Tea Party Week @ Messy Play

For our 4th week of messy fun I decided to go for a tea party theme, mainly so we could do some cupcake decorating! So that's what we did, I bought 3 dozen ready made cupcakes from the supermarket (didn't want to be poisoning any kids) & lots of sprinkles & sweets to decorate. In the hour we used almost a box of icing sugar & I spent most of the session mixing icing. The kids decorated all the cakes & then moved on to the pack of biscuits I brought as back up :-) It was a really busy session, & I didn't get chance to take any pics of the set up & not many during the session.

I dyed the pasta left from animal week, using the same method I use   a little bit of food colouring & some surgical spirit (rubbing alcohol for those in the us) in a zip lock bag. Mix it around to cover the pasta & add more colouring if required. I've previously had poor results using the natural colouring vs regular, as i was out of green I thought I would give the gel colouring a go. It did give better coverage however left a slightly sticky residue on the pasta. 

I supplied lengths of string so that the kids could make necklaces to wear to the 'party'. I also made some 'needles' with some pipe cleaner for the younger ones to make the threading easier.

For the sticking craft I printed out a cupcake picture & decorated using fabric, paper & foam scraps, lolly pop sticks & sequins. I had some ready coloured lolly sticks, but wanted to make sure i had enough so i tried a colouring them using food colouring at the same time as the pasta, it worked but not very well. I then used a chunky marker to colour them in this was quite quick & gave a better result. A great way to recycle all those lolly sticks you've been saving all summer.

My example cupcake (I'm having great fun doing my own pictures)

In the sensory box we had red jelly & custard.... this started out nice & thick but ended up all thin & watery as the kids mixed it.

In one of our pools we had out our tea set, with our coloured rice to use as pretend tea.

In the other pool I put a whole bag of asda value cornflakes, they had lots of fun crunching & scooping.

Daniel (3) requested that we had pink paint at messy play, so as it was tea party week, i mixed some up using our red & white paint. It ended up a peachy pink, I also mixed a purple which ended up darker than I would have liked. As well as the brushes I also cut an old car sponge out in to sort of cupcake shapes.

A fab week again with a long clean up, but worth it as all the kids love it. Especially my boys who wouldn't get to experience this otherwise. It really is different experience from doing these activity's at home.

x Jo x

P.S. The next theme is The Hungry Caterpillar