Remember, Remember,

The fifth of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot....

Yes, November 5th is bonfire night back home and it is a festival that the Japanese have yet to adopt :o) Basically in 1605, a chap called Guy Fawkes and his mates decided to blow up the Houses Of Parliament but their gunpowder plot was foiled and Guy ended up on top  of a big bonfire. Now we celebrate by having a bonfire party with an effigy of Guy Fawkes on the top plus fireworks. We wrap up warm and eat baked potatoes and hot mugs of soup with a toffee apple for a treat. The run up to Nov. 5th kids usually get together and make a Guy using old clothes and stuffing him with newspaper. Then they sit on the street with thier guy and ask people who are passing 'Penny for the Guy' (although these days it is probably more like 10p!)

Well, I can hardly recreate the whole experience but I do want Ebi-kun to learn about it, so using a good old toilet roll middle we built a bonfire. I covered the toilet roll with brown card first the we cut strips of brown paper for sticks and used double sided to tape to stick them on.
Ebi-kun decorated the 'guy' then we shoved a couple of pieced of coloured gel into the top of the stick pile to make the flames and popped Guy in the  top. The, it just so happened when we were coming home from the football the other day I saw some mini toffee apples for sale so I bought one for him to try. He wasn't overly impressed and gave up about a third of the way through :o)
Then we had a look at our on going experiment. Nothing new here, just a bit of celery in a cup of red water but the effect was quite nice. I have never actually done this with celery before so I was interested to see what would happen too.
It had been sat in the cup for about 3 days so we had a good look at it before cutting it up, the cross section was really clear.
So, what do you do with lots of chopped bits of veg? Print making of course, I chopped some carrot, broccoli and potato too, so he made 'fireworks' using yellow paint on black paper.

We had just finished when Kym arrived for lunch with her son, Ebi-kun got SO excited he was running around the house, jumping up and down, gave himself a nose bleed, fell over and scraped his chin and somehow bumped his head. After a run in the park he eventually calmed down enough to play properly.

Good news from Kym, I sold 19 of the 26 brooch kits I had given her for the shop - Yeah! I will be putting the ones that were left in the shop, I hope to get them and the new ones in over the next couple of days.