The weather’s turned rather appalling here again, so much so that the school’s closed, the cars stuck and everybody is in the house and awake at the same time … a truly rare occasion, even if Jolene is confined to the bedroom with her work laptop, the household laptop and the skype phone, no doubt she’s doing important business type things like, um, whatever it is business folks do!
Meanwhile I have to deal with the kids, my day job, and provide a little entertainment to keep them from killing each other or, worse yet, being killed by me – obviously I jest, they’re lovely really … honest!?
In the event I decided we could make some Charlie and Lola style butterfly mobiles, the lad decided to do planets instead, and I suppose you could make whatever you want too! Whatever you decide to do you’ll still need the following … unless you decide to do something completely different in which case some, all, or none of these items may or may not be useful!
- a pencil, a short piece of dowel of garden cane could work too;
- some thread;
- a sheet of white A4;
- a box of crayons, and;
- some sellotape.
It really is terribly easy but if you want step by step instructions here they are:
1. Take your crayons and randomly colour your sheet of A4 on both sides.
2. Draw your butterfly shapes (or whatever you’ve decided to do), I folded a side of the A4 over and drew half the butterfly and cut it out in that fashion for an element of symmetry in their shapes. The lad had opted to do planets and so I provided them with a load of round things in various sizes for them to draw around – we ended up with 8 or 9 shapes each.
3. Next we cut three lengths of thread each and taped each piece to the pencil, one length at each end and another in the middle.
4. Tape your butterflies / planets / whatever to the lengths of threads. We put three on each length, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t do more.
5. Tape a final length of thread (about twice the length of your pencil) so that it is attached to each end of the pencil, this’ll be your hanger.
