Easy DIY Nativity - #christmascrafts

We made this Nativity scene a few years ago, and it worked really well (it's here if you'd like to have a look).

Thing is it's made out of paper, so, didn't really stand the test of time... though we do still have the three Wise Men.

They live on top of my spice jars in the kitchen.

It's been on my mind to make another nativity scene - a cardboard one this time, that should hopefully last a little longer, and I've been eyeing up the cat food box for a while, thinking it would make a pretty good stable? So, over the next few weeks I'll be sharing some ideas here.

If you don't have a cat, or a friend with a cat, then look out for any other packaging that's a similar sort of shape. This teabag box has a nice arched opening too, but your stable really doesn't have to have one - it could be the bottom end of a large cereal box or a dishwasher tablets box. As long as it's high enough for the figures (about 10cm).

I've kept the cardboard flap on our box, and might add something to it later, but it'll work just as well without.

Painting the stable is the easiest option.
Rub the shiny outside of the box with some sandpaper to remove the sheen and to give the paint something to grip to. To make a good 'stable' brown, mix a little red with a lot of yellow to make orange, and then keep adding small amounts of blue, until you're happy with the colour.
Probably need 2 coats.

I went for the slightly harder option and covered our box with brown paper. Does take a bit more time, but think it's worth it.

Start with the sides of the stable and cut out two identical bits of paper that are a bit bigger than the area you're covering.

To do this, place the box on one side on the paper, and line the bottom of the stable with the edge of the paper.

Mark a few dots about a cm out from the other 3 sides. This is so you have extra paper to fold over the edge of the box.

Use a ruler to join the dots. You need two pieces the same size (you could fold the whole sheet of paper in half and then cut them both out at the same time).

Brush craft glue evenly over one side, making sure you get into the corners, then line the piece of paper up with the bottom of the stable, making sure you have a similar size overlap on the edges.  Press along the edges to crease the paper.

At each corner, snip a small triangle out of the brown paper to make it easier to fold - brush a line of glue along the edge of the box and stick the overlap down. Do the same on the other side. This will give you a much neater join when the rest of the stable is covered.

Cut a piece of paper that's the width of the stable - line the box up with the bottom corner of a sheet of brown paper, mark the width of the box, and use a ruler to draw a line along the whole length of the sheet. Cut out, following the inside of the line - you don't want this piece of paper to hang over the edges of your stable.

You might find, (as we did) that one piece of paper is not long enough to cover the front, top and back, so, cut another piece the same width as the stable, and make it a little bigger than the gap you need to cover, so there's an overlap.

Cover the front, top and back of the box with an even coat of glue, then, starting at the front, line up the paper with the bottom edge and carefully stick it down, a little at a time, pressing and smoothing as you go. If you're working with a box like mine you will be covering the arched opening too, like this.

If you're using the bottom end of a large cereal box, or something like a dish washer tablets box, then you'll only have to cover the top and back. To get a neat finish, leave a cm or so of paper hanging over the front edge, so you can fold and glue it underneath.

If you have an arched opening, cut the hole out, but don't go right up to the edge - leave a paper border of about 1cm around the arch.

Snip into this extra paper, up to the edge and crease it back, before gluing.

Once the glue's dried, (or paint if you've gone that route), then use a ruler and a black felt tip pen to add lines for a wooden tongue and groove effect. I found drawing a broken line like this worked well, giving it a more rustic look.

 Don't worry if they're a little uneven - a bit of variety is good.

Randomly draw a few short lines going across some of the planks, to look like joins, and add two dots for nails.

For the straw, loosely fold a yellow and orange sheet of tissue paper together, and snip across to make really thin strips.

Unfurl your strands, then - the really fun bit - cut or tear and scrunch them up, until you're happy with your tissue paper straw. Place in the stable.

Figures next time!

Leaf Art and a gift idea

More often than not a little collection of things finds its way home in a pocket after a walk. And there are rich pickings at the moment - conkers, pine cones, acorns and stacks of colourful autumn leaves. 
Leaves are great for simple craft projects - just don't forget to press them quickly, before they start curling and crinkling up. 

