tales from the corner house…

We made embossed leaf jars at our craft group this week. If you want to have a go…

Collect some leaves – choose the ones with the thickest veins, as they will make a clearer emboss. Most of ours were cut from the bushes rather than found on the ground, as it’s better if they aren’t too dry and cracked.

Use PVA or equivalent to glue them onto thick card (about 1 to 1.5mm thickness seems to work well – you could glue two layers of cereal packet together to get this if you don’t have any to hand).

Once dry (they don’t take long suprisingly), cut them out,

and stick onto the jar. If you have a round jar you made need to bend them slightly before sticking on to get them to follow the curve of the jar. Cover the whole sides of the jar with glue,

and wrap in kitchen foil.

Now run the kitchen foil all over with an old toothbrush (you can see the marks), and the outline of the leaves and the veins should start to show up…

…and there you have it. I think this method would make great embossed pictures too, watch this space

Here’s a fun game you can make if you have some letter ink stamps:

I stamped some words, spread around on the page, which were around Sam’s level for reading. Then I drew little pictures to match the words, also spread around the page.

The game was to join the words to the pictures. Sam also added the idea of colouring in the things as he matched them.

Afterwards, Sam made a game for me using the blocks. I had to find as many words as I could using letters that sat next to, or diagonally next to each other, (a bit like Boggle). We did it together, and talked about the sounds and what the words meant. It was amazing how many words we found, and I’m sure there are probably more…

I think the stamps added a lot to the fun of these games. We could have had the same thing in a workbook and I don’t think Sam would have enjoyed it as much. And he wouldn’t have been able to make one himself.