A Chocolate Day in York

At the start of the week my boyfriend and I went to York for a couple of days to start off our school holiday. Andrew has quite a big sweet tooth so as an early birthday present I booked us on to a tour at York's Chocolate story, and a chocolate workshop at York's Cocoa House.

First up was the Chocolate Story tour. It was very informative and each section came with a taster which was a bonus, though next time I'll give the cold chocolate water (similar to what the Aztecs drank) a miss. The tour ended with a chance to make our own chocolate lollies which were cooled and bagged up ready for us after a demonstration by their chocolatier on how to make filled chocolates.

In the afternoon we headed to the Cocoa House for our 'design and make your own chocolate bar' workshop. We were given different kinds of a chocolate buttons to try to decide which chocolate we wanted to use for our bar. 95% cocoa chocolate? No thank you. We went for the 55% dark chocolate instead.

Our bar was made of 300g of chocolate buttons which we melted using a hair dryer. There was a choice of flavourings to add to the melted chocolate and we chose mint. We poured the melted chocolate into plastic take-away containerss and added Smarties and sprinkles for decoration.
When we came back the next day to pick up our chocolate bar they'd wrapped it up nicely in cellophane tied with ribbons!

It was a really fun day but after such a chocolate filled time we were ready for a very savoury dinner with lots of vegetables!

This Week I...

...was pretty busy. I worked an extra day at school and two evenings at the arts centre.

I also took the first kids art club of the new term.

This is what the children came up with.

 I found this idea on Pinterest. We drew round the children on big pieces of paper, over lapping the outlines.

Then we painted all the sections different colours with colour theory in mind.

I think it was a good activity for the first week back as the children had to work together which helped to include the new kids.

How was your week?

People Patterns

This fun painting was the example I put together for this week's kids art club at the Letchworth Arts Centre. It's sort of the like the 'take your pencil for a walk' activity from one of the summer sessions, but with people shapes. I used water colour paints as a change from felt tip pens.

  I'd been thinking about this idea during the week and then saw these wooden people templates at school. They were perfect and would save me cutting out templates from scratch, and thankfully the class teacher let me borrow them for the weekend. She also wants me to do a similar activity with the class next week.

Aboriginal Art Workshop

One of the children's art workshops I did for the Letchworth Arts Centre this summer was about aboriginal art.

The main activity was to produce a painting inspired by aboriginal dot paintings. The secret to all those dots is cotton buds/q-tips! They worked really well and I especially liked that I didn't have any brushes to wash up.

The children produced some great work. The older ones sat for almost the whole two hours working on their paintings. 

I provided lots of examples of the dot paintings and some children stuck closely to their inspiration, whilst others did their own thing.

This girl actually has Australian parents so she could tell me a lot about the different animals she was painting. I love that platypus!

This one is two snakes surrounded by shapes inspired by boomerangs!

Doodle Activity

Have you heard of the doodling exercise 'take your pencil for a walk'? My Mum introduced me to it and I used to do it all the time as a kid. You draw all over a piece a paper, keeping the pencil on the page the whole time and crossing over to make loops. Then you can just colour in the sections, or fill each part with a different pattern.

One of the kids art sessions this week was all about creating colourful patterns so I thought I'd start with this activity. 

I gave the children A3 paper as the A4 (which I'd used for mine) looked too small. I thought it would be easier for them to fill the sections if they were a bit bigger. But to my surprise most of the children filled their sections with tiny, detailed patterns, meaning they didn't all have time to colour in their patterns before moving on to the next activity, but they can always do that at home.

I suggested that they should only use four different colours so they'd have to think carefully about colour combinations, and I think the pieces look better when they is a colour theme.

The 4 year old who created the piece on the left decided to use all of the colours and the crayons and felt tips. Mix of colours and textures? I'm down with that. Her 7 year old brother whose work is on the right announced that he'd be 8 by the time he finished it. 

I was impressed by how many different kinds of patterns the children came up with. I was expecting just a lot of spots and stripes.

This activity kept the children (well, except the 4 year old) quiet for a good 30/45 minutes. Keep that in mind parents/teachers/babysitters! 

Kid's Craft: Model Olaf

The summer holidays mean the start of the children's art workshops at the Letchworth Arts Centre and the first week is Frozen themed. Note: I did not pick the theme.

The first activity was making a posable Olaf out of tissue paper covered polystyrene balls with wire running through them.

Pipe cleaner arms, rolled up paper for the nose, black paper for the mouth, googly eyes and paper eyebrows which make him look both excited and terrified. Excitified.

To extend the activity the children also made winter scenes in a box for their Olaf figure to fit in to.

I love what they came up with.

This Week I...

...helped run a Sticky Arts workshop in Surrey for the Children's Liver Disease Foundation, like the one I did in Manchester at the start of the month.

Again the children made little treasure boxes and clocks out of selotape. I love the guitar shaped one made (with my help!) by a 6 year old.

Sunday was Mother's Day so my sisters and I treated our Mum to lunch at Jordan's Mill. One of the staff members kindly took this photo for us. Notice anything different about me in it?

That's right, I got my braces taken off this week! This awkward train selfie was taken on the way back from my appointment on Wednesday. I've already eaten a lot of caramel and peanut butter to make up for the 18 months of not doing so.

How was your week?