How to make a handprint birthday card

There's nothing better at receiving a hand made card. After having lots of fun with our hand print dragon we thought we'd have ago with another, this time making cards (NB as we are not very organised this card was meant for a birthday in April, when we first started making it but as you can see by today's date we didn't get round to finishing it - fortunately we have very patient family and friends who don't mind *very* late cards).

First of all we painted The Fairy's hand to look like a cake and candles (missing out the thumb to make it easier to print).

We then printed the hand and added separate yellow finger prints for flames.

When the picture was dry (well 3 months later !) I mounted it and made it into a finished card

A Very Hungry Party

'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' is a popular bed time story in our house, we even have a CD version for the car. So for 'The Fairy's' 2nd birthday we had a very hungry caterpillar themed party. I have thought about blogging about the party before (it happened over 18 months ago!) but with other more recent stuff to blog about it never happened. After seeing this post and realising that Eric Carle (the author of the Very Hungry Caterpillar) had a birthday today I thought now would be a great time.

Here was the centre piece ( I got the idea from this blog)- using fairy cakes (or 'cup cakes') was great as I didn't have to spend ages cutting the cake - we just bunged them on a the plate for the little ones. It also meant that we could cater for dietary preferences the 'The Fairy's Aunty cooked some low sugar- un iced ones for friends who prefer thier kids not to eat too much sugar (so if children had intolerances using cup cakes rather than one big one could be helpful too). I have since discovered icing gel paste, here I used the liquid stuff and it didn't colour the face as bright a red as I would as liked.

For games I made a 'throw the food in the caterpillar' out of an old cardboard box.

We also had a sun pinata.

To decorate I made items of food from the book out of craft foam (I always seem to have more craft foam in  my craft box than a person could humanly use in a life time - but that's another story). I stuck the pictures of with blue tac.




Happy Birthday Eric- Thank you for all your wonderful books