Firebird: Nina Ananiashvili
Prince Ivan: Andris Liepa
Princess: Ekaterina Liepa
Kashchey: Sergey Petukhov
Ballet masters: Alexander Prokofiev, Nikolay Androsov

Margot Fonteyn as the firebird

The Firebird suite on Fantasia 2000

As I’ve said previously, having some visuals to watch has helped enormously with enabling M and J to sit and listen to the music.

Sitting still, though, isn’t really in the nature of my girls. What they were born to do is wriggle, jump, fly, swirl and move around as much as possible, all over the place and especially if there is music on. So the next thing we did was create some firebird costumes together in order that they could pretend to be Margot Fonteyn.

Using the same technique as for our Halibut Jackson outfits, we first made our skirts. What I like about this technique is that it involves no sewing and so M could really play a part in making her own costume. We used net in various different fiery colours, and the only thing I’d do differently if this costume was going to be worn for a long time is create a little petticoat to go underneath as both the girls found the net quite scratchy after a while.

I made wings for the girls out of a length of gauzy material (a little longer than from finger tip to finger tip in each case). I folded the material in half and tied a long length of ribbon round it. This scrunched the material together, and then the remaining length of ribbon was used to tie over the girls shoulders and around their chests. At each end of the gauze I attached an elastic band which the girls slipped over their wrists. For a proper tutorial take a look at this one from This Mama Makes Stuff.

Lots of leaping and rolling around then ensued…

I’ve not yet taken either of the girls to see a ballet live. Have you taken your kids to see any dance? What age were they and did you do anything in particular to prepare them for the performance?

Flowers on our patio

Carrot and Cauliflower have decided to attend the Flower Ball. Their fellow vegetables are shocked and think this is a bad idea – “You should stick with your own kind,” Lettuce scolded…”Proper vegetable never look past their own fence!” chirped the Radishes.” Once at the ball, the flowers are equally concerned to see the vegetable pair - “Raw vegetables – how dreadfully crude!”… “They are nothing but tedious soup-wallowers!” Marigold wilted with disgust”. But Cauliflower and Carrot hold themselves with poise and grace. wowing the flowers with their breezy cucumber tango and chilli pepper cha-cha-cha.. Soon all sorts of vegetable-flower friendships are formed as the communities on different sides of the garden realise that differences need not rule out friendship.

Our veg patch at the moment!

As keen gardeners this book was an instant hit for us because of its gorgeous, charming, funny and detailed illustrations. The flowers and vegetables are like updated, slightly off-beat Flower Fairies – the dresses, and especially the hats are fantastically fashioned out of petals. In fact, this book made me think of these adorable petal people from Elsa Mora.

I personally really enjoyed the text, full as it is with wordplay, for example when deriding the flowers the vegetables describe them as “those stuck-up vase stuffers!” and “Those fancy-pansies, those fluff-puffs, those ornamental dandies…“, whilst the carrot and cauliflower are later described as “Miserable groundlings, wretched undergrowth!“, but I suspect that for some the quite heavily laden language may seem a little overdone. Nevertheless, for a mere £1 I don’t think I could have found a lovelier story about acceptance and friendship. The only problem is, having found one good book I shall be tempted to return to the remaindered book shop…

Inspired by all the costumes in The Flower Ball M, J and I set about creating some petal-based artwork for our windows. First the girls had lots of fun collecting all sorts of flowers and petals from the garden. Then I gave each girl a large piece of contact paper (transparent sticky paper, the sort you might use to cover school books with). I peeled back only half of the backing paper.

Once they had covered their half of contact paper with petals I unpeeled the rest of the backing and folded the remaining half of the contact paper over the top. The girls then pressed down all over to seal in the flowers, and in doing so released lots of lovely scents from some of the flowers, especially the lavender.

Once our flower pockets were complete I taped them in our front window. Here’s the view from inside out:

And here’s what it looked like from the outside in:

Our petal suncatchers / stained glass / window art looked utterly gorgeous for about 15 minutes, but then what with the sun, the heat and the fresh flowers, the pockets soon became full of moisture and turned cloudy and milky looking so our artwork didn’t last long. Still, the process was lots of fun and for a brief time our windows looked great. Of course, we could perhaps repeat this with dried flowers (although you wouldn’t get the same olfactory experience when sealing the pockets).

