Another gorgeous day at Bigbury

Photo taken on Burgh Island. You can see the hotel ahead and Bigbury beyond that.

Bigbury is one of our favourite spots in Devon.  We have had some gorgeous days out here.  Lucky for us it is only about 45 minutes from our house.

Bigbury is located near Kingsbridge in Devon. It’s official location is ‘The South Hams’ which is the part of Devon that everyone would love to live in but few of us can afford. The beach at Bigbury is gorgeous and has that perfect kind of sand that you always long for on a family seaside holiday. Perfect for making sand castles, digging holes, even for making sand sculptures.

The waters around Bigbury slope very slowly out to sea, so it is very safe for children. Head further out though and thrill seekers can often catch some good waves for surfing and other water sports. There are lots of opportunities for rock pooling here and caves that children can explore.

Looking for secret tunnels in the caves!

We don’t mind remote beaches that have no facilities but sometimes you just want to know that everything is on hand. I think this is especially important if you plan to stay all day. Bigbury does have EVERYTHING! They have ‘award winning’ toilets (there’s a handy plaque outside informing you of their credentials!), there is a car park right next to the beach and there is an amazing Venus Cafe. The Cafe serves very good, reasonably priced foods and (this is the exciting bit….) you can get ice creams with gluten-free cones and gluten-free chocolate brownies too. There is also a small shop selling beach goods.

Picnic on the beach or if you want to get away from it all take the little cliff path just before the beach and you can usually eat in solitude whilst enjoying the glorious views (Just watch out for the Adders that can be found here).

This little fella decided to join us for our picnic!

When you’ve had enough of sunbathing and making sand castles, there is a wonderful island to explore. Burgh Island can be accessed by foot during low tide or via sea tractor at high tide (current cost is £2 per person). The island is privately owned but you are allowed to walk around the western side of it and up to the summit. This is well worth doing as you can really escape the hustle and bustle of the beach and ‘get away from it all’. The path to the top is rugged and definitely not for the infirm. Do keep a close eye on children at all times as there is nothing to separate them from the cliff edge. Apart from the numerous butterflies and the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks below, you will find the island very peaceful and you can imagine some real ‘Enid Blyton’ adventures here! Lily and Thomas have renamed it ‘Kirrin Island’ for just this reason.

If you need some refreshment after your walk you have two options on the island. One is the expensive but ‘oh so tempting’ Burgh Island Hotel.   A glamorous Art Deco Hotel with a very interesting history. Agatha Christie and Noel Coward are just two of the celebrities that stayed here pre-war and it now has its own helipad for visits from the rich and famous. Non-residents are welcome to Sunday lunch at £48 per person. All ingredients in the restaurant are carefully sourced from local producers. 80% of the ingredients come from within a 20 mile radius.

This photo of Burgh Island Hotel is courtesy of TripAdvisor

Right at the bottom of the island is The Pilchard Inn.   A ‘proper olde worlde’ little pub with a roaring fire and slate floors. Well worth a visit, just remember to keep an eye on the tide whilst you enjoy your drink or you could be faced with paying for the tractor to take you back to the mainland – that would make it a pretty expensive pint!

Hand print stepping stones for Father’s Day

I have recently developed a bit of an obsession for sea glass. We saw some jewellery made with it at a craft fayre recently and I just fell in love with it.  We love hunting for sea glass at the beach and seeing the excitement on the children’s faces when they find a good piece is just great! After a particularly successful trip to the beach, I decided to use this to decorate some hand-made stepping-stones.

This is not something I’ve done before and I didn’t have a clue where to start.  I didn’t even know the difference between cement, mortar or concrete! Luckily I found a very helpful chap in B & Q who suggested I use this.

You just need to add water to it and mix well which is the kind of instructions  I can cope with! You then need some kind of mould for your stone. I used this plastic tray from a plant pot which seemed to work well. I greased it first with vaseline to prevent any disasters getting the stone out!

Once you have mixed your mortar just pour it into the mould and level it out to a nice smooth surface. It needs to begin to set before you add any decorations. I left it for 90 minutes before we did anything else. This would probably depend on how wet your mixture is. (Don’t make it too wet or you’ll have to wait weeks for it to dry!)

After around 90 minutes the children pushed their hand down into the mortar to make a lovely hand print. You need to get them to press down quite firmly for this. At this point they wrote their names in the mortar with the end of a small paintbrush. This wasn’t really that successful to be honest. Where they had pushed the end of the paintbrush in it just kind of collapsed in on it self and didn’t look great.  I think for any future stones we will paint their names on when the mortar has set.