This is when I miss the old telephone directories, because they were perfect for the job. Still, a large book works fine. Put a few leaves between pages and weigh down with some other heavy books for a couple of days, until you’re ready to use them.

But what to do with your leaves? A few years ago we made bookmarks which worked brilliantly - they were useful, looked pretty good and made perfect presents. 

The thing is, just about everyone we know in the whole wide world has been given one. 

Time for something new...

..so, this is the other idea - a leaf art/collage notebook.

Make sure you’ve got a good selection of leaves - colours, sizes, shapes.

I got the plain notepads from Asda. Only 45p. They’re spiral-bound ones, but any kind would do. If there’s some writing on the front, cover with a piece of white paper cut to size (glue down with a glue stick)

Arrange your leaf design first, and when you’re happy, start sticking. We found it was best to brush a thin layer of craft glue on the back of the leaves. Lots of inspiration online or try with your own pattern.

Then cut some clear sticky back plastic - you'll only need a piece to cover the front, with a cm or so extra to fold round the 3 edges.  

Start at the bound side, peeling a little of the backing paper off at a time, and smoothing out air bubbles and any wrinkles as you go. 

Then wrap the extra sticky back plastic neatly over the edges.

Quick workshop update - it was such a full on day, with 3 sessions fairly close together and more kids than expected! And even though I wished I'd brought something like a hair dryer because it was too cold for the paint to dry quickly, and what I planned to fit into the hour was massively overambitious, everyone seemed to enjoy it - lots of impressive making anyway! For me it was just lovely seeing the animals come to life and watching the kids come up with their own ideas about how their lions/penguins/giraffes should look. Sure that's what it's all about.

I'm kicking myself I didn't take more photos - there are a few here, on the MYOZ Facebook page - I'll definitely take more at the Hay workshop at the end of November. And now I've had a bit of practice and learnt a few lessons, I'm feeling much more confident about that one!

Make Your Own Zoo, down on the farm!

I'm holding my first Make Your Own Zoo workshops next week! REALLY excited. A little apprehensive too, but mostly excited.

They're at Kate Humble's farm, Humble By Nature near Monmouth which is a pretty special venue.
Humble By Nature is the place to go to learn rural skills, like running a smallholding and animal husbandry, and there are cooking and craft courses too. Such a varied range of things to do, often with a bit of a twist! And the team are always open to new ideas; ones that share their values. Do have a read about how it all began, here. It's been quite a journey.

I'm doing three, hour long sessions on Monday, and they're all sold out which is brilliant. So, there'll be 10 children + parents coming along to each one, and my goal is to make it fun, and to send everyone home with as many animals as we can possibly squeeze into an hour!

I've done a bit of prep to keep things moving along, mainly painting pieces of cereal box card and cutting up egg boxes. Hopefully we'll manage a lion, giraffe or zebra, a penguin....

and, if there's time, a sheep! Definitely the right place to be making sheep. Might be a little ambitious though. I've been working on a few make your own farm ideas....

I'll let you know how it goes! Hopefully no hitches, because I've been asked to do a workshop at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend at the end of November which I'm so, so thrilled about. Can't believe it really. Another path that started here.

DIY glow-in-the-dark Halloween board game

At last! A board game for the mini Halloween figures I made yonks ago. This was always the plan - it's just taken me a very long time to get round to it.  If you'd like to make the figures, the pumpkin and the witch are here and the ghost and vampire bat here.

To be fair, the glow-in-the-dark part is a bit of a novelty; I just really wanted to get some glow-in-the-dark paint. And it does glow, though not quite enough to read what's on the squares in the pitch black, and certainly not enough for me to get a decent picture. Sure anyway, it all adds to the fun, and the game works fine without too.

You'll need:
a cereal box (at least 28cm high)
glow-in-the-dark paint (optional)
good black felt tip (like a Sharpie)
ruler
scissors
toilet paper tube
paint
LED tea light (optional)
sweets (optional!)

