Sometimes you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel when it comes to craft time, and our barrel is pretty low on crafty supplies at the moment. When my toddler asks 'Mummy please can I do crafts', I sometimes have to think on my feet. Today my baby turns one - in the next few minutes, actually - so I thought we could make some celebration badges.

You'll need:

• A5 piece of foam or cardboard - the back of a cereal box will do
• A safety pin per badge
• Staples or tape to attach the pin to the foam/cardboard
• Decorations

Cut them out, and hand to your toddler to decorate.

Clip your badge on the recipient, and whether you're celebrating a birthday, just a day, Easter or whatever occasion, you're geared up to celebrate, celebrate, celebrate!

If you're looking for something easy to make for Mothering Sunday, that Dad can do, older kids could do on their own, or you can do for the grannies, then look no further. This Meringue recipe is so easy, my three year old can - and did - do it. Okay, she helped. I had to redo the eggs after she broke the yolks, but still she had fun. For ingredients you need 2 egg whites, 100g castor sugar, and your choice of food colouring. In a subsequent batch I've also added half a teaspoon of vanilla essence, just to give it a little more flavour.  

• Heat the oven to 110C
• Separate the eggs (I save the egg yolks for fabulous home made mayonnaise) If you get yolk in the white, the eggs wont stiffen up.
• Beat the egg whites till they are frothy and stand at peaks. 
• When they are firm, add the castor sugar a tablespoon at a time, beating all the time. Add the vanilla essence. 
• If you want white meringues, scoop out spoon fulls onto a greased tray. 
• In the mixing bowl we added a drop of yellow, a drop of blue and a drop of red food colouring in three different areas and lightly mixed them gently in those areas. Then my toddler scooped from each area, onto the tray, sometimes getting a mix of colours and sometimes just a mix of white and blue or white and pink.
• She scooped them onto the tray and we left them just like that. 
• Put in the oven for 40 minutes 
• If you want them chewy on the inside, you can take them out of the oven after about five minutes and leave them to cool. If you prefer them crunchy leave them in the still warm oven until it and they are cool. 

We then popped them in an over-sized cup wrapped some cellophane around it all, and that will be a mother's day gift for Nanna from her grandchildren.

On  a particularly house bound day this week, we decided to do a bunch of Valentine's cards for grandparents and daddy.  They're just paper crafts, really, but a three year old and paint pretty much equals a good afternoon's fun.

To make these three cards, you'll need two pages of card stock, and one painted paper and a few bits of shredded, colourful paper.

For the Window Card, fold the card stock in three parts.

First off, I should be honest and say that my daughter didn't make this craft - these misshapen fish are all of my own unimaginative creation. But she didn't care how they looked, she loved the fishing game and her and her friends had loads of fun with it.

We went away for a few days recently and our Trunki full of toys somehow stayed behind, so I had to make a plan for toys and activities, and thanks to the wonder of Pinterest, I am happy to say I spent an evening making up toys and activities for the weekend with a minimal cost and much more joy out of it than effort put in to it. In fact, my daughter loved the 'busy bag' activities so much, she now asks for them at home almost daily.

I'm sure there are much better versions 'out there', but for our version of the fishing game, you will need:

• Dish clothes or felt - dish clothes are so much cheaper and do the job just fine
• Paper clips - one per fish
• Scissors and marker pens
• Fabric glue
• String
• Magnets - I randomly had some in my bag, but you could cut up those that come through as adverting from pizza places and similar
• Chop Stick or a straw or even a twig will do

Fold your cloth in half and draw a fish on the fold. Ideally you'll probably just work with two layers at a time to make sure they are identical, but I was impatient and wanted to make four fish shapes -two fish - at a time. The dish clothes were pretty thin, so that was easy to do.

When you've cut all the fish you'd like, place a metal paperclip between the two halves of a fish, and glue the two bits together, keeping the paperclip inside. I left the tails free so they could 'move' independently, but that's up to you. Do this with all the fish.

Glue the magnet to a piece of string on the one side - always use this game under supervision so these magnets don't get swallowed - and on the other attach it to a chopstick, straw or twig.

