Used coffee grounds are great for messy play! To play with they are a bit like a cross between sand and mud, in that they are grainy and can be crumbled up, scooped and poured, and can be moulded too. They also smell great (if you like coffee)! Most cafe's will give you their used coffee grounds for free - some even bag them up ready for customers to take because they can be used for gardening. They have to be fairly fresh as they start to mould within a few days. The brown colour lends itself well to setting up a zoo animal scene but I have also made coffee grounds into a farm. The photos here are from when I did Happymess at the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta last year - the theme was recycling so coffee grounds were perfect! I just added some plastic animals, scraps of astroturf, some cardboard box enclosures and a few messy play tools (spades, pots, rakes etc) along with the coffee grounds to the tuff tray and lots of fun was had by the children who visited!

Here's an adult messy play / craft activity for you! I made these last year and am about to dig them out to refill them for this Christmas. They were very easy and fun to make and are pretty sturdy - I think they should last a good few years. I was inspired by those lovely fabric advent calendars you see, but didn't have the time or inclination to sew, and had a large loo roll tube collection, thanks to Happymess. It takes a few days to make due to glue and paint drying, but it doesn't use up much actual work time to make, if you know what I mean.

What you need:
​12 loo roll tubes - all the same size, cut in half
​Sheet of sturdy cardboard
​PVA glue (I used an adult version but I'm sure children's glue would be fine too)
​Green spray paint
Coloured tissue circles
Loom bands or other small elastic bands
​Number stamps (or you could use stickers, or hand write)
​Sweets/tiny toys to fill (I used chocolate coins, and some jewellery, erasers, stickers and a parts of a 'road works' set that I found in a charity shop)

​How to make:
​I followed the instructions on the glue packet for priming the loo rolls and board - I watered down the glue and brushed it over the board, and dipped the ends of the loo rolls into it, and left to dry over night.
​I then arranged the loo rolls into a Christmas tree shape and glued them onto the board, and left overnight to dry. I sprayed the whole thing green and again left overnight to dry. I cut out tissue circles and stamped each one with the numbers 1-24. This year I have made this part easier and I have got pre-cut tissue circles and Christmas number stickers (from my new favourite shop, Tiger).
Once the paint was dry I popped sweets and tiny toys into the loo roll compartments and covered them with the  tissue circles, fastened with a loom band. The children loved them and I was pretty proud of them too!

If there was a prize for the most child-friendly art installation, Liz West's Our Colour at the Pithay, Bristol would get our vote! It's basically like playing inside a rainbow, but not as high up. In fact it's in a disused, striped-out office space, with a shiny but not too slippery floor, so much better for health and safety than an actual rainbow. When we went, the lovely invigilators were really happy for children to run around. One of them even sang nursery rhymes, there were so many children there. There is absolutely nothing they could break, and it's a unique, rainbow-lit space for a play. I imagine it's so much more fun than when it was an office!
​
​Our Colour is part of the Bristol Biennial 2016: In Other Worlds and is on 10am-7am until 10 September 2016, at the Pithay, Bristol BS1 2LZ

The weekly Happymess sessions only run in term time, but if you are missing getting messy over the summer, you can find us at the Bristol Harbour Festival and the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta as part of the Children's Areas organised by Cirque Bijou. Both events are free to come along to and there will be lots of other fun family activities.

The Bristol Harbour Festival Children's Area is at Castle Park, 12-6pm Saturday 16 & Sunday 17 July. Happymess will be there will a mud and sand magical grotto, and making magic wands.

Keep an eye on the Happymess Facebook page for more details. Hope you can join us! ​​

​This is an article I wrote for the second issue of Babber, the NCT magazine for Bristol parents, which you can view here: http://bit.ly/babber2 (lots of other interesting reading in there too). Here is the article in full...

​I run preschool art, craft and messy play classes, which I love doing, but I have to admit at home I don't really like mess. With two young children I have to embrace it, but I'm the kind of person who has a dust buster at arms reach at all times.That said, we do a LOT of art and messy activities at home and I have learned strategies to contain and cope with the mess. The thought of doing messy play at home can be a bit intimidating, especially if you have limited space or lots of light coloured carpet. My first bit of advice would be to only do this if you really want to, otherwise you won't enjoy it. Your child will be just as happy if you sit down and do a puzzle with them, and there are playgroups you can go to make a mess – Children's Centres are a good bet for affordable messy play classes*. However if you do want to have a go at home, you are likely to find it rewarding, I definitely have. Here are some tips on how to go about it;

• Prepare everything in advance, so that you can supervise and join in the fun the whole time your child is playing. Then you'll have more of chance of intervening before the sofa gets a new pattern handprinted onto it!
  