1. Open up the cereal box - use the creased lines to help you draw a square 28cm x 28cm. Don't cut it out yet - easier to paint the whole square and draw lines when it's like this - less mess as well!


2. (Optional) Paint your square with a few coats of glow-in-the-dark paint.

3. Use the ruler to measure and mark points 3.5cm along all 4 lines. Then join them up with the black felt tip to make a grid. (3cm was too small and 4 was too big - 3.5 seemed just right)
Cut it out.

4. Now the bit that my kids really enjoyed - coming up with the good square/bad squares. Kind of like Snakes and Ladders, with an evil twist. We did a few miss-a-goes too. And my daughter came up with the idea of having some Trick or Treat squares. If you land on one you can have a sweet. I did try to point out no one was likely to want to do a trick with sweets on offer, but anyway!

Here are most of ours - I bet you could come up with even more gruesome ones.

Good squares: Halloween! +5, Jump on a broomstick +2, Drink witch's brew +1, find a black cat +3, Zombie party! +3, Full Moon! +4, Win a gruesome ghoul contest +4

Bad squares: Spell backfires -5, fall into a cauldron -3, Phantom flu -2, turn into a frog -3, lose your head! -4, and the worst of the lot, 'Zapped by a Ghostbuster! Back to the beginning'

Miss a go: get stuck in a web, catch Hog warts, fall in a slime pool

5. Write on your squares, (use different colours if you want) making sure you don't have for example, a +2 landing on a -2, sending your figure endlessly forward and back, like being trapped in limbo, FOREVER!!

6. Fill the numbers in around the good and bad squares (make sure you include them in your counting)

7. The winner is the first one to reach the haunted castle at the end of the game. It's made from a toilet paper tube. Cut out a door shape at the bottom, and make short, evenly spaced cuts around the top. Bend back every other flap to form battlements.

Use nail scissors to pierce a few holes in the tube and cut thin slits for windows. Then paint.

We popped a LED tea light (from IKEA) inside, to give it a ghoulish glow.

We've all played, even the grumpy teenager, and it's been great having a bit of time and a bit of fun together. Doesn't happen as much as I'd like these days.

Now looking for other things to do with the glow-in-the-dark paint.... Tempted to put 'tidy your room, or else...' on the 13 year old's wall, so it mysteriously appears at night.

Too mean? :)

Linking up with Trash 2 Treasure and Creative Mondays

Mushroom foraging in the Forest of Dean

Know your Shaggy Parasols from your Blushers? Not something I'd be staking my life on, but there's a glimmer of a chance now, because after banging on about it for years, I finally booked myself on a mushroom foraging course in the Forest of Dean.

So very glad I did, it was such a good day, and  full on - from 10 to 5 - searching for mushrooms in the woods, learning how to spot the good ones, and more importantly, the deadly avoid-at-all-costs ones.

Our guide was Jesper Launder: top forager, Herbalist and a font of fungi knowledge, with an ever so slight Brian Cox thing going on.

No doubt whatsoever he loves his mushrooms, and I'd say his enthusiasm and passion rubbed off on the whole group. The best kind of teachers - especially when it's really important to pay attention...

There was such a lot to take in - in the first half hour we'd already found over half a dozen different types: Butter Caps, Fairy Bonnets, Honey Fungus, Puffballs, Shaggy Parasols, Blushers.... some edible, some not. I started taking notes - not stuff I wanted to get muddled about. Up to this point the only thing I knew about Honey Fungus was that it was responsible for the demise of several small trees and shrubs in our garden. I had no idea you could eat it.

Jesper explained some of the distinguishing characteristics of different mushroom families - colour (red, best steer clear), shape, stem rings, gills or not; just for starters.
But of course nothing's really that clear cut - some red ones are okay, some good ones have evil looky-likeys - Blusher (good)/Panther cap (baaaad) or Shaggy Parasol and The Vomiter...

Even some in the fungi family that includes the lethal Death Cap are apparently edible, though why you'd want to go anywhere near mushrooms that have relatives with Death in the title... or Web, as it turns out.

