Making Mondays – Tagxedo word art

Always looking for ways to make easy art with the children – this site is a dream!

Instead of a simple word cloud, at Tagxedo.com you can choose from an astonishing array of shapes, and make real  ‘word art’.

tagxedo dog trudyktaylor blog4

  • Firstly, paste in your blog url, or text, or individual words.
  • Choose your shape. Hearts, elephants, bats – I even saw a witch’s hat in there!
  • Choose from a beautiful range of colour themes.
  • Even choose your fonts!
  • Then create, and save to jpg, or share on Facebook or Twitter.
  • They have a shop where you can buy mugs and stuff with your word picture on it.

I can see tons of uses for this:

  • A family word picture, with all our names on it.
  • For Father’s Day, the word ‘Dad’ repeated, and printed out to stick on a card.
  • For Valentine’s Day, the word ‘Love’, to stick on a card or frame and give to someone special.
  • Your child’s name, printed out to frame, maybe even print out 16 or 25 of them, each one in a different colour theme, in a smaller size, and then collage them together!
  • The words of a favourite poem or song.

The possibilities are endless!!!

These are the words it picked up from the blog.

Strangely, at some point I have used the words ‘sandwich’ and ‘rice’, which taken out of context seems a trifle odd! I’ve also used the word ‘really’ a lot more than I should. Happily, ‘Chocolate’ seems nice and emboldened, but where is ‘coffee’? This blog runs on coffee, yet no mention of it – strange…..perhaps it is my guilty little secret, only now revealed…

(Upon further investigation, I’ve uncovered ‘sandwich’ tins, ‘rice’ krispies – see, makes more sense now!)

Have you tried this? Can you think of any more uses for tagxedo?

Making Mondays – How to make a pet collage with your children

We’re always on the look out for great craft projects, and when I saw the work of this artist Michel Keck, who produces amazing dog pop art, we just had to have a go.

The girls and I made…….. a collection of collaged Berties!

craft with kids, pet collageAnd for this craft, you’ll need all the usual scraps.

collage materials

  • Paper or material scraps – wrapping paper, scrapbooking paper, newspaper, even A4 lined paper can look good.
  • Stickers, glitter, beads – whatever you fancy.
  • PVA glue
  • Scissors
  • A4 photographs of your pet

Firstly, protect your work surfaces from all that glue.

Next, print out the pictures of your pet. You need a nice clear image. We printed the same picture three times, but flipped it in one picture, so Bertie was looking the opposite way. Make sure the eyes and the nose really stand out, because that’s all you’ll be able to see later!

bertie4Then get to work! Tear or cut pieces of your paper and stick onto the photo. You need to leave key areas clear, so that you’ll recognise your pet. With our collages, it was the eyes, nose, and floppy ears that stood out. And we all came up with our own unique versions!

bertie3bertie2bertie1These pictures are all on A4, and since I don’t have any good frames for that size (until my next trip to IKEA), I photographed each collage, changed the backgrounds in Photoshop,  then printed them out as 7″ x 5″ photos.

copiedAll of which fits nicely into the RIBBA frame.

ribbaLike so:

craft with kids, pet collage

It’s not a very messy craft, and I think the end results are really colourful and fun. When I get round to framing the originals, which have a lot more texture and variation, I’ll update this post with some more pictures.

Let me know if you try this with your own pet photo, and post a link to your site so other people can see too!

And I think our Berties might look better in a white Ribba frame….what do you reckon?

 

 

 

 

Homemade Christmas Decorations

All our best Christmas decorations are home made. They’re special because we put our time and creative energy into making them, often with scraps left over from other projects.

Here are a few of my favourites –

Christmas decoration, 8 maids milking

Eight maids-a-milking from The Twelve Days of Christmas carol.

The maids are peg dollies, their skirts made from paper and doilies. The cow has his own little bell, rescued from a Lindt reindeer that was consumed a previous year 🙂

Rudolph.

He has a nodding head, and his body is made of a plastic milk bottle. Poor thing, his legs are a bit wobbly with old age, but Rudolph’s been coming out to play every Christmas for the last 7 years, which is pretty good for something we cobbled together with papier mache and a milk bottle!

The Gingerbread House.

Shiny cardboard overload on this one! We’ve got glitter, jewels, metallic card, cotton wool, and cardboard tubes all dressed up like candy canes. So over the top – I love it!

We don’t make all our decorations, but those are the ones we ooh and aahh over every year, the ones that come with memories

We also let the girls choose a new tree decoration each year, one for each of them, and I put a little label on each one saying which year we bought it. It’s part of our lead up to Christmas ritual.

I think a lot of people do this now, and there was a lot of thought and deliberation going into the choices being made at the Garden Centre last night. The girls took nearly an hour making their decision!

What about you? Do you have any special decorations, or rituals for this time of year?

 

 

Making Mondays – Easy hamburger cupcakes

As I’m trying to catch up on my Nanowrimo wordcount this weekend – an easy post for me – how to make hamburger cupcakes with the children.

These cupcakes are the quick and easy relation of those found online here at Bakerella. I once made the Bakerella version for a party, complete with fries in a little personalised holder, but for everyday……..

how to make hamburger cupcake

…..these little cakes are SO easy.

The ingredients:

  • Cupcakes, home made or store bought,
  • Green butter icing,
  • Yellow butter icing,
  • Seedless jam,
  • Jaffa cakes, or similar chocolate cookies.

how to make hamburger cupcakes

Remove your cupcakes from their cases, and slice in half. Spread icing on the base of the cake.

easy hamburger cakes

Place the Jaffa cake or cookie on the icing, and then top with more green icing (lettuce), yellow icing (mustard) and jam (ketchup).

easy hamburger cakesThen put the top of the burger on. SO EASY.

I don’t think they’re any healthier than the real thing, but children love sweet food masquerading as something else – especially if they can make it themselves!

Have fun with it!

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Making Mondays – how to make Tree Skeleton Art with the children.

As Autumn turns colder, trees are beginning to reveal their starkly bare skeletons, and it’s surprisingly easy to make beautiful art based on these natural sculptures.

This picture was made by my daughter when she was 8.

bare tree, how to make bare tree art

Fun, effective, and you may already have the ‘ingredients’ in the house – the chief ingredient being children with lots of puff! Continue reading