I was reading my blog reader earlier this week, when I saw a great kid art project to create easy Hyacinth paintings come up in a round-up post, and my daughter (who happened to be passing my desk at the time) thought it was a great idea.

The original project involved using wine corks, but as we didn’t have any we used some round foam brushes from the craft store. I pulled up some photos of Hyacinths up on Google image search to show Thing 1, I drew the greenery, and she painted in all the flowers. She obviously enjoyed it as she did four of these paintings. :)

Here’s one of the pieces she did:

I was planning on suggesting a watercolour wash to colour the background, but then remembered I drew in washable markers. Next time.

If you have young children, Inner Child Fun has lots of other interesting projects, too. I have several bookmarked for upcoming art sessions.

Given the amount of cardboard that has entered and exited the house (though thankfully the mover took all but two of the moving boxes and a huge stack of the cardboard we’d accumulate to that point), I thought some cardboard craftiness was in order. I’d seen a number of interesting ideas on Pintrest, but given my daughter’s fascination in child-sized houses lately I thought this was just the ticket.

The supplies, plus an entire roll of duct tape:

The framework begins:

And from the side:

The main house and the ‘mudroom’ entryway were created with the two moving boxes that were not hauled away when the movers left, whilst the roofs were supplied by Ikea shelves. The skylight is made with some plastic from a box of toy cars. And duct tape.

I added in four windows plus the skylight to allow as much light into the house as possible. During the day she gets enough light to easily play or read in the house, which is exactly what I wanted.

The non-functional chimney was the cut out from the skylight. My daughter was a bit disappointed the chimney didn’t have proper wood smoke coming out of it, but sometimes there is no pleasing a four year old.

She did forgive me about the wood smoke thing and is quite delighted with her playhouse.

Four year old added for scale.