• Pick a good time, when your child has enough energy. There's nothing worse than setting up an activity up and dealing with all the cleaning up afterwards if they only play for a few minutes. Also it has to be a time when you have enough time and energy to enjoy the activity too!
  
• Start really simple so you can get an idea of what interests your child the most. For example my eldest loved mixing, stirring and making, and every messy play activity we did involved me being made to drink pretend tea. She liked sand, cloud dough, foam – anything she could mix up, pour and mould. My youngest likes exploring mechanisms more than materials, and can play with a single playdough extruder for twenty minutes at a time. Once you get a feel for what interested them you can set up activities you know they will enjoy.
  
• Choose the best space available, i.e. the easiest to clean up, or most contained. Outdoors is good but if you don't have any outdoor space (we didn't when my eldest was a toddler) or it's winter, the kitchen is the often best. Hard, wipeable floors and surfaces are useful! Then make sure they stay in that space until they have finished the activity and it's time to clean up – unless you are outdoors or somewhere it doesn't matter so much if they spread the mess around a bit.
  
• Cover the floor with something you can pop in the washing machine – washable shower curtains are good, but an old sheet would work too. If you are at a table you can cover it with newspaper but I don't find that works on the floor, it doesn't stay put.
  
• Cover your child up with a long sleeved apron, or just clothes you don't mind getting messy. Or if it's warm enough strip them off – you can always pop them in the bath afterwards to extend the fun!
  
• Think about the equipment/container you use – sometimes this depends on the materials they are playing with. For messy play plastic underbed storage boxes or tuff trays on the floor are good, but I tend to find children sit in these to play, which in turn spreads the mess around more. A less messy option can be sitting or standing at a low table, or a tuff tray on a stand, which generally means they only get their top half messy. Same goes with painting. Painting on the floor is really fun and definitely worth doing, but often results in full body painting – whereas at a table or easel it is more often restricted to fingers and hands, perhaps extending up the arms! Easels also take up less space if that's an issue.
  
• Have a second activity ready that will hold their attention (i.e. Cbeebies) and put them somewhere out of the way of the mess while you clean it up – prioritising anything they could reach and get messy with again.
  
• Build up a collection of toys you can use for messy play that are easy to clean and don't get water stuck in them (and then go mouldy). Many of mine have come from charity shops, which are particularly good for playdough tools and plastic animals/dinosaurs. Ikea are good for sand and water toys, and their some of their kitchen tools are suitable for children to play with too – such as ice cube trays and plastic cookie cutters. In Bristol, Artragous, the art shop at the Children's Scrapstore is good for tools, equipment and materials such as glue, paper and paint. Use your recycling – plastic containers such as yogurt and ice cream pots and bottles are great for using in most messy play activities, and kitchen roll and toilet tubes are very versatile too!

Most importantly, have fun! And try to worry about the mess – once you have done messy play at home once or twice you'll see how much your children get out of it and know how worthwhile it is to do!
A list of my top ten simple messy play activities to get your started is coming soon!

*Or come along to Happymess, my preschool art, craft and messy play sessions – see www.happymess.info for more information.

I recently made this light box fairy castle (with a bit of help from my children) so we could take part in Window Wanderland - a lovely event; it's a walking trail of night-time window displays. There were over sixty houses taking part in our
area, and they all had great displays, ranging from simple and effective to large-scale artworks that must have taken days to create. It was really fun to make our window display, but also to wander around a check out everyone else's.

I wanted to make something that my children could play with afterwards so after a bit of deliberation hit on the idea of a light box castle.  Each of the 'rooms' were lit from the inside with a torch or an electric tealight. This way we could decorate lots of little windows rather than one big window, plus I had built up a vast collection of cardboard boxes that I wanted to use up! In fact I didn't have to buy anything specially to make this castle, it was made entirely from stuff we had collected and basic craft materials.

If you'd like to make something like this, it's really flexible, but here's what I used, and how I did it:

Materials
Cardboard boxes
Gold spray paint, optional
Greaseproof paper
Coloured tissue
Black sugar paper
PVA glue
Cardboard rolls
Scrap cardboard - i.e. cereal box
Double-sided tape, optional

Equipment
Scissors
Stanley knife
Torches/electric tealights
Brushes for glue
Novelty hole punches (butterfly and stars), optional

To make the castle structure I built up a castle shape from boxes and took a photo to remind me how I had arranged it, and then cut the windows out with a stanley knife. I cut some crenulations (the turrety bits) out of a cereal box to add to one of the boxes at the top, and to a thick cardboard roll I had, and cut more crenulations out of kitchen and loo rolls so I could add some towers to the castle. I had half a can of gold spray paint so I used it up to cover any mailing labels and turn white boxes gold, which blended in with the rest of the brown cardboard and made it look a bit neater in daylight. If I'd had more paint I would have covered the whole thing but I didn't want to buy more specially.

