Handsome horse marionette

Our puppet craze continues in earnest - we've made another marionette - but this time it's a horse. He's been named Handsome, and he is brilliant. He clip-clops around the house on his mismatched button hooves and he is particularly good at jumping. Here's a little clip of his skills in action:

I love that Handsome is made entirely from recycled and found materials; frayed string for his mane, forelock and tail (just seen), and empty toilet rolls for his head and body. I think he'd have been even better with some googly eyes but we used all ours in last week's puppet project - which you can see here.

We just need to find a good way to display all these puppets now. I think I need to buy some hooks...

Shake, rattle and roll

We made these rather snazzy decorative eggs today. It was a messy project - with glitter galore - but it definitely worked a treat. It even got my sticky-hand averse son willingly involved with glue - a sure sign of success. 

1. First we covered the bottom of four small transparent plastic food storage tubs - ours were from IKEA - with different coloured glitter.

2. Then we each coated one of our small polystyrene eggs - from a local pound shop - with PVA glue. We began by using a little paintbrush to do this but soon found it quicker and easier to spread the glue on the eggs with our fingers.

3. Next we dropped the eggs - one at a time - into the glitter-bottomed tubs, wiped our sticky paws and then firmly closed the lids.

4. After that came the really fun part; to shake, rattle and roll the eggs round and round in the closed tubs - covering each egg with an even layer of glitter. 

5. The transparency of the tubs allowed us to check that our eggs were glitter-coated before we removed the lids.

6. The twinkling, and now non-sticky, eggs were then transferred to a plate to dry for about an hour.

7. We mixed up our leftover glitter to make a few multi-coloured eggs too.

This was a fun activity, with proper wows from the children as they transformed their white eggs to sparkling treasure. And now we're all ready for our egg hunt on Sunday. Happy Easter!