If you are up for making a bit of a mess at home at home with the aim of entertaining young children, here is a list of my top 10 tried and tested activities to get started with (in no particular order - we love them all!):

1) Homemade playdough
Children love playdough and it's great for developing fine motor skills and strengthening little hands. Homemade playdough is cheap and easy to make, and making it can become an activity in itself. I find homemade is easier to clean up than bought playdough too. The possibilities for play are almost endless; you can use actual playdough toys or kitchen tools – rolling pins, garlic press, cupcake trays and cases. You can add natural objects such as pine cones, twigs, pebbles, or lolly sticks, straws, buttons, sequins. To keep it simple use one colour at a time if you don't want the colours to get mixed up, or use two primary colours – i.e. yellow and red so it turns into orange (rather than using three or more colours and ending up with brown!).
I use the Imagination Tree's Four Minute Playdough recipe. Like Jamie Oliver's 30-minute meals, in reality it takes a bit more than four minutes but it's still pretty fast!

2) Shaving foam
Shaving foam is pretty cheap (Sainsburys Basics version is 50p) and one can is plenty for one or two children to play with. It's an interesting texture; light, soapy and mouldable. It's fun to smooth it over a flat surface and make marks in it, and a lot of children like to cover their hands and arms with it. You can stir in food colouring or leave as is. Good with plastic dinosaurs or bugs, ice cream toys, pots and spoons, or just hands! The great thing about shaving foam is that it dissolves away to almost nothing, so although it gets everywhere it's not too tricky to clean up, and because it's a toiletry item, it's clean messy fun!

3) Sand
Sand is an oldie-but-goodie. Whether on a beach or in a sandpit I find it holds children's attention for a long time. My youngest loves it so much that as a one year old he'd eat big mouthfuls of it (not to be encouraged – but it didn't seem to do him any harm!). It can be poured, mixed, sifted, moulded, dug, prodded, smoothed. Play with it dry and then damp – it's texture and mould-ability changes so much that it will hold children's interest for even longer. Playing with sand and water together is also a timeless and brilliant combination. You really just need to provide a digging tool – spoon or spade – and maybe some pots, but you can also add toy diggers, moulds, shells, stones or sticks for extra fun.

4) Cornflour gloop
Gloop is cornflour mixed with water and is quite unique in that is can seem both like a solid and a liquid depending on how it is manipulated. It is very messy but worth it – it's such an interesting consistency and properties are fun for children and adults! To make it gradually add water to cornflour until it's gloopy. Your child can help with this! Then play. Hold a handful up and watch it ooze down. Any toys or tools you leave in the gloop will get 'stuck' to it, and it can be quite hard work to rescue them! You can use food colouring or coloured ice cubes to add a bit of colour. If you use coloured ice cubes they leave a lovely trail of colour as they melt, but use a little less water to make the gloop, or add a bit of extra cornflour later so the mixture doesn't get too runny. A good tip for clearing up is to leave the bowl of gloop to sit for a while afterwards – it separates and you can drain the water off. Then leave it to dry out and the cornflour dries into solid lumps you can pick up and pop in the bin (or food recycling) – or actually could be played with as another messy play activity!

5) Dried pulses/rice/pasta
Playing with dried pulses, rice or pasta is quite noisy which can add an extra element to messy play. Generally pulses can be played with in a similar way to dry sand, for pouring, mixing and sifting. I like to put out tubs of different kinds of dried foods which can then be mixed together in smaller tubs, or lifted out with big toddler tweezers. It's good to find some metal bottom cardboard cartons (such as breadstick tubes or some cocoa tubs) as they make such as good noise when they are shaken with pulses inside. You can colour chickpeas, pasta or rice using zipped food bags; put the chickpeas or whatever you want to colour inside, with some gel food colouring and a little squirt of anti-bacterial hand gel (the kind that you use to wash hands without water), shake it all up until the colouring is spread evenly, and pour into a baking tray or large shallow tub to dry. Keep them in a airtight container (make sure they are dry when you put them away) and they keep for ages and can be played with again and again.

6) Painting
Painting can be messy but it's so much fun and so good for fine motor skills / learning to hold a pen that it's really worthwhile, and it is possible to slightly control the mess. We often stick to watercolour paints inside, as there is a bit less danger of spreading the paint around the room than with poster paint. Using an easel or painting on the ground works well outside. Plus being ready to pop them in the bath straight away afterwards! Many little children (and often bigger ones too) love the feeling of poster paint on their hands or feet so starting with hand and foot prints is fun! There are so many variations when it comes to painting - printing with vegetables (celery makes good fish scales), painting with funny brushes (toothbrushes, dish brushes), splatting with fly swatters, or varying the surface by painting on tinfoil, bubblewrap, cardboard are all fun options worth experimenting with!

7) Chalk and water
Chalk and water seems like a simple combination but it can actually be played with in a lot of variations - my children have spent hours playing with jumbo chalk and water in spray bottles, drawing pictures and then spraying them with the water - we've made targets to aim at on the walls and mushed up chalk 'splats' on the ground. They have made 'potions' with water and little scraps of chalk, they have drawn figures on the wall and thrown wet sponges at them - inspired by 'splat the teacher' games at the school summer fayre! Some children enjoy wiping and so just giving them a wet sponge with alongside chalk on an easel enhances chalk drawing. Chalk colours look bolder and brighter on damp surfaces too.

8) Water
Water is the number one messy play activity in our house. Well, mostly in the back garden! Cheap spray bottles for gardening have provided hours of fun. The plants, walls, windows, chalk board all get sprayed. We have a 'no spraying people' rule but it isn't always adherded to! Both my children like to play at cleaning windows with a spray bottle and a sponge. My daughter is really into giving her dolls a bath at the moment, but she also likes making 'potions' and watering plants, and pretending to be a mermaid in the paddling pool. My son likes pouring and is very keen on watercans - we have quite a collection! Both of them enjoy playing with a simple water wall I made for them (find out more about how to make a water wall by clicking here) and playing with funnels.

9) Mud
When it is not possible to get out to play with mud in nature, playing with mud at home (outside!) is a good plan B! In the past I've used bags of topsoil from a garden shop but more recently I've been using coir, which is really fun to prepare and quite a 'clean' mud if it goes in mouths accidently. It's rehydrated coconut husks which you buy in small, light blocks and hydrate by soaking in water overnight. It swells up quite quickly and you have to crumble it up into the remaining water. It's very cheap and you can use It for gardening as well. You can buy ethically produced coir from Traidcraft by clicking here. Coir (or mud) is good for digging, mixing, planting (we've played with mud and dried beans or real vegetables before), or add plastic animals/vegetables to make a farm. A cardboard box can easily be turned into a mud kitchen if you draw a few circles on the top and cut an oven door out of it. We've got a hand-me-down plastic kitchen in the back garden we use for this purpose!

10) Cloud dough
Playing with cloud dough is like playing with soft, smooth sand! It is mostly flour, mixed with any kind of oil (at a ratio of eight cups of flour to one cup of oil). We mix it with our hands like rubbing scone dough but you could also use a wooden spoon. It gets mixed up as it is played with though too. it is mouldable like damp sand, so you can make shapes with it using sand moulds or cups. You can colour it with powder paint or if you make it with cornflour instead of wheat flour it is just like crunchy white snow. So much fun and very relaxing to play with (if you can cope with the mess!).

There are so many possibilities when it comes to messy play - have fun experimenting!

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 ;-)