Lay the fish out on a surface and supply in a bowl that can serve as a 'pond' to scoop the fish into and hover the magnet over one. The magnet will attach to the paperclip in the fish and your seriously excited toddler will gleefully fish until all the fish are caught. 

One hot and sunny day last summer, someone posted an amazing photo on Facebook from Jolly Learning's page. A row of multi-coloured ice marbles arranged in the snow. Just a little something to cool us all down, but I was smitten with the idea. How cool would it be to make some?

It was a long wait. I think I may have been the only grown up in the entire UK who has been chanting 'please let it snow, please let it snow'. The 'marbles', which you can see pictured above, with the original photo that sparked it all below, are easy to do and lots of fun for the kids.

My son decided that his were ice eggs and they were going to hatch ice dragons. Read on to find out how you make them.

We're all about cheap and cheerful paper crafts at the moment, and still quite low on Christmas decorations or festive spirit, so we decided if it wasn't going to snow, we'd make snow! I bought book cover paper - the stuff with the sticky side on one side - so that we could make wall decals, but this could be a great idea for something to do with left over wrapping paper. Laminate it and you'll have decor for next Christmas sorted!

You will need:

• Squares of paper, left over wrapping paper, sticky paper, news paper etc
• Scissors
• Depending on the paper you use, decorations - glitter, glue, stickers etc

To make the snowflakes:

Cut squares by folding a corner into a triangle and cutting off the excess rectangle. If using wrapping paper or similar, you can just cut squares.

Fold the triangle in half to make a smaller triangle.

Cut shapes into the triangle making sure to get through all the layers

You can fold again to change the number of shapes that are cut out. Small gashes make nice repeat patterns, or sides cut off shape the inside line or the outside of the shape - just experiment and see what you come up with!

Cut shapes into both sides of the triangle and unfold to reveal your shape.

We then stuck it to the inside of a window in the kitchen so that we could see the snowdrops all day long. Our paper is shiny and swirly, so it catches light and changes colour as we move, which made our snowflakes perfect.

We're pretty low on Christmas decorations in our holiday accommodations for this year, so I thought we'd make some Christmas angels to decorate the place a little. At first I wanted an angel to top the tree, but as we made them and placed them on a wine bottle to dry, I thought they'd actually make a lovely table decoration on Christmas day too. Because of the shape of the 'dress' it can't go flat on a table, but could top wine bottles or Champaign flutes and could even act as place settings. Or you can cut the bottom straight and have them standing on a table. The possibilities are endless.

You will need:

• 2 sheets of paper
• adhesive - I used double sided tape
• decorations - glitter glue, glitter, stickers etc
• scissors

My little girl is three, so I did most of the preparation work for her - I cut one sheet of paper in half, and drew a circle in one half, cut it out and then cut out another circle inside it - one for the head and one for the halo. On the other half of the paper I folded it in half again then drew a wing and made wings for the angel.  My daughter then decorated it all (and I decorated one after it had been glued together!)

To make the angel roll the second paper into a cone. Holding it with one hand stick it down with the other. We used double sided glue dots as we've had such failures with glue recently!

Stick on the wings, head and halo, and that's that - a pretty Christmas angel.

What gift do you give someone who doesn't want anything, need anything, or have much room for anything? Well, this Christmas my Grandmother is getting some home made lighting from us, so I thought I'd share the how to with you.

You'll need:

• A canvas
• Paint & brushes
• Battery operated string lights - make sure to get the type that separates the shaped light (the flowers in my example) from the actual bulb, so you can stick it through.

To start with, my three year old painted the canvas red. We have one of these for ourselves, with the canvas left white it works too, but when the lights aren't on, it looks quite bleak, so painting it makes it look better.

Once she had made it all red, I painted a flower on it, because I'm no artist, but flowers I can just about manage. Initially I thought a haphazard toddler design would be nice, but she got bored, so I finished it off.

Once the paint dries, pierce holes in the canvas where you want your lights to go. If you're after precision, mark out points on the canvas before you start painting so you know where to centre your flower and so on. Stick the lights through from the back, and pop the covers on the front.

Switch on, hang up, and enjoy your home made sensory lighting.

