Back at The Little House in the Park today for the first time in ages. We started off in the Holburne Museum to get inspiration from the Painted Pomp exhibition (early 1600s art and fashion), before heading back to the Little House to make some Elizabethan accessories - a fan and some shoe pom-poms. 

To make the fan we printed with gold paint onto pre-cut paper, and when it was dry we folded it, used decorative cutters round the edge, then glued sticks of gold card (with holes at one end) onto the back, using a paper fastener to hold it all together at the bottom. 

The pom-poms are made from lengths of netting folded in half, tied off with a rubber band, and poked through a hole in a small doily. We added silver decorations with paper fasteners, then tied netting under the doily for attaching to shoes. Oh man these pom-poms are cute - Matthew asked me to tie them to his slippers when we got home and he's been prancing about like a dandy ever since.
 
I was in a multicoloured lolly sticks kind of mood today - luckily we have a bumper pack of them in the cupboard. Phew. 

For the porcupine card, I cut a body shape out of orange card and then we glued that and the orange sticks onto the blue card, added a googly eye and coloured in the nose. 

The monsters on sticks couldn't be easier to make - just wrap pipe cleaners around sticks in whatever shape you fancy and add googly eyes (we used extra big fluffy pipe cleaners). Matthew's passion for googly eyes apparently knows no bounds. 

For the tulips, we painted some bits of card first (quite subtle here but you could go wild), cut out the petal shapes when they were dry, and glued them onto green sticks. The vase is an empty plastic vanilla essence bottle with its top cut off. Matthew took ages decorating it with dotty stickers in an impressively painstaking way. Blimey. This is new.