Muno

Ages and ages ago I made the Bean a T-shirt of one of her favourite TV characters. I used that iron-on transfer paper. It was RUBBISH! It looked fab when I first did it, but washed terribly and looked dreadful after only 2 washes. But she still loved it and insisted on wearing it to my embarrassment. At long last I have made a new one using applique.

Well I had to make two to avoid arguments, and now I have to go against my rule of not dressing the girls in the same clothes at the same time. However the result is is infinitely better.

By the by if you have never been exposed to Yo Gabba Gabba I highly recommend it.

Things to do with your toddlers...

...when they have an infectious illness and can't come into contact with other kids. And you have a Merlin Pass.

1) Visit Chessington World of Adventures Zoo and have your snack at the same time as the tigers

2) Splash in Puddles

3) Make them race each other. Lots.

4) Go to Littlehampton (this will only work if it is cold)

5) Collect stones

6) Eat random odd things together in cafes

7) Watch trains

8) London Eye

9) Go to the London Aquarium during school hours

10) Visit Polesden Lacey

Dinosaur cake

Last time I made a novelty cake I got a lot of questions about how I did it, so here are the hows for the latest non-anatomically correct triceratops cake.

I use Madeira cake as it is nice and easy to chop up into whatever shape you want. You can basically carve it if you need to, and this is even easier if you freeze it first. Also I tend to make a chocolate marbled Madeira cake to make it a bit more interesting. I haven't got this quite right yet...the Pingu cake was not marbled enough (tried to marble it in the tins and it was too thick) and this one was a bit over-marbled (mixed it in the bowl a bit too much). Still, practise makes perfect.

So first of all, I constructed the cake, here's a photo of how...I baked three normal sandwich tin-sized cakes and had plenty left over to make a nice chocolate treacle tart later. The body is two half cakes sandwiched together and everything else is just carved out of the leftovers.

This is the first time I have used butter icing to ice the cake. Let's face it, it's the best tasting icing there is, but it is a pain in the bum to get a nice finish. With Peppa Pig I iced with butter icing and then put that disgusting royal icing stuff on top. With Pingu the butter icing was topped with marshmallows. In this instance I had in my head to do a nice purple, but found the colour almost impossible to achieve. Maybe it is the food colours I have? I'm pretty new to this novelty cake stuff, has anyone got any recommendations? I went with blue white chocolate icing instead.

Then my beautiful assistant was let loose with the chocolate to complete the look. It did require rather a heavy supervision to make sure some chocolate ended up on the cake as rather a lot seemed to head tummywards immediately. Still my only directions were for the three horns and the rest is her work.

Then I just added white chocolate buttons for the toes and eyes, and piped on a little mouth.

Here he is in all his glory. Couldn't get a nice shot really, but you get the idea.

Making Monsters

Back in the days before the sun came out, and Little My had just arrived, we needed things that could amuse two little girls inside! Thanks to Mr Maker we knew just the thing. Making monsters!

Just a couple of empty bottles, some PVA glue and paint, and various bits and bobs to stick on, and let the girls run riot! I prefer to allow them to do their own thing with regard to what their art looks like, and was really pleased to see the Bean being inventive with the eyes placed on coloured circles. The Bug has always had a thing about giving everything multiple eyes, and this was no exception! Here's the final products!

Little My

Delighted to introduce the latest addition, Little My!

Trousers

Having made the error of allowing the Bean to colour unsupervised with a sharpie, I was left with a lovely pair of jeans with an annoying unmovable stain. I tried everything, and usually Napisan gets everything out, but the stain remained. So I decided to do a bit of something I've never tried before...

I have plenty of odd buttons and bits of old felt so this was just using up scraps. I was really pleased with the result, but of course what with having a baby and all this has taken much much longer than it should, and the Bean has grown out of the jeans now! Good job I have three girls!

Children's illustrations

I know I have blogged a bit about this before, but if you end up reading a lot of children's books, you start to get a big appreciation of the artwork involved. Of course I go on a lot about Sarah McIntyre because she is a good friend of mine and happens to be extremely talented! We recently came across Timothy Basil Ering's book Frog Belly Rat Bone in the library and I absolutely love the illustrations. Click to enlarge, it is worth it. The Bean isn't quite old enough for the book yet, so it was for pure pleasure D and I were flicking through this one.

On another note, The Bean loves dinosaurs, so when I saw Tyrannosaurus Drip in the library it immediately went on her wishlist, and she got it for her birthday this year.

It's by Julia Donaldson, who of course wrote The Gruffalo, a book that I don't really rate that much. She has a real genius for the metre of poetry for children's tales and they are a pleasure to read. I much prefer Monkey Puzzle (although the illustrations by Axel Scheffler, who also did The Gruffalo, completely freak me out) or particularly What The Ladybird Heard or Sharing a Shell with great illustrations by Lydia Monks. Tyrannosaurus Drip has illustrations by David Roberts and they are fantastic. His Tyrannosaurus Rex are so wonderfully fierce but dim and the change of colour palate between the goodies and baddies is marvellous.

I've no doubt I will have plenty more to say on this topic, but just wanted to share these gems with you!

Dinosaurs and mushrooms

More t-shirts! The Bean had been asking for a dinosaur t-shirt for a while and I tried to convince her that a nice brontosaurus was the way to go, but she wanted a "scary dinosaur that says rrraaaahhhh" so I had to oblige. I made both, but the brontosaurus (which apparently is meant to be called an apatosaurus, who knew?) was immediately given to Bug, who happily seemed very pleased with it. The Bean is delighted with her scary T-Rex.

The most complicated stencil I have done so far was a t-shirt for D for Christmas. It was a multi-layer job so took a bit of time. It's also my first time using white, and rather disappointingly it has already started to crack after just a few washes, something I have not experienced with any of the other colours. I had to use rather a lot on the dark purple though, so it's my fault. I should have paid more for an ink made especially for dark colours. We live and learn! It's very noticeable that the white has a rather plasticy feel on the t-shirt where as you can easily see from the dinosaurs above, the other colours are more like true dyes. So I think in the future the white will be limited to lighter backgrounds. I'm still pretty pleased with the result though!