Welsh cake recipe and printable

Happy St David's Day! Or Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant. I have another post for you over at Alphamom today. I've mentioned St David's Day on this blog before a couple of years ago, in this post. We do try to do something little to celebrate each year (partly to try and share some traditions from home with the kids while we were in the US, because they only really saw St Patrick's day being celebrated there), but this is the first year in almost a decade that we've actually been back in Wales for March 1st! and for the kids it is their first St David's Day in the country!

We made Welsh cakes for the family this year, and I have written about it over on Alphamom.com, where you can find a free printable recipe that is very kid friendly, along with a lot of photos and tips on changing up the recipe if you want to suit your family's tastes. Del can't get enough of them! I love them because they are delicious, so quick to make, and freeze really well too. There's also an example of a savoury "not really very welsh cake" that my kids love too.

Check out the old St David's Day post if you fancy making some kitchen paper leeks for your imaginary grocery store.

I'll be back very shortly with another post, because we just made a dragon costume out of two plastic milk jugs, tin foil and newspaper. It's way cooler than I thought it would turn out, and the kids were really into the messy papier mache and painting. I was making it up as I went along, so hopefully I have enough photos that it makes sense when I write up how to do it. In the mean time, here's a picture of a little Welsh baby in a Welsh field with a bunch of Welsh sheep.

Last thing... Exciting for everyone here...Ffion lost her first baby tooth last week and we had a visit from the tooth fairy again (you can read about the first tooth fairy visit for Carys in this post). This was our first UK tooth fairy experience, and Ffion decided to make her a little Lego chair to rest on, with a little drinking fountain, after she'd dropped her miniscule tooth into the box of Lego and freaked out that she would never find it ever (we found it).

Weirdly, the Conwy Tooth Fairy Co-operative use the same stationery as California Tooth Traders Inc. I went with a reader suggestion from the last post about tooth fairies and Ffion's fairy's name was Enamelie. The pixie fire stone mentioned was a tiny pendant that I've had for years and never worn. Ffi thinks it's awesome. It was so small that it could be taped to the bottom right hand corner of the letter and folded up in it, and the letter is only two inches wide.

We've got a total of four wobbly teeth in the house at the moment, so I have my work cut out! Anyway, hope you're tempted to try cooking a few Welcakes :)

Hershey's Kiss Lighthouse Valentines

I've designed you a printable to make these sweet little lighthouse valentine favors. You sit a Hershey's Kiss in the top of it as the light and then, if you are my kids, you make a "SQUEEEEE!" sound because they are "so tiny and cuuuute!" The message reads "You light the place up!"

You can find the free printable and easy instructions on how to put them together over here at my post on Alpha Mom. Each printed page makes three lighthouses.

Hope you have a lovely love day!

Decorations from recycled holiday cards.

OK, so this is a bit late for a Christmas craft (or is it just very very early for a Christmas craft?), but I just wanted to post it in case you had cards left around from the holidays. I remember making these with mum when I was about eight years old. Mum would take down the Christmas cards after the holidays and stash them away with all the decorations so that the following year we could make these globe decorations from them in the run up to the holidays.

They are pretty simple to make. You need twenty identically sized circles cut from your cards to make each one. The circles have their sides folded to make triangles. The shape that results from sticking together these twenty triangular sides is an Icosahedron. If you want to, then it is possible to make smaller ones in the shape of an octahedron very easily with just eight circles, which would work better if you had smaller kids that wanted to join in too.

We used a roll of sticky tape to make our circles because that way we could see well to center the design that we wanted. It would work just as well to use a glass to draw around, but my kids are less likely to smash a roll of sticky tape!

I've made a little printable so that you can easily mark on your circles where they divide in thirds, because this part needs to be reasonably accurate if they are going to glue together nicely with no gaps. If you click on the little thumbnail image of the print out below then it should bring it up full sized for you to print out.

To use it, you line up your card circle within the nearest sized circle outline and then use the three lines to mark three dots on the edge of your card circle.

You can then use a ruler and something like the back of a butter knife to score between these dots. This will get your little triangle shapes folded neatly and evenly.

I suppose you could stack up all your pre-made circles and pop them in with the holiday decorations like that, as a ready to glue together holiday project come December.