There were a few in our group of about 10 who already knew a fair amount, but most were beginners like me. The only wild mushroom I've ever felt happy foraging is a giant Puffball. Mainly because there's no chance of muddling it up with anything else really, and there's one that pops up most years in the church car park next door. We found this a few years ago.

Delicious fried in a little garlic butter with bacon, and the rest went in pasta and savoury rice. It lasted for the best part of a week.

So excited when I found a smaller, but perfectly round and firm one in the same place just before the foraging day, but didn't pick it straight away because I knew my daughter would enjoy that bit. Of course I promptly forgot all about it, and when we went back someone had flipping well driven over it!

Love the name of the one at the back - Amethyst Deceiver - mushrooms do have great names.

As well as looking pretty amazing, some smell unexpectedly amazing too. One of the more experienced foragers found a tiny Coconut Milkcap mushroom that really did smell of desiccated coconut.

We nibbled a few varieties of Brittlegills - very common in the UK, edible, but not all of them are pleasant - some tasted spicy hot, like you'd been hit by a wasabi express train. The most desirable one is the Charcoal Burner...which doesn't have brittle gills like the rest. I'm feeling the more you learn, the bigger the mushroom minefield gets.

Jesper took us foraging in three different places - the first was probably the best, but as he says, it can change so quickly - a spot that's good one time, can have little to offer on the next visit. The foraging window isn't often that wide either, and probably not helped by the growing numbers of wild boar in the Forest of Dean, digging up the soft ground. Some spots where just a mass of churned up earth and mud.

HUGE mushroom envy when someone found this large Porcini (Cep or Penny-bun) - from the popular, and mostly edible, Boletus family. They're an easier one to identify because the underside of the cap has spongy pores rather than gills. Still, some are toxic (of course) and we were warned to avoid red boletes and ones that turn a vivid blue when cut.

Jesper explained other helpful detection techniques, like the spore test, though feel that's getting into advanced foraging territory; and as he's a qualified Herbalist, he talked a bit too about the medicinal properties of some fungi, which was one of the most interesting parts for me.

I had no idea that some common Polypores (Bracket Fungi, usually grow on wood, often shelf-shaped), like the one called Turkey Tail, are used to treat cancer. Mainly in Asia, though there's more research going on here now apparently. Or that Birch Polypores can be used as firelighters, knife sharpeners or, rather brilliantly, strips cut from the underside make a neat natural plaster. Antisceptic, porous, anti-fungal and sticks to itself.

Did you know that the dusty spores in an old Puffball also act as a natural antiseptic and can be puffed out to help treat a cut? It's known by quite a few weird and wonderful names. Seeing a murky little cloud burst forth, 'Wolf's Fart' sort of makes more sense...

I was definitely not top student forager - there was a measly amount in my basket compared to the others, but as I'm the only one at home at the moment who eats them, that was fine.

I hadn't really appreciated all wild mushrooms should be cooked, and that some absolutely have to be cooked, to break down toxins. And on the whole chuck out the stalks.

We found quite a lot of Honey Fungus, which is a popular one, though apparently not everyone gets on with it. That's another thing - a tasty little mushroom treat for someone can be an indigestible nightmare for someone else. But I'm pleased to report no repeating problems with our Honeys. I cooked them with a little butter, thyme and seasoning, and though they disappeared to almost nothing in the pan, they were delicious.

Obviously a little mushroom knowledge could be a very dangerous thing, but actually, if anything I'd be more wary and cautious now. I'll be dashing out to get a seriously good guidebook before I dash out to do any foraging. It's more about the knowing and the searching for me, rather than the eating.

And if I ever did venture out, I'd stick to the most obvious ones that are easiest to spot, like Porcini, Funnel Yellow Chanterelles, Hedgehog Mushrooms (spines instead of gills) and of course my old favourite, the Puffball.. as long as they're not purple inside...

Jesper also offers a kind of after care service, so if you're brave enough to have a go yourself and are not absolutely 100% sure what you've got, you can email him a picture. He runs other courses in different parts of the country - and not just mushroom foraging. If you're interested, do have a look at his website to see if there are any near you. You won't be disappointed.