The Flower Ball: ** (2 stars)

Here are some lovely flowery songs to enjoy:

And there are oh so many lovely flower activities we’ve seen elsewhere we’d like to try, such as….

What books are your favourite books for illustrations of flowers and vegetables?

I’m joining up today with What My Child is Reading, hosted at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns – now I’m off to explore what other kids have been reading this week!

Photo: minniemouseaunt

Although some of our favourite books are by Pat Hutchins I simply had no idea how many books she has written – 5 novels and more than 25 picture books during the course of the last 40 years. Whilst we haven’t been able to read all of these in the last couple of weeks, of all the new books that we have read the one that I’ve barely been able to prize out of J’s hands is Barn Dance! – a story in rhyme of a Mum Pig, Sheep and Horse determined to have a good time.

One beautiful night the mums are all keen to go dancing, but with their little ones fast asleep in the barn’s hay they can’t leave for a night on the town. Instead…

They put straw on the floor
to muffle the sound,
then they bounced,
and they jigged,
and they leaped around.

Each mum dances until she is so tired that she has to join her young charge asleep in the hay. And once all the mums have passed out exhausted…

out of the straw
the little ones crept.
Now they could bounce
and jig and leap…

as all their mothers were fast asleep!

This book has become such a hit for a number of reasons.

1. As a mum who sometimes dreams of going out dancing of an evening I love how these mums find a solution that keeps their little ones safe but allows the grown ups to have fun and let their hair down.

2. As the mums dance they have one or two minor mishaps (for example the horse’s hooves pound the floor so hard that sparks set alight some dry straw!) and J in particular loves this element of calamity combined with comedy.

3. M and J think that the idea of sneaking out whilst Mum sleeps is *so* exciting (Mum, on the other hand is a little concerned that M might just act this out!)

4. This being Pat Hutchins the illustrations are of course a delight, even though they are quite different from the illustrative style I typically associate with Hutchins. In Barn Dance! the animals and trees are less stylized than in eg. Rosie’s Walk or Good-Night, Owl!, and Hutchins uses a lot of bold colours rather than the more muted and limited palette that is familiar from many of her earlier books.

The intense yellows, reds, greens and blues in the illustrations leap off the page not least because every page bar the last (when morning has arrived) also has a great deal of black or dark blue forming the night sky. The images of moonlit clouds and starry skies are a striking feature in the book, and they led us to try out some of our own art using just black and white – some wax resist painting.

I used a white crayon and drew some images in secret on pieces of white paper. When the girls decided they wanted to join me I gave them very watered down black paint and they got stuck into discovering what secrets the paper held.

For about 5 minutes this was exciting, but that was all. M wanted to do her own thing (of course!) and so out came the coloured crayons and she prepared her own paper.

As you can see, to get the desired effect she had to press pretty hard with the crayon, but the results were beautiful (if somewhat removed from the black and white images which had inspired this little activity of ours!)

Although I enjoyed the wax resist painting M and J didn’t find it terribly exciting. Instead they emptied out our bucket of plastic animals and told me they wanted their very own barn for their animals to dance in.

Fortunately a large parcel had arrived that morning (Thanks, Oma!) and so we set to transforming it into barn worthy of a wild, all night shindig. I cut some doors in the sides and then the girls painted the roof gray and the walls green.

We made some stalls out of plastic biscuit trays and added some straw from the pet section in the local discount store. In went the horse, pig and sheep, their little ones and a whole load of playmobil, the music was turned up, and crazy dancing began.

Barn Dance!: (I give it 2 stars because, whilst the illustrations are lovely I don’t think they are quite as wonderful as her earlier books, although I’m sure M and J would give this book 3 stars)

And what did the animal (and human) mums and kids dance to? Lots of music played by Jimmy Shand, including The Gay Gordons, Strip the Willow and The Duke of Athol’s Reel.

Other night-sky inspired activities I thought would be fun to do include:

As to farm related craftiness…

Now I just need to find a real barn dance or a ceilidh that we could all go to…