Beautiful Birthday Butterflies

I mentioned at the end of my last post that we'd likely spend all day Friday on arty crafty things - and indeed we did. Emily worked her socks off for hours and came up with some really beautiful bits and pieces for my Mum's birthday tea. Emily's asked me to put the pictures on here "so that Nana won't forget her decorations" (not that there's much chance of that!)

Altogether on Friday, Emily made two different types of hanging butterfly chains to hang up over the table: One type was transparent film with shreds and sparkles sandwiched in between, but into butterfly shapes and threaded together with beads; the others were six stained glass butterflies hanging each on their own threads. The picture's not very good, but it looked fantastic when it all the bits were hanging over the table at birthday tea time :-))

Emily also made six butterfly/dragonfly plate decorations, one for each of us, which she set out on the plates at birthday tea:
Also on the craft menu on Friday was this lovely balloon butterfly
and a pretty heart/butterfly bag filled with peanut brittle: and of course a beautiful butterfly birthday card, my photo of which has decided to be incredibly blurry.

Phew. Well, that took care of Friday. Saturday morning we got up really early to make Nana's birthday cake before Emily had to go out to ballet. She's getting so good at baking. We had a recipe for a chocolate/orange marble cake and apart from reaching down ingredients and handling the oven, Emily did the lot from start to finish. She had a fabulous idea for decorating it as a butterfly flower garden, so when she got back from ballet this was the result:
Nana was overwhelmed with everything and very touched by how much effort Emily had put into it all :-))

Today I've been hard at work on boring old BBC stuff while Jon and Emily have been painting rocks. We've also been playing an excellent Egytpian board game which they picked up for the princely sum of a pound from the charity shop on Saturday. It's quite old but in fabulous condition, called Piramid (yes, that is the spelling). You have to trade slaves and gain protection from the Gods against various things that befall you on your way to the Valley of the Kings to build your pyramid. Good stuff. Which reminds me, Scunthorpe Museum's Egypt exhibition is on now, with stuff on loan from the British Museum. Emily doesn't want to go to any of the half term activities on next week as she's done them all before (writing in hieroglyphs, wrapping Mummies and the like) but she's very keen to visit the exhibition itself "once the kids have gone back to school" ROFL. The Tutankhamun Exhibition at the Millennium Dome is creeping closer (well, November 07 - that's close in my head) and we're being pestered not to forget that we've *promised* that we'll spend a week in London at that time. I didn't know the Millennium Dome was now called O2 - ??? Oooh, I just read the site and discovered that you're advised to reserve ticketing certificates as they expect it to sell out. OK, reserved ours.

Meanwhile, Emily's enrolled on the Young Artist's Course at London Art College, so she's very excited about that. Oooh and of course Springwatch starts tomorrow, which is the cause of even more excitement. I think Bill Oddie is now rivally Tony Robinson in Emily's Heroes List. She's been watching some of his How To Watch Wildlife DVDs.......and was extremely surprised when she watched some episodes of the Goodies recently!

Thought I was seeing things earlier this morning. Went out in the garden to call Romeo as I'd just put some food down for the kits bits and whilst his sister was chomping away, he was nowhere to be seen. Saw this:
Couldn't see the rest of him apart from a few bits of black blob inbetween the leaves - he was stretched out in the branches of next door's apple tree with his paw hanging down like a leopard, bless him. Here's His Royal Pink Nosed-ness on his way down!