crafts, google+ hangouts

Inspired by the button cupcakes we created for swing tags for Mother’s Day, we found some thin wire and got busy with this button flower craft.button bouquet

The wire needs to be quite a narrow gauge to make it ‘bendable’ for smaller fingers – and choose buttons within a sympathetic colour spectrum to make the flowers quite beautiful!

For this button flower craft, I found that the best way to do this is to arrange the buttons in the size order you’d like, ie, larger buttons at the back and then feed them onto the wire.

IMPORTANT – make sure you thread the wire through the buttons across the diagonal if there are four holes in the button, this way the buttons sit flat on top of each other – I cut a petal shape from some off-cuts of green felt to make the petals.

Google+ hangout with redtedartIf you’d like to see more button crafts, check out our button raindrops and giant paper pom pom clouds, our  Button Cupcakes and Christmas  Rudolph Greetings Cards, and watch the Google+ hangout hosted byMaggy at RedTedArt where myself, Anthea and Maggy shared our favourite button crafts.

Ali also blogs over on aGreenerLifeforus.com and is a new lover of Instagram too… pop over and say hello!

crafts, gardening with kids, google+ hangouts, kids, Uncategorized

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Andy Goldsworthy inspired
FlowersBuildKidsChaosThis week my darling boys got busy with some Andy Goldsworthy style flower arranging! Well, they made some gloopy papier mache glue (recipe here: two parts water, one part flour, nuked in the microwave for 50 seconds…stir stir stir the lumps out as best you can).

Then they painted the patio and started building up their pattern of summer leaves and petals. It has to be said, 10yo particularly LIKES working with colour patterns, you only have to look at his gogo crazy bones collection which he has displayed by colour, and he LOVED David T Waller’s amazing Toy Atlas Rainbow – the hundreds of toy cars… oh, click here to see it…

This is a fabulous way to explore the science of plant decomposition too – watching as the petals’ colour changes over a period of days – and the release of carbon dioxide…

If you’d like to see how our own patio art works with Autumn / Winter leaves – take a look at the ‘sculpture’ we made with the neighbour’s children – read more here, taking inspiration again from the fabulous Andy Goldsworthy and RedTedArt of course.

10yo boy was really excited to tell his Dad all about this, and has decided that he will cover the entire patio for his birthday, in November, so watch this space!

Anyway, as you know, I’m on a weekly panel of crafty So-and-So-s invited to ‘hang-out’ on Google+ by the every lovely Maggy Woodley at Red Ted Art.

I’m hanging out on Google+ for a bit of a vlog…(click the screengrab to watch) with some craft buddies to share these flowers and leaves ideas, hosted by the aforementioned ever lovely Maggy from Red Ted Art. who made flower crowns and showed us how to press flowers and cute woodland people. Also present are Anna, Crystal, Anthea’s wild grass seed head artKelly‘s amazing helicopter seed thank you cards for teachersLiz was featured with her diy flower-petal paintsThe fairy and the frog’s discovery bottle Pop back later for more links soon.

KidsChaosFlowersYouTube

Oh, and I’m on twitter.com/MoreKidsChaos too… Erm, and funnily enough onGoogle+Facebook and Pinterest! Pop over to say hello x Like it? Pin it!

Ali also writes over on AGreenerLifeforus.com
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