We're starting to get into the Christmas spirit at home and I'm beginning to think of decorations and occasions and things to do. We have some felt and a few bits and pieces lying around so I decided to make pencil toppers* with my three year old.

Materials:

• Felt or card
• Scissors
• Glue
• Decorations
• Pens and pencils

To start with, create your Christmas design in duplicate - we created two trees, a star, and a snowman. I folded two sheets of felt and of card in half (together) and cut it. The most important thing is that they should be identical in shape.

Glue the outline, making sure to leave the bottom unglued. Decorate the designs with pompoms, sequence, or colour the card and decorate with stickers or glitter.

When it's all dried you can put glue on the end of a pencil or pen, and insert it into the shape, and there you have a pencil (or pen) topper. You can also glue the lid of a pen to have a decorative pen lid.

*Yeah. I have no idea what the point is either, but my daughter loves it! Maybe you can use the pens to write all your Christmas cards with!

Well, it's just about time to break out the chestnuts and as I write this, my fingers are aching from being so cold. We had a beautifully sunny day on the weekend, perfect for walking in the forest and collecting pine cones.

I must admit that when you leave things in the surprisingly capable hands of children, anything can happen! In this case, those two little guys at the back? They're snails. The one at the front is a rather unfortunate bird, and the six legged insect is, well, six legged. Not bad for a half hour's crafty fun.

You'll need:

• Pine Cones
• Googly Eyes
• Glue
• And then anything else  for the rest of the body: play dough, pipe cleaners, felt or paper to name a few.

To put them together you need serious imagination - or a toddler!

Just wrap, mould, shape and contort pipe cleaners, cut wings, use play dough or plasticine for wings, pop a hat out of paper on top... the options are limitless really.

We used play dough to stick the eyes on the snails and that worked really well, because it made it look like eyebrows.

This isn't really a 'permanent' craft. I think part of the fun of it was being able to undo all but my daughter's favourite one and return the pine cones where they came from - or if you have a fire place, using them there. It was still a fun activity and a great way to spend some quiet and relaxed moments together.

One of my favourite things to do with my toddler is baking. She really loves it, and gets involved with the stirring, mixing and scooping. We have the Dora The Explorer set, so she has real, but child sized, cooking and baking equipment, and it's just a lovely thing for us to do together.

One of her favourite things to bake are ice cream cone cupcakes.

One of our favourite pass times is playing in one of the many woodland areas around us in Hampshire and Surrey. The bonus of this - apart from being entirely free - is that we can spend hours in the morning rummaging around, walking, foraging, and playing, regardless of the weather, and then take bits of the forest home for our crafts. It's both educational and fun.

Today's craft is super easy. You will need:

• Leaves of different sizes and colours
• Glue
• Googly Eyes
• Lollipop Sticks

To start with, go outside and see what diverse range of leaves you can find. We were doing other things today so just picked up leaves on the way to the car and they were all relatively similar, but still worked well.

I made the first Leaf Man, and my daughter was soon making her own leaf men too.

Instructions are so easy they seem silly to write out, but here you go.

(I found the glue didn't work too well, so swapped to Pritt, which did the trick)

1. Rub the glue on the stick, and gently put the leaf on it. Leave it to dry for a few minutes while you do the rest.
2. Pop glue on the googly eyes and place them on the leaves.

If you were that way inclined, you could draw a mouth, eyebrows and a nose on the leaf or the lollipop stick, but we were quite happy with just eyes.

In the original, they also coloured the sticks. Perhaps with an older child that would be good, but my 2 year old had enough just with gluing.

Once we were done and they were dry, we used the Leaf Men as puppets, which she loved and giggled the whole way through me just talking about our day in stick men voices. In the image above, her Leaf Man is running, apparently, to get into the pictures too. What a great way to encourage imaginative play!

It's my little girl's third birthday in just over a month, and we've decided on an ocean themed birthday party. While buying decorations and party bag fillers would be the easy thing to do, I've decided to make craft time productive, and make some table decor or whatever -we-end-up-using-them-for decorations. We started with Egg Box Jelly Fish, adapted from various Pinterest examples.

