Once Upon a Time....

Did you love building your own forts and castles out of mum's sheets and blankets when you were a kid?  We did, but times have changed and we've just added the next best thing to our range from Villa Carton. 

Now you can save your sheets and blankets, and replace them with this cardboard castle which children can decorate themselves any way they want to. 

We just had to try this one out.  Miss 6 chose to use paints on hers so into the garage we headed.  It took us about 10 minutes to put the castle together, which was lots of fun as it took shape.  Miss 6 scooted inside the castle and pulled through the tabs as we constructed it. 

The inside of the castle is a life-size colouring page, with lines and pictures ready to colour in.  This is were Miss 6 choose to start.  About 2 hours later, she emerged with the biggest smile on her face, and a lot of paint I might add.  But she had completed the inside to her liking and was ready to tackle the outside.  The outside is one blank canvas and Miss 6 was soon joined by Master 3.  They spent hours mixing colours and getting paint onto the castle. 

Needless to say a painting war ensued and all pomp and ceremony was removed from the painting process.  I couldn't really watch as they slapped paint on willy nilly, I think I would have painted pictures and windows, and bricks and real castle things, but after a while the colours and how they've painted it makes a bit of sense.  Sure it's not attractive, but to a 6 and 3 year old it was a whole heap of fun. 

The choices for decorating this castle are limitless, you can use paints, felts, pencils, crayons, you can even glue bits and pieces on.  Once they've decorated it, their imagination runs wild as they make up all sorts of games revolving around, inside and outside the castle. 

It's made of cardboard (recycled and European FSC certified) easily assembled and dismantled and guaranteed to provide hours and hours of fun and entertainment. 

DIY Castle from Villa Carton - available now on our website.



How do you explain...?

We've been a bit quiet on the blog front and feel it's time to get ourselves back into the Blog World.

It's been a challenging few months mainly from a personal aspect for our family. In May my dear father-in-law passed suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving us all reeling from his loss. One of the hardest things I've had to do is tell my two children that their grandfather had died. How do you even begin to explain to a 6 and 3 yr old that the Poppa they cherished and spent a lot of time with was gone forever? How do you explain death in terms that a child is going to understand?

Even now 2 months on, they still ask why? How do you explain something that us ourselves still don't understand.

To assist us in chatting to our children about this very subject we turned to craft. My father-in-law had a couple of weeks in hospital a few months before he passed, and this led us to discussing the role of a nurse with our 6 yr old daughter Nikita.

On one of her visits to the hospital she watched the nurses go about their daily tasks. She was fascinated with the blood pressure machine and the other implements nurses use during their day.

This coincided with a new range of craft kits we'd just got in. Our DIY costumes from Villa Carton.


These costumes come pre-printed and ready to colour in and it so happened that they have a nurses costume, just perfect for our daughter to test for us.


We had a few hours to fill in one day so we sat down with the nurses costume and the markers and away we went. The whole time discussing the job that a nurse does. Nikita chatted about wanting to become a nurse and working in the hospital so that she could look after her Poppa.






The costume even had a badge for Nikita to write her name on it. Nurse Nikita. The colouring in of this costume took a good hour to do, and it was one of the better hours I've spent with her having a chat about Poppa being sick, and being in the hospital.

On her future visits to the hospital Nikita chatted with her Poppa about becoming a nurse and she proudly showed off her completed costume.



Her Poppa was out of the hospital and on the road to recovery and when he passed it was sudden. Nikita is still a bit bewildered about it all, and hasn't spoken about becoming a nurse since. She's moved on to wanting to become a swim teacher, it's just unfortunate that there isn't a costume for that.

Our 3 yr old son Tyler is very matter of fact that Poppa isn't here anymore, and in time he won't remember much about Poppa, but dear blog world, I'm still left with the question, how do you explain..?

'Goodbye Poppa, we love you and we miss you'

We're going on a Dinosaur hunt and we're not scared...!

Gosh, where oh where did those holidays go!

We were quite busy over these holidays, and one of the things we had a lot of fun doing was excavating a dinosaur skeleton.

Yep you read that right, we excavated a dinosaur skeleton right here in our own backyard. Okay so it wasn't a real life size dinosaur but we followed the same principals using our Dinosaur Excavation Kit - we excavated the Velociraptor.

This kit comes with everything you could possibly need for a successful dig. And a lot of digging you will need to do. The skeleton is embedded in a plaster block, and with the special digging tool provided, you slowly and painstakingly dig away the plaster to reveal each piece of the skeleton.

It took a wee while to dig up all the bones, my children were still a bit on the small side for the patience it needs for the dig, but they were very useful on the brush to brush away loose plaster to help reveal the bones. It took me a good 1-2 hours to complete the dig, so this is a great kit if you need to keep your children occupied for several hours at a time. They may even take a couple of days but well worth the effort.

A word to the wise, the dig is best completed outside, or on a large surface covered with newspaper or an old sheet or cloth. There will be a lot of dust around, and not a good look having it walked into your carpet.

Once we had excavated all the bones and cleaned them off, (checking on the instructions as to how many bones we should have), then came the part of assembling the skeleton. We found the diagram on the instructions easy to follow, and the bones had sockets and pins on them so they just clipped together. A bit of wax is provided in this kit to help seal the bones together, but we found they clipped together very easy and didn't need the wax.

We had the Velociraptor assembled and looking great. Thankfully this kit also comes with a cardboard display stand with which we could then display our skeleton.

This kit was lots of fun to test, and recommended for kids over 7yrs old. It's available now through our website http://www.thecraftibug.co.nz/.