Friday 12 July 2013

I've been very busy.....

As usual we're a bit slack on the blogging front but we have real excuses this time....
This is my new little addition, Bethany Hannah Adams, who has been taking up my time:
So with the other little monkey they take up a lot of my time



She came 2 weeks late which was lucky as I worked right up until my due date. I've had a great time with all the kids at work, it didn't really feel like going to work especially as the parents were all really lovely too. They all made some amazing pieces, and it was a great atmosphere where they would share ideas with each other and help one another make things!

I didn't realise how much we made until I looked back at all the photo's. It's not everything, we'd be here all day otherwise, but here's some of them:

To start of with we did some fabric painting with a cultural theme, here's my Scandinavian and Egyptian samples we used as inspiration. We also made festive cards using mono printing techniques, one little boy made a tank and added glitter I think he'll be the next .....


Here we did Banksy style graffitti bags and pencil cases using fabric spray paints and stencils. I loved using the tulip fabric pens, reminded me of making things for my baby sister:

For one session the children wanted to make Christmas stockings but I couldn't find any canvas ones anywhere for us to decorate so I bought a few metres of calico and made up some myself, these made lots of children very happy!! We then fabric painted them and used fabric glitter pens to personalise: 


 We also covered cultural crafts so I did African inspired face masks, Greek shields, dragon puppets to celebrate the Chinese New Year (which some of the families took to China town to join in the celebrations!) and pencil cases fabric painted with Aboriginal designs:

Shamballa bracelets with the teenagers, it was the dads on this workshop who came into their element with knot tying!

Handmade notebooks, using fused plastic from shopping plastic bags (from our recycling theme).

We made some hand puppets with the little ones for 'Best time is book time' where all the puppets were based on characters they had made up, here was my Muddy Maureen based on a little girl who despite her mum and dad putting her in pretty dresses loved to play in the mud with the creepy crawlies (guess who this is based on?!):


Paper based crafts with glueing and sticking for really little ones. We made reindeers using their hand prints as the antlers, the paint was a little ambitious with the really little ones but they all loved it. I was finding glitter for weeks from making the festive birds!

This was one of my favourite ones, made during the mini beast course. So along with wormeries, butterflies and insect habitats we made these wire mini beasts to go into their flower pots:


I was really chuffed on my last day as all the parents bought me this lovely baby present, at the time I was so hormonal I got really choked up. So a big thank you again to all the mums, dads, grandad and kids for making this year so enjoyable and memorable.