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

Father's Day card

Well Father's Day is nearly upon us so thought we'd be unusually prepared and post how we have made our Father's Day card.

Ages ago we made some prints from shaving foam using this technique but didn't know what to do with the prints (so we kept them because I'm can't bear to throwing anything away  love keeping all the beautiful things we've made!) So whilst hunting through our craft boxes (we have multiple boxes as there is too much stuff for 1 - I really do need to de clutter/ organise them better, but that's a whole other post) I found them and thought they were perfect for 'up cycling'.

I cut out the word 'Papa' (as my husband is Spanish so we call him Papa not 'Daddy') and 'The Fairy' arranged the letters on contrasting card.

'The Fairy' chose to add a drawing and a heart cut out of the same pattern as the front of the card.
Hey presto a home made Fathers Day card. Perfecto!

Easter biscuits

We love to eat in our house. We love to eat when we celebrate. We especially  love to  celebrate by eating chocolate. 


However as 'The fairy' is getting bigger I felt it important that she understood the real Easter story- not just about chocolate eggs and bunnies (as lovely as they may be- and we shall be eating those tomorrow too). So we decided to make some cross shaped biscuits.

We made some dough (we adapted  this recipe we used marg instead of butter and left out the ginger and added vanilla essence). Rolled out the dough and used our cross shaped biscuit cutter (if you don't have one you could use a cardboard template and cut around it).

Crushed some boiled sweets. This didn't work too well with the banging rolling pin method so I reverted to our liquidizer which I recently found can crush ice - now we can add boiled sweets to that list too.

Cut out a cross shaped window.

Sprinkled the bashed up sweets in the hole and baked (make sure you cover up the hole completely otherwise you will get gaps in the 'stained glass'). If you want to use the decoration to hang make sure you put a hole in before cooking (you can do this with a kebab stick). I think they would look great hung on a tree or on a garland.


The results looked and tasted great too.


'The fairy' loved the finished product and was fascinated by something that she could see through as well as the sweets changing colour. 


This was a great opportunity to use language to compare the texture and colour.. before, after , soft, hard, squidgy, same, different, red, yellow. Lots of verbs were used too... roll, cut, press, squash, bash, hit (a positive way to learn a word that can sometimes be negative!)