I've been trying to think of more loo roll craft ideas, and have come up with this nice easy project - a bird finger puppet. 

Dead simple - take your loo roll and bend the edges of one end over, to make the ears. Then cut finger holes at the other end. After painting, stick on eyes and nose of your choice (I would have made a big pointy beak out of card or something, personally, but Matthew wanted to use a jewel sticker, and it is his puppet after all), and then add feathers (we made holes and pushed them in). 

Here are some other ideas for loo roll finger puppets... 

- other animals: lions, rabbits, dogs, jellyfish would work particularly well
- monsters: you could really go wild here and stick all kinds of bits and pieces on to make fantastical creatures 
- robots: add the finishing touch with silver foil or silver paint

Matthew's really into castles at the moment, partly because of Mike the Knight on CBeebies (which has a particularly irritating theme tune that stays lodged in your head all day) and partly because we visited a couple of castles on holiday last month. 

We're going to get him a play castle for his birthday, but in the meantime I thought we could have bash at making one using loo rolls. 

So to make the towers, I cut out notches all round the top of four loo rolls, and then we folded the leftover bits down to make battlements. Then I made cuts all round the bottom of the loo rolls and we splayed them out for gluing later. I also cut two long slots up two sides of each loo roll. 

For the walls I cut up pieces of cardboard box and then fitted them into the loo roll slots. We cut a doorway before gluing the splayed bottoms of the loo roll towers onto a base of stiff card. 

We painted the castle (purple, obviously), and then when that was dry we painted the base. We found a rainbow sticker for the crest over the door, and some bits of material to make flags (glued round toothpicks).

I cleared out some boxes recently and stumbled upon an old riso screen from my days at Bristol School of Art, made from a drawing of red cabbage. Aha, I thought. Just the thing for making some tiles for the Widcombe Art Trail. So that's what I did.

May Day! May Day! Oh OK, it's a bit late, but that was the theme for Friday's session at The Little House in the Park, and we're feeling extremely springy here in sunny Bath this Bank Holiday weekend. 

All of these things - giant flower, May crown and spring streamer stick - are pretty straightforward and self-explanatory really, so I won't go into lots of explanation about how we made them this time. 

It was such a lovely afternoon. At the end we took all the crafts outside into the garden and danced round a maypole, singing traditional songs. It got a bit much for some of the children after a while and we ended up in a big tangly hysterical mess. One of my favourite days at The Little House ever.