Dedicated to Mister Maker...

Okay so I love stationery! I'll always pick up colour paper, glitter, glue (i've now accumulated about 10 sticks of glue - all hardened), ice cream sticks, googly eyes, paint, stickers... well you get the picture. This I've been doing for years now, long before my daughter was born.

Thanks to Mister Maker and Ms Tandon, I now use the stuff i buy. The other day we made some lovely colourful ice-cream stick bugs.

All we needed were some ice-cream sticks, paint, pipe cleaners (btw, you get pipe cleaners at Crosswords along with a lot of other fun crafty stuff), googly eyes, and some sticky tape (in the words of mister maker himself)

... Since we make most of the things we see on his show on Cbeebees, this most is dedicated to him.

Each ice-cream stick bug will need 1 ice-cream stick, 3 pipe cleaners (2 each for the legs and 1 for the tongue, so choose your colours accordingly), 2 googly eyes.

You start with painting the ice-cream stick with a bright happy colour. Once it is dry you stick on the googly eyes, the legs and the tongue, so that your bug looks like this -

You could decorate your bug with spots, stripes, stars... pretty simple eh!!!

the friendly neighborhood bug...

We go through a lot of eggs in my house... A LOT!!! So we generally buy large quantities... and apart from accumulating calories, we also have a lot of egg cartons... So guess what... thats right... its craft time.

Egg carton Ant

Cut out a 3 egg size out from the egg carton. Paint it any colour you like, Sharanya chose red. Punch 2 holes on the head of the ant, put a pipe cleaner through it and twirl it like the antennae. punch holes on either side and stick in the pipe cleaners to make legs...

Don't forget to stick on some googly eyes.. and once you're done, it should look like this or any other way your toddler makes it... they never are wrong...

A egg carton ladybug and caterpillar are simple to make as well, all you need to do is cut up the size required (size of one egg in the case of a lady bug and 4-5 incase of a caterpillar), paint it, stick on the googly eyes and you're set. Did I forget the antennae... stick in pipe cleaners...

Sharanya loves to mix colours to see what the new colour is...

So she figured that red and blue made purple...

Sharanya told me the entire process of metamorphosis, saying that "our caterpillar looks sad because it wants to be a blutterfly (butterfly) soon, but hasn't eaten its veggies...". And she gave it some stars to encourage it... So thought for the day - Get your child to tell you about the craft he/she made... who knows what little pearls of wisdom come tumbling out...

Yeah... nothing about the ladybug... Sharanya made it... so it's all good!

Dusting for finger prints!!!

One lazy afternoon, well i was feeling lazy and Sharanya wasn't... Anyway, we (READ: I) decided to do something to make her room pretty.

So again i sought help from our dear friend... the trusty internet and found something for Sharanya to do. A combination of paint, hand and complete gloopy mess... Sharanya loved it. Some time later we did something similar for show and tell at her school and she ended up painting herself up as well...

So anyway, this is what it looked like - the giraffe was a palm print, the grass was the print of an entire finger and the spots on the giraffe, leaves and fruits were thumb prints...

Its a little tough to get them to stick to the right angle... but what the hell...

We also made peacocks for a Republic day show and tell at school... The palm became the dancing peacocks feathers...

PS. I promise to get it framed by this weekend...