably damaged, it doesn't matter..we can just re decorate.

Cress Heads

This is a great penny pinching home craft for the little ones.

The kids enjoy getting messy making them, lots of stickers decorating them, then watching them grow. The best bit is they grow super quick for those impatient kiddies who tend to loose interest if they can't almost see something growing before their very eyes. These only take a week or so to mature so are perfect.

So here is how:

1. Cut up an old pair of tights around the ankles.
2. Pour a few cress seeds into the toe part of the foot.
3. Top with soil and tie up end. (for the daddy pour a few extra seeds in around the top of your soil to create a beard before you tie up)
4. Turn upside down onto the tied up end.
5. Decorate with stickers. We did a mummy, daddy and Scarlett. 
6. Place into little dishes to collect water.
7. Water thoroughly at first, then just pour water into the dishes when they start to feel dry.
8. Watch them grow.
9. When shoots appear to be trying to break through the tights, cut a small hole to let them through
10. Add to salads and sandwiches when you want to give them a hair cut.

Day 1

Day 3

You can see the shoots coming through. 

Day 7

This is Halloween, everybody SCREAM!!

 ..In this town we call home

Everyone hail to the pumpkin song la,la,la

My attempt at corpse bride make up. 

3 times today Scarlett has made us watch the Jack skeleton (or skelington as she says it) film. She's watched is every day for the past week. So now I have the song on repeat in my head, especially when I'm trying to sleep at 2am.


Anyway I thought I'd share some of our Halloween crafts and decoration tips.


Firstly to decorating. I hate spending money on decorations for Halloween. Mainly because we have 7 family birthdays in October including Scarlett's so I'm usually skint by the time Halloween comes around. We go down the home made route usually and this year I prepared a few crafts to keep the kids quiet on the first day of school holidays and create some decorations too.

Skull Faces

This ones really simple. I pre cut out some skull faces from A4 white paper (the stuff you pinch from work). I then let the kids colour them in and hand them on the windows. These cast a great shadow on the windows during the day, then I leave a led candle on at night so you can see them back lit from the street. Super cheap and very effective.

Ghost Bunting

Again A4 white paper. Layer 4-5 sheets at a time, fold in half, cut out ghost shape and you have 8/10 ghosts. Then draw on simple silly faces for your kids to colour, or if they are older let them draw their own. String together with black wool. Done.

Hanging Bats

I cut out bat shapes from black card and let the girls cover them in glitter glue. I then suck them to the walls with blue tac and hung them from lights.

Scary Masks

These are great fun to make. Using card from a cereal packet or what ever you can get your hands on draw a shape of any Halloween character you want.
Then using free home furnishing catalogues, clothing catalogues or any other crap that get's put in your post box, cut out colour pieces for your mask.
I cut out brown triangle shapes from wooden flooring section for the wolf here. It looks a bit like fur from a distance and has lots of interesting shades.
I used green grass photos from a gardening magazine for the witch and cut into squares.
Glue all the pieces into place and cover with a layer for glue for durability. Once dry use a marker pen to add details. I also made purple hair for the witch out of some left over wool I had. These are great for parties as there's always someone (usually an adult) who turns up without a costume. The kids will make them wear these.

Lego KeyTidy

We don't really lose keys (well not too often) but I'm properly fed up with finding random piles of stuff, be it keys, change or whatever hubby empties out of his pockets. And although this hasn't totally resolved the issue it has made key storage a bit easier.

I made this Lego key tidy because hubby love Lego and I like tidy. Win, win!

I went for neutral colours here so it wouldn't look garish.

This cost me £8 delivered..all from ebay:

1. Letter stickers =  £1.99
2. Technic Lego (Part 3701) with holes used as keyring to stick to back board = £1.98
3.Grey flat tile bricks 4 = 20p
4. Large grey plate = £1.99
5. Smaller cream plates = £2.00

This is just stuck onto the wall with blue tac and stays up perfectly.

Sensory Board

This is a work-in-progress project here as I'm planning on giving this to the girls for Christmas.

I wanted to create a sensory board which would grow with the kids. So currently we have lots of fiddly bits on it, but later on I'll use it as a notice board and jewellery rack in their room.

I took a trip to a DIY and pound shop. I've spend about £20 altogether, so this is a super cheap craft with a lot of impact.

I bought the following.
1. MDF board. This was a cheap off cut from the bargain bin.
2. Along the top we have a metal rule which also acts as a magnet strip for the alphabet letters and light.
3. In the middle we have a mirror, door knobs, chalk board, photo frames, alphabet stickers, felt picture board and pink pencil case.

Firstly I arranged the bits on the board, finding out the best placement for everything.

Once I liked the positioning I raided the craft cupboards, stuck down the pieces and this is what we have. the circular photo frames are not finished, but they are hanging so you can lift them up and see underneath. I'm going to fill these with different textures and pictures.

Kids Artwork, Art Gallery

Scarlett always comes home with lots of artwork from preschool and although we put the odd one up, they easily get damaged by falling down off the wall and into the hands of littlest one, or misplaced in the odd pile of paperwork. So I decided to create the kids their own little gallery so they can show off their proud doodles.

I got a cheap £9 frame from Ikea (Norrlida if anyone's interested) 

Here's the before shot.

I then covered the back with some pretty paper, for when the frame isn't full.

I then carefully placed Scareltt's recent artwork. The a4 paper is a drawing of herself. We then have a lolly pop mummy and daddy with a love heart kite. Beautiful.

The finished result looks good. With her art on display, not getting damaged and we can easily change the bits over when she next brings something home.