We put ours together though, so that I could photograph it to show you. The easiest way to construct the icosahedron is to start off by making a panel out of five pieces like in the photograph below. We used regular white glue to do this, but it probably would have been a little easier with a glue stick, only we didn't have one handy.

So, with ten of your pieces you make two of those panels, then with the remaining ten pieces you glue them together in a long line like in the photo below..

Then you take your long line of ten pieces and glue it closed into a ring. This is the central part of the icosahedron, and the two other panels now can be glued to the top and the bottom to complete it.

Here it is with just the top panel glued on.

If you're having trouble with the glue not drying fast enough, just put a bobby pin/hair grip on to hold the pieces until the glue sets.

Here are the two that we made, one big one and another that was slightly smaller.

 I would love it if we managed to make at least a couple of these each year and eventually we'd have enough to decorate a whole room with multicoloured, recycled, holiday globes! I hope you like them. I think I might be extra fond of them because mum showed me how to do this as a kid. She used to cut her circles out with pinking shears, so they were all zig zaggy edged and that made them look a bit snowball like.

...and with that, I promise that I will never again write a Christmas themed blog post in February ;)

Candy rope friendship knots.

Happy new year! Am I the last blogger out there to wish you that? At least it's still January eh! Only just though! Anyhoo, I have a printable and craft for the kiddos to make this valentine's day. I know we're in the UK now and over here we don't give valentines in class, but I figured we'd do it for our first year here just as a little novelty (the kids are still very much the yanks in class, and the accents have only faded very slightly after six months).

These friendship knots are really easy to make from any sort of rope candy, and I've made a print out that you can download to make cute little bag toppers with instructions for tying the knots, so that they look like more of a little gift.

The full instructions and printable download are here on Alpha Mom, so pop on over to have a look and see if these will work for your children. Ideal for both lads and lasses, as I'm pretty sure all children like candy and tying things in knots. I know boy scouts sometimes use this knot if they haven't got a woggle handy, but it makes me think of holding hands like this...

I've got another craft here ready to post too. It's something that my mum used to do with me, using left over Christmas cards after we'd taken them all down. Do any of you actually have left over holiday cards lying around anymore or have they all been recycled by now? I guess it's handy to have the idea for next year though right? I'll get to posting that tomorrow!

In the mean time, here are a few links to older Valentine's day projects that we've done here in the past...

Giant lollypop valentines

Toilet roll tube valentine's necklaces

Plastic bag iron on felt valentine's patches

Mini crepe paper roses instruction video

Kanzashi from baby wipes and paper towels.

Paper plate heart hats (and other designs)

Awww, I can't believe that photo above is almost a year old. Del looks so teeny! She's nineteen months old now and is all over the place running and climbing and jumping! Her hair is as wild as she is too :)

I hope you all had a lovely winter break. My epic mission to cater Christmas dinner for both sides of the family worked out in the end. Space was tight, so I did two sittings. Yes, that's right, I cooked Christmas dinner on Christmas day for one side of the family and then did it all over again on boxing day for the other side of the family! Our tiny little oven didn't know what had hit it! Then we started off 2013 with some wild and wooly Welsh walking over by Llyn Idwal. We've had a photograph of Llyn Idwal on our wall in America for years, and this was the first time we had taken the kids there. They have seen that photo pretty much every day of their lives, so it was fun for them to figure out where it was taken from.

Here's hoping that the rest of 2013 is just as lovely!

Paper snowflake fun

Yule tide festive vibes to all!

Just popping in to give you a link over to my post on making paper snowflakes at Alpha Mom. Folding tips to make an easy six sided snowflake, plus some ideas for using them to decorate. Here's a piccy for you to see how we used a big one to conceal the fact that our table is not really one table, but two folding leaf tables next to each other. Just a big strip of wrapping paper and a snowflake and it looks like a giant present (I can't do table cloths at all at our house because they would get stained immediately or everything would get pulled onto the floor by Delyth).

We popped some big snowflakes made from wrapping paper up on the wall too, as well as the usual white paper ones on the windows. So, if you're interested in upping your paper snowflake making game, pop and have a look at the folding instructions and tips over on my post here.

 

 Happy Holidays and wishing you all a cracking 2013!

Star of treats advent craft

Wow, welcome to December! That snuck up on us didn't it! As usual I'm a last minute kinda crafter and yesterday we put together our advent calendar for this year. It's fabulously cheap to make and you can re-use it next year too, so it may be entirely possible that next year I actually have this advent calendar thing all sorted without the usual night before flurry of glue and recycling. Yay! It's a double sided star with 24 little containers that can be opened and closed again.

