Halloween party

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As we’ve mentioned in our last post, we have celebrated Halloween for the first time this year and have invited some of our friend families with children with the same age of Gabriel to a Halloween party.

We have made some scary (funny) food inspired by a lot of things we have found on the internet like a vegetables skeleton, spider pizzas or ghost cupcakes. We have also made bat cookies with this recipe which we’ll probably use a lot in the future because it’s sooooo easy and also quite good. We have also cooked a Jack o’Lantern pumpkin pie with a recipe we’ll share in a future post (we have made its eyes, mouth and nose out of chocolat cookies, as we did for the mouth of the ghost cupcakes. The eyes of the ghost cupcakes were bought on Amazon).

To decorate the living room we have made several paper garlands with Halloween motives. Our inspiration came from the black napkins and paper glasses that we bought at Amazon and which had spiders in violet, orange and green. To fit this color scheme, we made pumpkins and bats and cut paper circles with a circle puncher. We made garlands with only pumpkins and circles, a second one with only bats and circles and a third one with both motives. To put the paper garland together we have positioned the motives and circles alternatively on a surface in order to realize the effect before actually sewing it with the machine. We have also bought ballon with the same colors which were all over the place!

We have also organized a few handcraft activities for the kids. We have asked Gabriel to make models so that the children could see what they were supposed to do, so he was quite proud to do it for them! We found inspiration for this mummy on No time for flash cards where we always find such amazing ideas: such a great site! All kids took their mummy home which we hope will be a souvenir of the good time they have spent with us.

 

 

Welcome Autumn!

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It’s Autumn, Ines’s favorite season! The colors of the leaves change and have inspired us to make a paper garland with autumn colored leaves. To do so, we have cut different shapes of leaves in orange, yellow, red and some in green transparent paper (you can find the paper we used here. We advice to use paper with at least 90 g/m2). We have sewn them together with a yellow thread one after the other, changing a bit their orientation.

autumn leaves garland

 

Other then leaves with amazing colors in Autumn time, we also love going to the Kürbismarkt. It is an event that takes place once a year in our city where they sell lots of pumpkins: for decoration (by the way, that’s where we bought the ones shown in the picture above), for Halloween, to eat… Although its quite a small event we always go there because pumpkins are less expensive and they also have huge pumpkins our son loves to watch. This year we could even see them being transported using a mechanical shovel which is something all kids love to watch!

3 Easy watercolor techniques for kids

3EasyWatercolorTechniquesForKidsOur son Gabriel will soon leave the Krippe (daycare for babies) and go to the Kindergarten. This big event has been keeping us busy for a while now and we will soon share with you some of the thighs we’ve been doing. We have decided to help Gabriel make a personalized small present for him to offer to each of his teachers. Because we have appreciated so much doing this watercolor painting with him (we find it quite easy and love the result), we have looked for different negative watercolor techniques one could use to write  the teachers name (read at the bottom of the post how we made the letters out of masking tape).

Gabriel found the first watercolor painting technique quite funny because it used cotton buds (here’s where we got the inspiration). He has chosen 4 colors and started painting dots all over the surface by pressing the cotton bud vertically on the paper. We had to insist that he makes more dots on the letters so that we could read the name at the end.

In the second technique we used rubber bands to partially covered the surface on which we had already sticked the letters (here’s where we have got our inspiration). We have also asked Gabriel to choose the colors he wanted to use and then let him paint the surface by pressing a cylinder of foam (actually a small painting roll like these) on the paper. We let it dry between colors and took the rubber bands out only when it was completely dry.

The last technique didn’t quite work as planned although we also like the result at the end. It was probably Gabriel’s favorite technique because it implied using a straw to bubble a mixture of watercolor, water and dish soap on the paper or just bubbling it for the fun on the cup filled with the paint mixture (here’s where we got our inspiration). Unfortunately we didn’t take pictures of the different steps but we show here the pictures of another painting we did before the one with the name, to test the technique. We started like in the other techniques by sticking the motive on the paper. We taped 3 straws together that Gabriel used to immerse in the paint mixture and slowly blow on the paper. If no bubbles were formed, he would also try to slowly blow again on the surface of the paper which often made the mixture bubble. We let the paint dry between colors. We find that the colors effet looks great but unfortunately the paint flowed under the masking tape and the probable reason for this is the big amount of water we used every time. We like the stars painting even if the negative of the stars is hard to see but in the case of the letters it was quite difficult to read the name. For this reason, we have decided to cut the letters and put a sheet of paper in one of the colors of the painting behind it. A bit more work but it looks great!

