School gave us some Home Learning for the Easter Holidays – to make a Box Garden. So we decided to use a few bits from our craft tub to make it look like a garden. So far, the most fun thing has been the cork bees!
Cork bees are ridiculously easy. All you need are some corks (handy if you drink wine), some paint (black and yellow), a pipecleaner and some play doh to stand it up – and a couple of googly eyes.
First of all we painted the corks yellow and left it to dry overnight. We used Tiger Stores paint which covered the print on the corks really well. In the morning it was still a bit tacky, so I used a corn on the cob holder while we painted the black stripes onto the cork. After that they were left to dry overnight again. Get some googly eyes and stick two to the front of the bee. Then all you need to do is create the wings.
This is where the pipecleaner comes in – this is where I had to help H the most too. Wrap it around your fingers twice – these loops are the wings. Criss-cross them on themselves so they look kind of wing-like, and then just wrap the two ends of the pipecleaner around the cork, making sure there’s enough to create a stand. Then all you need to do after that is put it in some playdoh to stand up. It’ll now wobble around a bit like bees do, and looks jolly cute!
For the base of the Box Garden we got tissue paper and crunched it up, then found flower stickers, feathers, covered toilet rolls in sticky backed plastic and basically went crazy with decorating. We also added a caterpillar by threading beads onto a pipecleaner, putting a head on him and bending him to look sort of like a caterpillar crawling. It worked pretty well anyway, even if I say so myself!
In the middle is what makes it a garden – Tiger Stores had little basket type things for sale, and I picked one up a while ago. Inside the little basket is enough space for a shallow dish, which we put cotton wool in, and sprinkled some cress seeds on top of! Fully sprouted it looks like a very cute little crafty box garden – and while I’m sure we won’t be winning any prizes for our creativity, I LOVE THE CORK BEES!
So that’s our Box Garden done!