Autumn leaves are falling down

It’s peculiar: you leave the country for a week and you miss the seasons changing. Or rather you miss the leaves turning. We got back from Kefalonia last week to find that Britain was expecting a heatwave: it got as warm in our back garden in the last few days as it had been by the pool in the Greek Islands!

Which is why The Girls could be found painting in their underwear in the back garden. Painting the leaves falling from the trees. I ask you: how are we supposed to teach our children about the seasons if we can’t be sure what season it is?

I used a good old-fashioned technique and cut a potato in half. I put the cut side down on some kitchen roll to thoroughly dry it out, then sketched a leaf shape onto the flat cut side, which I then cut out. Having seen One Artsy Mama’s lovely tree shape, I painted a basic tree outline in brown on a few sheets of paper and let The Girls print with their potato leaf shapes, and an array of autumnal colours.

It started well, and they both neatly printed leaves onto their trees.And then they got a bit more ‘involved’ with this craft: Dimples started rolling the paint-smothered potato across the page, which spawned a picture which looks a good deal like a bonfire; LBG decided to use her feet as a paintbrush (!) and before I knew it they were both covered in red from head to toe. It is a clear example of child-led activity: I provided the tools and they did something unexpected with them.

The bathroom looked like a scene from Dexter by the time I got them clean. As did the Utility Room, where I finally got round to creating an art-drying-facility: I bashed (and I use the term literally) a few nails into the window frame, and trained some garden wire across them. It made it so much easier for me to store artwork until it goes up on the wall (or in the post to the GPs) and means that I still have access to the chest freezer which, up until now, has been my art-drying-table. The disadvantage to drying paintings by hanging them is that, when an excess of paint is on the paper, red in this instance, it drips rather ghoulishly onto the floor!