To start with you'll need an egg carton, scissors or a craft knife, paints, pens and other decorations, ribbon, glue or staples, fishing line or string.

Cut the egg 'cups' out - using a craft knife is easier, but you can just use scissors and hand them over to your little decorator. I find it hard, sometimes, when my daughter's two year old vision doesn't match mine for the end result, but I'm learning to just let her have free reign  on her crafts, and it's making a huge difference - she enjoys it more and she's getting 'better' at doing it 'properly'. It's quite nice to see the transformation.

Leave the egg cups to dry, then take lengths of matching ribbon and either punch holes in the bottom sides or glue ribbon on. I just threaded a length of ribbon in one side and out the other. I've also seen some that are hung from the top so they hang out under the octopus. That also looks quite nice.

You can draw on eyes or stick on googly eyes, whichever takes your fancy.

To hang the octopus as decorations, pierce a hole in the top and thread through some string. Alternatively, just let the kids play!

The summer’s at its peak now, and with any luck your garden is brimming with birds. If it’s not, this little bird feeder might be just what you need to attract winged friends into your yard, your window sill or your sidewalk – where ever, really. The internet is choc-full of similar ideas, but this was the simplest one we found and it worked the best.

So, what you’ll need for this is:

• 2 cups bird seed
• 1 packet gelatine
• String
• Cookie cutter shapes

This could really not be simpler. To prepare, lay down a sheet of baking paper if you want to be able to easily clean up the sticky spillages, otherwise just have warm water handy for a quick wipe down.

Prepare the gelatine as instructed on the packaging. For us that meant adding some water, bringing it to the boil and that was that.

Next you add the bird seed – we used one that was suitable for squirrels and other garden animals too – and stir it all together. It does get really sticky, but won’t dry immediately.

Scoop spoonfulls of the mixture into your cookie cutters, half filling them.

Fold the string in half and place the ends in the centre of the shape, before covering it with more gelatine/seed mix.

Set aside to dry for at least 24 hours.

Gently pop out of the cutters and hang in your garden.  I say gently, but these are actually pretty hardy. We dropped them a few times in the hanging process and they were totally fine.

If you’ve used an all purpose seed you can hang some high up and some low down, and remember to keep an eye out for winged visitors.

There are no summer seaside holidays for us this year, so no splashing in the water, and no exploring critters in rock pools. With all this rain, however, there's been plenty opportunity for indoor crafts. Last week we made two types of ocean dwellers: fish & octopus.

For the Fish

You will need:

• An empty soft drink bottle
• Tissue paper
• Glue
• Googly Eyes

Start by tearing the tissue paper into bits, and leave a few longer strips for the 'tail'. I put everything down in 'place' and just observed as my two year old glued the bits onto the plastic bottle. I helped a little to get the long strips on the tail, and helped get the eyes in more or less the right place,  and then left the fish to dry.

For the Octopus

• Old odd socks
• Stuffing - plastic bags, more old socks, old newspaper etc
• Glue
• Googly Eyes
• Scissors

We made a few of these fish, so my daughter stuffed plastic bags into the socks, and I tied them off. She then held them while I cut the 'tentacles', although to just make fish, you don't have to cut anything. She then glued on the googly eyes. We left them to dry for a while, and then play time started. She's played with them on and off for a few days now and has great, imaginative fun.

We've been loving the weather the last while and have been taking every opportunity to get outdoors. The hosepipe ban has meant that we've not been able to fill the paddling pool, but we've been improvising with water beads.

If you've never tried water beads, I highly recommend them for all sorts of fun activities - just check the water beads pins on Pinterest for some ideas (and follow us on Pinterest, while you're there!)

One of our recent activities with water beads has been painting, and it's a great way to have messy play

To start with, you'll need: 

• Water beads (you could use marbles too, if you have enough)
• Cups
• Paints
• Paper
• A box or tray

In preparation: 
Put the water beads in water overnight to swell them up.

To paint:

Separate the beads into three (or however many paints you want to use) glasses, then blob some paint into each. You can mix them up, but leaving your toddler to do it is just as much fun!

Putting the glasses next to the box, which has a sheet of paper inside it, your toddler will soon drop them into the box and start rubbing, swirling, tilting and generally getting as messy as is physically possible!