We sincerely hope that Gabriel teachers appreciate these small pieces of art and keep them as a remembrance of the wonderful 3 years Gabriel spent in the Krippe with them! A big “Thank you” to them!!!!

This is how made the letters of their names in masking tape in order to protect the surface of the paper not to be painted. The technique we used to do it has evolved as made all three of them. Here’s are optimized method 🙂

  1. Print the letters/image you want to cut in an inverted manner (mirrored).
  2. Tape the sheet of paper on a window with the printed side against it and tape the backside of the letters.
  3. With a masking tape of a different color, tape the surface of the letters (this will help differentiate this first layer from the following one(s) which is important because the first one could be hard to stick out of the paper)
  4. Take the sheet out of the window, turn it and cut the letters (this will be easy because you’re now facing the printed side of the paper)
  5. Separate the letters in masking tape from the first layer of masking tape.
  6. Stick the letters on the paper and start painting!

Watercolor art

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We have been looking for ideas for nice paintings for a future wall gallery and we were inspired by this painting made by children. We have chosen a circle size (actually a masking tape…) and prepared the paper for the painting  by dividing the surface so that the space between the circles is the same. We then drew the circles with watercolor pencils and let Gabriel do the rest! We love the result and look forward to hang in on the wall.

Colorful snapshots of our art moment..

Summer fruit garland

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Every Saturday we come back from the market carrying several kilograms of fruit! And how inspiring they are…

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We have made a new paper garland inspired by them. To do so, we cut shapes of cherries, slice of ananas, strawberries, blackberries and slices of melon on a bright color paper with white dots. We displayed the different fruits on the floor before actually glueing them together and on the string with tape to make sure they look nice and symmetric. We also made a chain paper garland (each element is made with 2×10 cm paper stripes) with the same paper to hang on the branches we have on the living room buffet to go along with the fruit garland.

Nice decoration to eat nice summer fruits!!

P.S.: We bought the paper 4 years ago for our wedding decoration (picture bellow). Still using it!

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Decopatch display houses

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The small wooden houses were a Christmas gift. They are made of thin MDF and came in a kit to be assembled. We really liked them but didn’t really know what to do with them. We finally decided to use them to decorate Gabriel’s bedroom. To customize them, we have chosen green, blue and yellow decopatch paper we had bought a long time ago. Wit the help of Gabriel, we started by painting the background of the houses in white because the decopatch paper being so thin it becomes sort of transparent and would be less white once glued on the wood. We then carefully glued the paper with a suitable glue (vernis colle, in French) and let it dry.  Finally we assembled the different parts of the houses glueing them with wood glue.

How cute are they?

Guess how much I love you

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Living abroad, we both feel the need to offer our children as much contact with our languages as we can. For that reason, and because we love reading to our children, they have a lot of books! One of them is “Guess how much I love you” from Sam McBratney, which we own in the French version (you can buy the EN version, the FR version “Devine combien je t’aime”, the DE version ” Weißt du eigentlich, wie lieb ich dich hab?” at Amazon or the PT version “Adivinha quanto eu gosto de ti” at Wook). The book tells the story of Big Nutbrown Hare and Little Nutbrown Hare who ask each other “Guess how much I love you?”. The two answer using always larger measures to quantify how much they love each other: “as high as I can reach”, “as high as I can hop”, ending up with “right up to the moon and back”. Gabriel likes this book quite a lot and it has inspired us to make love declarations specially at night when we go to bed. “I love you up to my bed” (Gabriel sleeps in a bunkbed). And it has inspired me to make him a drawing using the gorgeous free printable papers from Mel McCarthy’s and personalising it with Gabriel’s picture which he really appreciates!

I created a 3D effect by glueing the rocket and some stars on the glass with a 3D effect glue (you can make the same simply by putting something that creates a small distance between the surface of the glass and the paper, like a piece of cardboard).

 

Paper garlands

We’ve made new garlands to decorate our living room. They were made out of the same paper bought at Tchibo: the big chain paper garland is made of 21×4 cm strips and the smaller ones of 10,5×2 strips (half the size of the first). The strips were simply taped in order to create a chain element, ensuring that the colours of the papers next to each other are not that similar. The last ones that we hang on the windows are made of 2 cm x variable length strips which were sewn not always along the center for a nicer mouvement effect.