We also pushed in the pieces of sea glass that we had collected earlier, along with some pretty clear blue glass nuggets that we bought from The Range. Now you need to leave it all to dry out completely. We left it for 2 days, again it could take longer depending your mixture.

At this point the children painted their handprints to make them stand out more. You can see in this image where the writing kind of fell in on itself.

Finally, we painted the background of the stone white.  By the way all the paint we used was acrylic as this is waterproof. Depending on the age of the child they can do an awful lot of this themselves. It is pretty tricky to paint in around the decorations on the stone so you might want to just paint the hand print and leave it at that.  Lily and Thomas were both very excited to give these to Grandad for his birthday but I think they would love make lovely Father’s Day gifts.

Papier Mache Easter Chick Basket

I spotted this idea over at the fantastic blog Red Ted Art. Maggy has some amazing ideas for crafting with children and if it’s something you are passionate about I would definitely recommend following her blog.

We loved making this easter basket. It was very simple and such a cheap (Pardon the pun!) idea. All you need is some newspaper, PVA glue, a balloon, some paint and some pieces of foam, felt or card for adding the little decorations. If you can find a few feathers too that would be great, most craft shops sell them.

How to make the chick basket.

First of all blow up your balloon. Don’t make it too big because it will take you forever to cover it with the Papier mache. Decide what shape you would like your basket to be and then start to cover that area with your papier-mache. The traditional way to do this is to use a special paste but I just used PVA glue as I had a lot of this to hand! It worked really well. You need a good 3 or 4 layers to make it nice and strong. Allow each layer to dry before doing the next one.

When you have a rough shape and you have covered all your layers use a pen to draw the line where you intend to cut your basket.Take a sharp knife and cut your shape out. You might want to pop the balloon before you do this. When you have your paper basket shape coat it with some good thick paint. We used acrylic and Thomas decided he would use a roller to do this.

When you have finished painting your basket leave it to dry before attaching a ribbon to carry it with. I made a couple of holes in the side with a scalpel to make sure that it stayed on but you could glue them to the inside of the basket with a glue gun if you are nervous about piercing holes in your basket.

Decorate your basket with some ‘chick’ features and voila! All you need now is to find an Easter Egg hunt….

And here is the finished basket, with feathers!

If you like this idea, you might be interested to know that Maggy at Red Ted Art has just released a new craft book called
Red Ted Art: Cute and Easy Crafts for Kids

I will definitely be ordering it. After following her blog for a few years now, I know it will be fantastic!

Home-made Christmas

Christmas 2012 was a busy one for  me, hence the fact that I haven’t posted in a while! This could well be the last Christmas that I am a stay at home mummy so I went all out with our Christmas crafting and play.

You may have already seen a couple of my Christmas posts. I loved making the Christmas Tree Elves and our Glitter houses, these were projects for me really. Lily did get involved when it came to the sprinkling of the glitter though! I think they looked lovely displayed on the mantlepiece.

We also made some lovely Christmas Tree Pine Cones.  We used some lovely big pine cones for this which we found in the woods. Before using them I dried them in the oven at about 150 degrees for around 30 minutes. This gets rid of any sap and if they are nice and dry they will not rot. Keep an eye on them whilst they are in the oven as some dry quicker than others and will start to burn if left too long.

We spread some PVA glue onto the pine cones and then covered them in glitter. We cut out a cardboard star and covered this in both sides with more glitter. Use some nice stiff card so that it will sit nice and straight on top of your pine cone tree.

We also decorated some christmas stockings and christmas trees that I had cut out from coloured card. All we did was stick some sparkly bits on and Thomas also decorated this stocking with his name. If you attach a horizontal ribbon in your window or along the ceiling you can peg these to the ribbon to make some Christmas bunting. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos of ours before packing it all away so you will have to imagine how they looked!

We’ve got lots of handmade decorations which we have made over the years. This one is so simple (and cheap!) and I just love it! You could make these as presents for grandparents and you could make a different one each year with a recent photograph. Just take an old plastic water bottle and cut off the bottom (about 4 or 5 inches) Make sure you have no sharp edges at the bottom.

Sprinkle some glitter onto it and then secure your photo with PVA glue. Attach a ribbon so that the decoration can be hung on your tree and hey presto! A very easy, simple craft that children can do themselves.

Another gift that we made this year was some lavender soaps with dried flowers. They were gorgeous and a big hit with Grandma and Nanny. You could also make these for Mother’s Day or Birthdays.