We used one of our food delivery boxes, which has a hole in the bottom - I just taped that up during play and when we were ready to finish up, took the tape off and just poured the beads back into glasses.  Wash off the paint, wash out the glasses and put the toddler in the bath!

I'm all about quick crafts that are fun, a little messy and can be done from start to finish in around 15 minutes. My crafty accomplice is a two-year old, so there's not much room for intricate, lengthy or too-many-steps projects. If you're on Pinterest, you've probably seen various versions of this little art project, but fortunately for us, the Daddy we're celebrating doesn't spend his time pinning things.

For this craft you will need paper - we used black, but any colour will do - a different colour paint for each hand print, a paint brush, scissors, a pen and a picture frame.

As Daddy has the biggest hand in the family, our daughter started by painting his hand white - you know how they say it's about the journey, not the destination? Well this is a perfect example of that. Painting daddy's hand was the biggest laugh my two-year old has had in some time!

Hand nicely covered, he put it firmly on the paper, and I squished it down a little to transfer the paint.

Leave it to dry for a little while, then repeat the process with the next sized hand - mine. A hint here is to make sure there's something to keep the two-year old occupied while you are indisposed!

Again, leave it to dry, then paint the children's hands one at a time, always layering them over each other. You could start them all at the same place, or you could keep the palm of the hand at the same place. The first idea will show off the difference in hand sizes, while the second will do the same but not as accurately as the kernel - the palms - remain connected. You could go super cheesy and draw a heart in the centre.

Once the paint has dried, write your message on the paper, with names and dates, and frame.

A fun, messy, 15-minute craft that will be treasured, I'm sure.

Do you have boxes of  old photographs lying around that you know you'll probably never do anything with? Well, I do, and I'm on a mission to find things to do that will use up the photos, act as a reminder for my daughter of her family far away, and be a fun activity too.

What you need: 

• Green paper for leaves and stems
• Cupcake cups
• Photographs
• Scissors
• Glue

Preparation: 
 
It depends on the age of your child, I guess. You could draw the stems and leaves and have your child cut them out - this will also make the activity last longer. Or you could let them do the whole thing. For my two year old, I cut out the leaves and stems and cut circles around the faces we would use.
 
To do: 
 
It's a really simple  activity, actually - dot glue inside the cupcake cups and stick the pictures inside. While those are drying, stick down the stems and leaves and then glue the cups to the stems.  You can then decorate the page by adding grass, sand, birds and a sun... but my daughter had used up her attention span by that point, so we just hung it up for the glue to dry.

It is the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. I just thought I'd start with that in case you didn't know. It is possible that in amongst all the messages from school asking for Jubilee projects, cakes and other stuff for celebrations, or the myriad of street parties, or the pubs clad in Union flags, or the wall to wall coverage planned on the TV, that you might have missed this.

One of the things my son had to make for school was a Jubilee Crown, to wear for the day. Great, I thought. This is perfect. I lovingly assembled all sorts of shiny materials, and researched the best ways to make a crown.

As my son is active, and most of these things tend to have difficulty staying on his head, I opted for this foam crown idea. You can see a full step by step guide here, complete with template if you want.

I had visions of being able to share with you all a lovely, sparkly crown fit for a king or young prince.

My son on the other hand was adamant that he wanted a Loch Ness Monster. No, I'm not kidding, and no I have NO idea where that came from. But tomorrow all the other kids will be attending school with crowns festooned with Union flags and shiny baubles. He will be wearing the Loch Ness Monster.

For this craft we used sheets of A4 foam. First, I drew out the crown shape I wanted on a piece of paper. We decided to do this as son didn't like the template on the site.

I could also fit that against son's head to make sure if fit properly. Then we cut it out.

What's great about this crown is that it doesn't have to fit all the way around his head. It is completed with the use of elastic to hold it in place. This meant I could use A4 sheets rather than having to find anything bigger, or stick two sheets together.

The foam was really easy to draw on, and I left son to it. The entire thing is his own design.

What I really like about this design is that it is easily adaptable. You can make it fit whatever materials you have to hand.