Dragons

We held a dragon-themed party for our No 1 dragon! It involved weeks of planning (well, just talking about it casually whilst watching telly) and about a crazy week of making! Here's what we did:

CAKE TOPPERS - it's surprisingly hard to find a cheap dragon toy last minute (because no matter how organised I think I am, the reality is I am and always will be last minute) but there are lots of dinosaur toys, so I made some silly wings and flames out of cardboard and stuck them on. I made the trees by gluing sushi grass onto skewers. It all looked pretty bad and hilarious. This is the look I was going for. 

HEADDRESSES - we made about 30 dragon headdress, with different coloured wings and tail tips. Despite the heavy rain the kids donned their dragon headdresses and ran wild, YAY!

PINATA - my partner Sam spent days paper mache-ing and glue-gunning and painting. By the end of it all his fingers were covered in blisters, all for the kids to bash the hell out of it and grab the loot!

And for afterwards...we made Thank You cards using the dragon print made during Daisy Hirst's printmaking workshop we attended a week earlier.

It chucked it down all afternoon on the day of the party, which goes to show that you can't plan everything but we had fun all the same :)

The most excellent fantastic Daisy Hirst!

On Saturday we went to a most excellent fantastic printmaking workshop run by author illustrator Daisy Hirst. It was my first visit to the House of Illustration where the workshop took place, and I felt excited and inspired the moment I stepped in, with it's shop full of beautiful cards and books as well as the gallery filled with beautiful original artwork.

I was a little worried about the length of the workshop (3 hours for a 5/6 year old could go either way!) but he loved it and we made it through without any tears or tantrums, phew! He got stuck in right away and created some lovely prints and we both came away inspired, wanting to carry on doing more at home :)

I loved how we were able to have a real printmaking experience using simple, familiar and safe materials. Daisy was brilliant at planting a seed for an idea which set off the children's imaginations! I loved the village scene she had drawn on huge black sheets of paper, which she then invited the children to print on. Soon the buildings were filled with a whole array of intriguing characters and narratives. 

She shared her sketchbook with us, which was absolutely fascinating! Crammed full of teeny tiny lovely drawings, with each character only measuring about 1-2cm!! 

Below is an A3 sheet of paper which our boy crammed full of dragon and alien sketches today. I imagine they were inspired after seeing Daisy's sketchbook.

We've been reading our (tinily) signed copy of "Alphonse, that is not ok to do!" throughout the day and it's been top pick for their bedtime story 2 nights in a row - the boys LOVE it as do I :)

etching

I took part in an "Introduction to etching" class at City Lit recently, which I really really enjoyed :) It was great to do something a little different, and to learn new things.
Our tutor Cath was brilliant, and crammed so much in over the course of 2 days. 
I did do a bit of etching when I was studying for my BA, but that was over 10 years ago so I was a little bit rusty. I particularly enjoyed Chine-colle, which was something I'd never done before - a process quite similar to collage, and a great way to add colour and texture. I loved the unpredictability of it all, not knowing the result until you peeled the paper off the plate. Very exciting!