We had a couple of twig trees this year, in addition to our traditional Norway spruce. I love how simple but effective these trees are. They are perfect for displaying home-made decorations.

Did you make any home-made Christmas decorations or gifts? Feel free to share links here, I’m sure we can all use some more ideas!

Fun with Snow Play Dough

I saw this idea on the fantastic blog Imagination Tree.  I love this blog and get lots of inspiration from here. Do visit this link to get all the instructions on how to make this play dough. It is SO simple and it does behave just like snow! Not the freezing cold, icy snow but the lovely fresh soft stuff that is crunchy and clean.

We had so much fun playing with this. We started off making a little snowman and some snowballs and then we got some animals out to play in it.

I used a piece of card to make a little igloo and Thomas loved burying the seal in it and making it snow on top of the igloo. We have had ours in a tupperware pot for over a week now and it is still as good as new. You could add little people or Lego to this for even more imaginative play.

Living in Plymouth we very rarely get snow. This may be our only opportunity to build a snowman this winter!

Musings on Mothering: Book review and Special Offer

 

I was recently sent a copy of the wonderful book ‘Musings on Mothering: About Pregnancy, Birth and Breastfeeding’ and have been asked to review this for you on here.

The book is a wonderful collection of Poetry, Sketches and Photos that have been submitted by mothers everywhere. The subject is  ‘motherhood’, from conception through to pregnancy, birth and beyond.

I initially picked up the book and read a couple of pages then left it to come back to with a cup of tea. When I did this, a week later I read the book from cover to cover – I just couldn’t put it down until I had finished. I became so absorbed in it that I was almost late for the school run….

My first thoughts on reading this book were how I wish I had a copy of it 6 years ago when I gave birth to my daughter! No-one can prepare you for your first baby. You just don’t know how much your life is going to change.  I remember feeling exhausted, emotional and filled with anxiety about whether or not I was doing everything right. I had no real friends with babies nearby and felt like I desperately needed reassurance that everything was ok.

This book is like picking up a collection of letters from a best friend. Someone who has been there and knows what you are going through. Someone who has been awake all night and slept with cabbage leaves in their bra. Someone who has not drank a hot cup of tea in a week and knows just how painful cracked nipples can be!

This is an honest collection of thoughts and feelings from mothers old and new, and a wonderful celebration of motherhood. I would recommend it to anyone that is expecting a baby or is a mother already. If I was pregnant this would be at the top of my wish list for a new baby gift.

All royalties from this book go to La Leche League GB which is a charity that provides mother to mother support with breastfeeding. They also provide encouragement, education and information to anyone who has an interest in breastfeeding.

If you wish to purchase a copy of this book and help this wonderful charity you can get 10% off by entering the code GREENMUMS10 when you order online here

Handmade soaps for Christmas

This is an easy peasy homemade gift that children can make! My 6 and 3 year old loved making these and they will make lovely gifts for grandparents. You DO need to be careful which bits you let the children do as you are using hot soap but mine were happy to watch me do the actual pouring bit and it was their job to shout STOP when the soap got to the top of the mould.

You will need:

• Melt and Pour soap – I bought 500g and we still have some left to make more. You can buy it online, I couldn’t find it in any local shops. We bought ours  from Bee Beautiful. They have a good selection and even have an organic option.

• Chocolate moulds

• Dried Flowers or glitter. We already had some dried flowers that we pressed in the summer but I understand not everyone is going to have these to hand! Glitter will work just as well.

Method:

Place your dried flowers (very small ones work best) into the bottom of your chocolate moulds.

Place around 100g of soap into a pyrex jug and pop them into the microwave for around 20 seconds at a time.  Watch the soap carefully and stir it occasionally.  You want the soap to be a nice melted liquid but you don’t want it to get to the point where it is bubbling. Ours took about 40 seconds but obviously it will depend on how much soap you are using and also on the power of your microwave.

When the soap has melted, pour it into your chocolate moulds (on top of the flowers or glitter)

Place your moulds into the fridge for about 30 minutes until they are set.

Remove them from the moulds. They pop out really easily.

We took this a step further and made our own little gift boxes to put these in. You can find lots of free printable templates on google. There are loads on the Don’t Eat the Paste website. Once you have found the design you want to use you can draw around this template onto white card giving your little one a blank canvas to draw on.

Lily came up with a lovely design on this box and we then attached a lovely Russian Doll gift tag which came free with a crafty magazine.

This is such a simple crafty gift and we loved doing this! Have you made any handmade gifts for Christmas? Do add a comment and a link, we would love to see them.