I've posted all about how to make it over at Alpha Mom. Here's the link. There's a printable that I made available over there too, so you can print out the numbers to go on it and also the little center circle that the kids can decorate. You can't see the numbers on the photo above because they are hidden in the tinsel (you have to hunt for the number that you are opening each day). You can see the numbers in the photo below before I put the tinsel on.

I'll get to posting some links to a few of our older Christmas/winter crafts in the coming week, but in the mean time, here are a couple of advent calendar posts from years gone by...

Tissue paper and condiment cup advent calendar from 2008 (first saw this idea by Brenda Ponnay as a November calendar on Alpha Mom, years before I started writing for them, Brenda still writes for Alpha Mom by the way, and did her own advent calendar craft for them this year as well, link here)

Last minute count down calendar for slackers (see, I don't even manage to get my act together for Dec 1st some years!)

Happy Holiday planning you guys! Now that we're back in the UK, this will be the first Christmas that we can have our parents and siblings over to our house for the holidays and I can't wait! There will be grandmas and grandpas and aunties and uncles and cousins. Question is, can I rise to the challenge of Christmas dinner for all those people? Place your bets!

Free pharaoh's mask and collar printable

We're gearing up for Halloween here. It's not such a big deal in the UK as it is in the US though, so sadly there will be no parade in costume at school for the kids. We'll likely do a minor amount of local trick or treating though, and I'm sure the kids will be excited to embrace the UK tradition of Guy Fawke's night five days later, what with all the fireworks and toffee apples!

This year what we needed was a costume that captured the kid's current fixation of ancient Egyptian mummies, and allowed them to get involved in creating their own costume at a very low cost. So I set about making a 3D Pharaoh's mask and collar from paper that we could combine with a lot of toilet roll to jazz up the classic, low effort, loo roll mummy costume. The head dresses were just improvised by sticking a long sleeved t-shirt on our heads with the arms hanging down in front. Easy peazy lemon squeezy.

The kids loved it, and I've written up a tutorial with photos and all the print outs for both the mask and the collar, available as either A4 size, or US letter size pdfs over at Alpha Mom. If you think your kids would also get a kick out of this then pop over there to read the post and print your own copies. They are black and white line drawings, so that the kids can colour them any way they like and it is low on using up printer ink too.

I'm hoping that some home schoolers might find them a useful resource when studying ancient Egypt too (you can probably tell that I based it heavily on the mask of king Tut) Interesting fact: According to Wikipedia, on November 4th it will be 90 years since the day that Howard Carter's team discovered the steps leading down to Tutankhamun's tomb! I may put on a suit and a stick on moustache to be Howard Carter when going trick or treating with the kids. Maybe I can get Paul to go as zombie Lord Carnarvon with a tiny piece of bloody tissue stuck on his face. Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.

While I'm posting about halloweeny/fall/autumn type things, I thought it would be useful if I put a few links in here to some older posts in the Filth Wizardry archives, that might be useful for either costume making or just plain crafty fun on the theme.I'm sure there are more if you go digging, but these are the ones that sprang to mind.

Costume posts:

1. Star Wars X-wing fighter pilot's helmet from recycling.
2. Star Wars X-wing flight suit iron on printable.
3. Roman centurion costume from cardboard and crepe paper.
4. Storm trooper's helmet from two milk jugs.
5. Mermaid tail from old pants and skirt.
6. Gift bag robot costumes.
7. antennae from cable ties and felt.

Halloween/Fall/Autumn craft posts:

1.  Toilet roll bat.
2. Halloween card printable by Carys.
3. Laminated fall leaf magnets.
4. Trick or treat pumpkin pots from milk jugs.
5. Collaborative fall leaf rubbing mural project.
6. 3D colourful skull and monster sugar dough cookies.

Hope there's something in those lists that will be useful to you this year. If anyone does make the storm trooper mask or Egyptian mask or the X-wing helmet, any of it really, I would so love to hear about it or see photos! The idea of people out there embarking on similar projects with their kids as a result of us blogging about our antics is such a lovely thought!

Have a lovely Halloween, and here's one last link to the Alpha Mom post with the Egyptian mummy mask, so that you don't have to scroll back up ;)