Tag Archives: how to

Make Your Own Very Hungry Caterpillar

Arts & Humanities, Children, Fun Stuff, Recreation,

Here is a fun craft activity to do with the kids – how to make your own very hungry caterpillar. This could be an activity for your own kids or something you can do in batches for a group of children, e.g at a playgroup or preschool.

The result is this, the caterpillar before he ate through all that food and got a tummy ache!

Instructions

What you will need:
  • green card (or paper or can be white)
  • red paper (again can be white)
  • white card
  • sticky eyes (optional)
  • lolly stick (optional)
  • green paint
  • yellow paint
  • glue stick
  • sellotape

Firstly paint your green card or paper with a very rough mix of dark green and yellow paint. Make sure the colours don’t blend together too well!

Mark up the back of the card with discs. If you are just doing one or two you can obviously make them much bigger.

Cut them out so that they all have slightly differing colours in them.

Cut a body shape out of white card and a head out of the red paper. if you don’t have red paper colour in some white paper with a red pen!

Use a glue stick to start gluing down the body pieces one at a time, overlapping each other onto the card body.

Stick on the head and then you can either use sticky eyes or else just draw on your own eyes (the rights colours are green in the middle and yellow outside but sticky eyes do just fine). Draw in his mouth with a marker or felt pen.

You can then use sellotape to attach the lolly stick to the back of the head so that you can move the caterpillar around – ideal to use with the story book.

And there you go, the finished hungry caterpillar:

How to make your own very hungry caterpillar

 

And if you want to buy the book…

Converting Fahrenheit to Celsius

General,

It seems that people either think in Fahrenheit or Celsius and are often unable to really ‘feel’ what a temperature is unless they have it in the units that they are used to. That is often the case with weather temperatures anyway.

But not only do we have different measurements for weather in Celsius and Fahrenheit but also when cooking, some ovens use one and some use another temperature. Often it differs from country to country but in some places you can buy ovens that read either celsius or Fahrenheit.

Anyway, to convert from one to the other manually you do the following:

Celsius to Fahrenheit
multiply by 8 and divide by 5 then add 32

Fahrenheit to Celsius
Take off 32 then multiply by 5 and divide by 8

These are not totally accurate figures but this is the easiest way to remember it if you need to get an approximate number and you don’t have google to hand! The easiest way is to just type in Google the conversion that you want like ’28 celsius to fahrenheit’ and it will tell you the answer.

 

How To Create Friendship Bracelets

Recreation,

There are many different types of friendship bracelets and to be honest you can choose any type of bracelet as a friendship bracelet if that is the manner in which you are giving it to your friend. Quite often with friendship bracelets, you can either buy or make 2 similar or identical bracelets that both you and your friend wear so that you have that connection of the dame friendship bracelets between you.

If you want to know how to make friendship bracelets then there are plenty of detailed instructions on the internet for different types of friendship bracelets – the most common type are ones that are made with embroidery floss and the floss is woven into patterns by hand by following  a pattern if necessary. Instructions are quite easy to follow and involve twisting and knotting the floss.

Custom Search

Of course the easy way out is to buy friendship bracelets and you can buy then for a reasonable price (although obviously not as cheaply as you can make them) on craft websites like etsy.

As well as friendship bracelets you can also find friendship necklaces which often have two halves of one piece of metal or symbol that match each other, split between the two necklaces. When the two pieces are together they form one solid piece.

How To Tell If Dementia is Setting In

Health,

One of the greatest fears of getting older for people is that they may suffer with dementia in later life. Dementia often strikes people over the age of 70 but it is not exclusive to this age group and can strike people as young as those in their 40’s.

So if you have a relative who you suspect may be starting to suffer with dementia then you might be wondering how to tell if this is the case? I have recently gone through this experience and so thought I would share it with you.

The first symptoms of dementia in the case of my elderly relative were that she kept forgetting things – she would get muddled about what she was doing and where she was going and also she had a few unexplained falls.  These kind of symptoms seem to be quite common in early onset dementia but obviously every case is different, depending on the cause of the dementia.

Sometimes the symptoms can get worse very quickly and at other times they are a slow and systematic set of symptoms that may take a while to pick up – thinking that things like being forgetful is just ‘down to old age’.

However, the only real way to tell if someone has dementia is to go through a system of tests where the patient is scored on various tasks that test their cognitive ability. From here they will be given a score that can show the extent of any dementia. The most common test is the MMSE where patients are given a score out of 30 and the lower the score the worse the dementia. There are drugs that can be taken and these are often prescribed for those who have a score under 26.

Dementia can be isolating and confusing for the individual who often doesn’t realise what is happening. One of the best ways to help them cope is to set up a regular routine and also not to forget that they need to have a life outside of dementia and to do the things that they would normally do for as long as possible.

How To Make Your Own Cup Cakes – Recipe

Food & Drink, , ,

Cup cakes have become all of the rage in recent years and they are no longer the simple and plain small sponge cake that they used to be but instead have become elaborately decorated treats for adults and children alike.

In the UK cupcakes used to be known as fairy cakes and there is really not much difference between a traditional fairy cake recipe and cup cakes.

So if you are looking for a recipe for how to make cup cakes then they are really pretty simple in terms of the ingredients although the execution of the baking of cup cakes is a bit of a master art.

There are a lot of different cup cake recipes out there and the quantities of the ingredients varies between bakers – some will have equal quantities of butter, flour and sugar but others will have mixed quantities. For a simple cup cake recipe you will need:

4oz self raising flour
3oz castor sugar
2 eggs
3oz butter

To really get the best cup cakes you need to experiment with relative quantities so that you get a mix that works well for you and the flavour of cup cake that you are making.

For some cup cakes you will also add vanilla essence and for chocolate cup cakes you can substitute cocoa powder for some of the flour, etc. So use this base to work out what works best for you in making your own cup cake recipe.

You can use the all in one method which involves just basically adding all the ingredients together and mixing, or you can use the traditional method of creaming the butter and the sugar together, adding the eggs slowly and then folding in the flour. Spoon the cup cake mixture into small cake cases and cook in a medium oven (180 C)  for 12-15 minutes.

The main art of making cup cakes these days seems to be the frosting – this can be a cream cheese frosting or a butter icing – there are many recipes and you just need to google cup cake recipes or cup cake icing and you will get a wealth of choices.  Personally I cream together butter and icing sugar and add colouring as necessary (or maybe some flavouring if required).

Many people have turned their love for baking into a cup cake business in their spare time and are making some extra income at home by doing this.