To make the windows I cut out greaseproof paper rectangles to cover the window holes, and drew round the window shapes onto the paper. I then got my children to decorate the paper with coloured tissue, using watered down pva glue and brushes, to make 'stained glass' windows. I cut out black shapes - fairies, bunnies (bunnies are important in our house), balloons and I also used our shaped hole punches to make tiny butterflies and star shapes, and stuck them down on top of the tissue. Once it had all dried I glued the greaseproof paper window panes into the inside of the boxes.

For Window Wanderland I stuck the castle using a bit of double sided tape (to hold it together a bit, knowing I'd want to reassemble afterwards for the children to play with) and I lit up the inside of each box with a torch or electric tealight, and switched the lounge lights off so that the windows really glowed. We also made some peg fairies, birds and a moon to decorate the lounge window with. After it was all over took the castle apart and reassembled in my daughters room, by the window because it looks good with the sunlight shining into the castle windows from outside too. I left the boxes and turrets loose so they could arrange it how they wanted each time they play with it. We also added some dolls, furniture and puppies! It's not the sturdiest homemade toy but I think it has quite a bit of mileage in it as a play castle!

I'm quite keen on the phrase 'life hack', although I like to think I use it in a slightly ironic manner. Anyway, toddler painting life hack coming up...

If it's raining and you are stuck at home with your toddler, and you fancy doing some painting, but it's too wet to even make the trip out to the garage to get a non-spill paint pot, simply cut a hole in the lid of a ricotta tub. Or any plastic tub you can find in the recycling. It worked pretty well - he only managed to dribble a small amount of water out of it, and he got on well dipping his brush in.

Incidentally in the photo he's using Ikea's coloured pencils that turn into watercolour paint when you brush over them with water. They are popular in our house at the moment - a good, fairly unmessy alternative to full-on painting.

I took my one year old to see Richard Long's Boyhood Line last week. It's perhaps not the most visually exciting piece of work but I thought it would be a good one to go and see with a small child, especially a contagious but not that poorly one. I was also quite keen to have a wander round the Downs just because I hadn't been before, although that didn't really happen because aforementioned small child was too tired, and upset I didn't have a second banana for him.

It was a drizzly, slightly misty day, so quite atmospheric. One interesting aspect of the work is that it's not signposted so you have to wander around and ask people where it is. I think that is what makes a piece of land art in a semi-urban area unique; although it looks like countryside, it's actually quite a busy spot with lots of dog walkers, joggers and there was even a buggyfit type class going on while we were there.

We asked a very pleasant elderly couple of directions when we got out of the car, and they pointed us in the right direction with no discussion of the work itself, but had a little chat with my son. We got as far as a outdoor gym which he was reluctant to leave, and then we had to ask a dog walker for further directions. She was very interested to know more about the work, and the artist and questioned me for quite a while about it. I felt like I should have read up a bit more before coming. She then showed me some examples of lichen and told me about her lichen tour of the Downs.

By the time we found the work, I felt like I had had quite an interesting introduction to a new place though interactions with a few local people and short-ish wander round, which may not have happened without the artwork being the focus of our journey. Richard Long is quoted in an article the Guardian as saying the stones will probably end up in rockeries. I might pop back and get a few to turn into Happymess stone creatures ;-)

I've been experimenting a bit with playdough playmats, and they have proven pretty popular at home and at Happymess. You can download playdough playmats from the internet to print and laminate, which would be good if you were just using these at home, but I like to make my own for using at Happymess. First off I made some monster playmats by cutting out coloured tissue and laminating the shapes on top of a sheet of A4 (printed with some suggestions for use). Second time round I designed some very simple face shapes on the computer and then printed and laminated them. I think they are great because they provide a focus for playdough play without being too prescriptive. My four year old picked the monster shape that she wanted (I made quite a few different shapes), and filled the whole shape in with dough - a bit like colouring in with playdough. She then added some eyes and decorated it with buttons. You could use this to practice counting, we didn't because I was slightly preoccupied trying to stop her little brother eating his playdough. She enjoyed picking the buttons off carefully to show the pattern of indents left in the dough.

I think the face templates worked better at Happymess than the monster mats, maybe because there were more three and four year old children there that day, or maybe because it's more obvious what to do with a face than a monster shaped blob! I used the face-shaped mats for Father's Day - to make funny Dad faces - but they could be any kind of face, so they will be back soon!