Messy Play

So the other day I let the kids have time to experiment around a bit. I mixed some corn-starch with water. This stuff is fun to play with as if you move your finger through slowly it is liquid but if you try to do the same thing fast it is solid. So it is grate for the kids to experiment with. At first I let them play with the plain white mixture.

Afterwards I let them choose 2 colours to put into there one.

When ever they wanted more colours I asked them what they think was going to happen. And just let them play. I think they played for over an hour before they got board with it.

At some point Miss Mar noticed she can roll it into a ball, Mr Mar Jr was doing little snake type things.

Then when they stop rolling the mixture they let it run between there fingers.

They played for over an hour with this mixture. To keep it a bit contained I put the mixture on baking trys. It still put corn-starch all over the place but defiantly kept it more confined.

Back to school

I am always looking for good friendship books, but they end up having cheesy questions like why do you like horses, who is to say everyone likes horses. So I am making a customized one for Miss Mar, its just a matter of finding the correct format and having photos. Also she is going to a bilingual school so I wanted to make the book in both English and German. So we went out and took some photos then ate ice-crème. It was also the first time I really shot in raw format, and all I can say is I LOVE IT, it made editing so much easer.

School starts for Miss Mar in 2 weeks here and I want to put her friendship book in her sugar bag (as I have found out they are called in English). When kids have there first day at school here they get a cone filled with sweets and other things, we are putting in her friendship book and anther little book about her first day/year at school for her to fill out.

And before we went home ICE CREME

For more photos click here.

Baptism cake

So Mr Mar Sr boss asked us to make a pink baptism cake. This is what I came up with. I used the make a cradle set from patchwork cutters, and the quilt set from patchwork cutters. I just love these cutters. I made it all apart from the writing the Mr Mar Sr needs to do. My writing is a mess no matter what.

Castel Cake

So Mr Mar Sr cousin had her 30th birthday, her wish from me was a castle cake, a pink one, with flowers, it has to be girly. Here is my how to.

To make the torrect I first pocked out LOTS of little cercals using a 14mm pipping tip.

What I had LOTS I started to glue (with water) the cercals onto a cone. The first row is the hardest. But I wet the cone a bit then pushed quite hard the first row on.

Make sure you leave the first one you glue on sticking out a bit so you can pock the last one under the first one to complete the cercal.

Keep going around untill done, I finnished the top of with one right on the point.

Now onto making the tower parts.  Fisrt I took the cardbord out of the center of a paper roll and covered it with cling foil. I rolled out the fondunt at 5mm think. Went over with the cobbel stone imprition mat using a fondunt smother.

When I had a good imprition on the fondunt I cut it out to the hight I needed and the apoximet wideth. I then wrapped it around the tube and cut along the overlying part. It is a bit tricky to do this but it makes a nice finnsh.

 

After that has all dried over night till a few hours. I accualy let this dry for nerly a week as we went on a short trip, and I only had 2 days to finnsih the cake after I got back. Put the points ontop of the towers. Take your cake and cut the coners off. This is where the towers will be placed.

Roll out more fonunt at 5mm then, put an imprtion on it cut to fit your 4 sides of the cake and around the top cake. Let it dry for a bit 20-30mins then place onto the cake and fix with some royal icing. You can tell I mixed my royal icing a tadd to dark. But it realy dosn’t matter.

Cut out doors, and windows using a paper template. I did the windows in yellow and the doors in brown fondunt. After that I painted the doors a bit to give it a bit more of a wood look then coloerd look. I colord some royal icing brown to make the vines going up the casel walls, this also helped cover the botched colord job of royal icing I used to clue it all together.

After the vines were added, we put in some flowers and leaves. We made the flowers wiht flower punchers.

When the caselt was finnished all I had to do was add a small mout, draw brindge, and grass. The bride is just a pice of rolled out fondunt. The stones are made out of mabaling black and white fondunt and rolling into small balls. The water is just plain geletien mixed with a bit of blue and green food colorering and some lusterdust. The grass is coloerd coconut (color with liquid or powederd coloer mixed with vodaka) I used some green royal icing to stick the coconut on.

The string you can make out on the top 3 towers was because I stuck them together with royal icing and didn’t want them to fall appart while travling in the car. So when I got to the party I cut the string off.

At the party All done

Thunder and Lightning

I have never been a fan of Lighting, guess I don’t mind the thunder so much, its just loud. But I am scared of lighting, even though growing up in a country with no folk lighting I still don’t like it. EXEPT for one thing. That is to capture it on a photo. I have tried a few times but never really managed. I don’t know what happened this last time. Other then I was taking photos on the night with the most recorded lightings though not 100% sure on that one but it was close I took my camera out put it on its tri pod, grabbed my camera remote (on the cord) and started to click away. Basically I was realising on my reactions. By the looks of things it wasn’t too bad.

This was the second photo I took. My main problem was that I had the camera on automatic ISO, so it was taking photos at a high ISO. This is also taken through the closed window that was covered in rain.

Another take you can really see the water drops on this one

And one of the last ones. I think this is the best shot. You can Mr Mar Sr and my mother in the photo on the side. Just but they were there. We were drinking cocktails that my sisters partner had made for us. While I was standing in the hall watching the lighting storm over Vienna.

Lady Bugs

 

So while looking around on pintrest I saw some ladybugs with number pop up a few times. The only problem was, it was some type of spam linked to it, therefor I could not get to the original post. With that I thought I would make them and create a post on how to. 

My kids had fun making these. Ms Mar is currently at home before she starts school in Austria, and as she went to school in New Zealand I am now continuing on from where she left of from there. Now she still has allot of problems recognizing a few numbers 6, 8, and 9 so I am doing lots of little things that include numbers, this was one of the activities.
What you need

• black card
• red card
• ether number stickers or pens that write on black paper
• paper pegs (I have no idea what they are called) The little golden things in the box
• Howl puncher to make eyes with / Eyes
• Scissors
• Black Water proof Marker
• Glue
• Lady bug Template (you can down load it here, do not redistribute, please link to this blog post for people to get it. THANK YOU )

Print the template onto cardstock or some other strong paper, as this will make tracing it easer.
Cut out the template

Then trace each part of the template 10 times, If you are doing numbers from 1 – 10 if you are doing more number trace more of each template.

While all this is happing keep 3 year old entertained with the whole puncher

Cut out all the 4 pieces

Punch out the holes

Once done assemble all the pieces, first the body and wings so that the wholes all line up, (on the template as I changed it a bit afterwards, the wings will not line up with the body part, this is on purpose)

Then thread the paper pin through and close it up

They should all look something like this now

Next glue the eyes onto the heads

Once the eyes are on attach the heads with a small dab of clue on the paper pin head

and push the head onto the glue, make sure you don’t use to much glue or else it will glue onto the paper and you can't open the wings anymore.

















Then open up the wings and stick the numbers onto the body


















Next look at the number on the body an draw on the dots representing that number

When they are done the will look like this

These are also useful for explaining even and uneven numbers, the uneven numbers have a dot in the centre going across both wings.
If you make them I would love to see them. Have fun.