Showing posts with label Easter Crafting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Easter Crafting. Show all posts

Wednesday, 15 April 2009

Easter Weekend

Sorry my posts have been missing for a while, I was rather poorly last week, unanticipated as these things always are, a quick two days in bed with the worst case of D&V I've had in years.....not recommended during your kids Easter holidays.........but I was better just in time for the chocolate and had obviously a huge excuse to eat my fill and gain the weight I'd lost being poorly!

However Easter came and went with a calculated lack of chocolate in our household. I'd anticipated the possibility of chocolate overdose, and worked around it, so the kids only ended up with one egg and a few mini eggs each, hurrah, a less fattening Easter all round. The pictures below show a few painted
eggs by dd2.
This one is by dd1.
On Easter Monday we managed a day out at Papplewick Pumping Station (with the Grandparents) as they were having an open day, which also involved Egg Rolling. dd1 a surprising hit there, she got the hang of it and came 3rd, much to her and our surprise! The Pumping Station itself is a fantastic grand venue and I'm sorry I only had my phone with me, so my photos are still on it! It opens its door to the public every now and again, and they had the old Victorian steam driven workings pumping away for all to see, quite a sight, when you consider the effort put into building such a structure in the first place. I think it took 6 boilers to keep it stoked enough in the days when steam did the trick on a local level, rather than the huge power stations and the grid that does the trick now. A great little site for the kids to see though, and it had some nice play areas, both park and science based, so the girls now know a bit more about the water cycle, getting water out of underground reservoir's, to houses etc.
Our back garden looking slightly more spring like.


Ok so here I attempted to show the Cherry Blossom in full swing, but the photo sure doesn't do the view from our garden justice. What a week its been in the garden......RAT is the main cry, we'll actually it went 'mummy, is that a squirrel hanging off the bird feeder?' to which I replied, yuk, no.......and thus the catcher man from the council is coming around tomorrow sometime to sort out our lovely row of houses, as it appears that our neighbour has the actual nest, whilst the rest of us, have a run through our gardens......shudder....it put paid to me doing an egg hunt in the garden let me tell you........



Sunday, 29 March 2009

Creative day


So with Mothers day gone (for the UK at least) and Easter approaching, what better thing to do on a Saturday afternoon with the girls, than create an Easter basket, in which you can store a multitude of things! These baskets were courtesy of Home Bargin's, cause I'm a busy mum! and they had a fab selection of quick things to do for Easter, so for about 79p each, we now have these all made up. There's an Easter Hen stuck to each side of the basket, with lots of great ready to stick eggs, eyes, beaks, which is fab, as it means dd2 doesn't need to be let loose with glue, always a good thing. So whilst the girls decorated their hens, I made the baskets and handles for the middle (i.e. I stuck them together). Everyone is pleased with the end results though, will be good for Easter Egg collecting, should an egg hunt arise?


Keeping with a crafty theme for the afternoon, we decided to make chocolate cup cakes (I tried to sway the girls to lemon, or vanilla, with no success) here's our recipe if you get the urge to try it.
8oz Self Raising Flour
8oz Margarine/Butter
8oz Sugar (in this case not caster, but brown, as it was all we discovered we had left! if you find this, I recommend extra beating)
3 Eggs
and around 6 teaspoons of Green & Blacks Coco Powder. (its an add to taste thing)
Oven 180 degrees, for around 20-25 mins.
We then waited for them to cool and iced them with Water Icing (icing sugar and water to desired consistency for those of you who aren't at all familiar with this sort of thing) and decorated in an assortment of ways (I did mine with just jellybeans, but as you can see the girls let rip!)
Dd2's cake


DD1's cakes
We had a lovely afternoon creating these cakes and can all testify they are yummy to eat too!