Gardener Amelia

While on Flickr recently, I saw a great idea of using an egg carton to make a little garden with carrots and flowers (Find the blog post here). I thought this would be a fun thing to do with Amelia while the kids were at school some time.

We made our version of it today. It took a few sessions but it was fun and distracted both of us for the day. Above is the wheel barrow made from a printer cartridge box, empty ribbon spool and lots of straws and sticky tape. And of course there is the gardener. I used a photo of Amelia's face and cut it out and drew a body (I am no artist). I covered it in clear book contact (self adhesive cover) and cut it out. I made a stand for it using just a strip of paper with a couple of slits in it. Perfect.

The flowers are made from paper cupcake liners with a straw sticky taped on. There is a box for a chicken house.

Amelia loved this little bucket I made from part of an egg carton and a pipe cleaner. The yellow chicken feed is just some tissue paper cut into tiny pieces (because I am silly and now have to vacuum my floor).

I drew some pesky chickens, that liked to scratch in the garden. I made them in the same way as I made Gardener Amelia. Covered in the clear contact. It gives them strength so they can be played with and makes the pen drawings not rub or run. As I said, not really an artist. We made trees too. Amelia liked helping with that one because she is quite good at screwing up paper :-)

And here is Amelia, cleaning out the chicken house. We also made a water tank which was a small box on a stand made from straws.

When Esther and Ellamay got home from school they wanted to know where Gardener Esther and Gardener Ellamay were. So guess what I should be doing right now? Yep, making some. This craft was great because it continued to be fun all day. Amelia played with it for ages. I had to do a lot of the making for it with Amelia because she is only little but older kids would have fun with it too.