Fun with B’s ‘potions’ school topic. A long way from Halloween we search for potions ingredients, then do that again with a friend in Spring; get messy with old pumpkins; look for wands in the woods and find some frogspawn.
355 – Gathering ingredients for potions
Saturday 11 January. Weather: dry and cloudy. Temperature: 4°C
B’s been making potions at school this week. She came home one day with a beautiful mini glass corked bottle filled with a purple liquid with glitter in. I’d been toying with getting her out to the local park today but give her the options.
Me: What do you want to do, go to the park and get the rest of the lights down or collect potions ingredients.
B: Potions!
I was hoping she’d say that. I want to have a go too. The night before she was explaining how she’d made hers and they’ve put cotton wool in the middle to make a sort of swirling look. I reckon we can easily find things outside that have a similar effect
We grab a basket and a trug and two pairs of scissors and gloves. I go out to the local bit of ground a fair bit to cut grass for our rabbits (spoiled things that they are) and we decide we’ll head out that way. We don’t get far. As soon as we’re out of the gate we’re seeing lots of options. I wasn’t sure we’d find much in January but I was wrong. The ground was full of old chestnut husks (where the nut had been eaten or decomposed and just the outside was left). There was also some holly bushes with leaves in different colours. Lots of grasses and weeds of course and lots of sticks and plant bits on the ground which had interesting textures. The hedges had the remains of the summer blackberries.
We had fun with moss as well, digging it up and cutting it into patterns. We found old leaves which had been partly worn away leaving a brown lacy structure too (see challenge 296 – ghost leaves). We also filled out baskets with holly and pine needles, the outside spiky casings of conkers and lots of snippets of green weeds. The prize find was an old coconut shell (possibly put out with bird seed in).
B loved using her gloves and scissors to cut bits off and arrange them nicely in the basket. She was happy getting one of most things and spent some time working out the best one and throwing away the rest. I’m an instinctive collector and wanted lots of each.
Once we had a good general selection we headed home and dug out B’s potion making set. Copying the school’s method, we started off filling glass jars half way with water, then adding cotton wool, food colouring and bits we’d gathered from outside. The moss and the grasses looked particularly spooky. Then we tried different methods using pale dried out bits of plant and twig instead of the cotton wool. It was really fun. Inevitably we reached into the craft cupboard as well and added in glitter and bottle tops and lots of food colouring. We ended up with some beautiful bottles which I suspect will stay out for a while before we throw them away. We lit candles behind them and they looked cool and spooky (one to bring back next Halloween maybe?).
< Climbing the garden tree (356)
277 – Gathering potions ingredients again… with a friend.
Sunday 30 March. Sunny. 16°C
Its’ a glorious spring day, warm and lovely, and B is having a play date. As with the Treasure Hunt back in January the condition is they have to do a challenge but they can choose. They want to gather ingredients for potions again. When B and I did this back in January we found a surprising amount of options despite it being the middle of winter. Now spring is blooming everywhere and the landscape is transformed.
I give them each a basket and a pair of secateurs (with health warnings) and we head out the back. There’s lots of different flowering weeds and pretty baby leaves which they collect with relish. We find some rabbit fluff from our bunnies and they both refuse some fantastic close knit spider webs I find on the old bikes. They also find, but leave, quite a few insects loitering in the even more decaying conkers and conker shells we found two months ago. There’s a lot of moss and they pick a bit of that. There’s a large bank of primroses so I let them pick a few of those too.
Back at home I find some cut roses that I hung up to dry a couple of months ago and give them those too. They dig out food colouring, cotton wool and glitter and generally have a fun, messy time, making different flower combination potions and seeing what looks good in what. Then we take the residue outside and make a large 277 to finish up. To finish they get vinegar and bicarbonate of soda and make a volcano type mess.
276 – Making stories in the clouds >
< 278 – Emptying the garden pond
344 – Pumpkin smashing and cauldron splashing
Wednesday 22 January, Sunny, 5°C
I have an idea for today but B is having none of it. “No, you’ve had all the ideas this week. It’s my turn. I’ve got loads of ideas.”
Me: Great. Shall we do something first thing in the morning?
B: No, after school.
After school I query more. “So what are we going to do for the challenge. There isn’t much time till sunset?”
B: I don’t want to do it now. I want to do it when it’s getting dark.
Me: Ok. About 5ish then?
We get to 4.45 and I tell her it’s time to go. “Where are we going? Garden?”
B: Err, yeah ok.
I’m not convinced she has an idea but some of our best times come when we have no plan at all. She gets to work gathering leaves from the few plants still growing and puts them in the big metal fire pit. She wants to burn them but I point out (I’m annoying myself too) that we did that on Monday (see challenge 346 – Exploring willow sticks with help from the chiminea). This is definitely becoming a trend, with both of us. We do something good and then want to go back and do it again. It’s not strictly against the rules but I’m trying to get us to do new things each day. Also the fire pit is too wet to burn.
We’re a bit at a loss and then we notice the pumpkins. We picked them back in October at a local pumpkin farm. It was great fun. We had a night time picking session so it was dark and we stumbled around the fields with a group of friends picking up, examining and taking ages to find the perfect ones. Inevitably we ended up with far more than we needed. We carved two and left the others to carve for Christmas… then never got round to it. I didn’t want to throw them away so they’ve sat in the garden ever since. I pick one up and hand it to her. “You could try smashing it”.
She’s not sure at first. She’s not instinctively destructive and they were all very pretty, but then she throws a little one down and it cracks open in three places. She has another go. Definitely fun. Very messy but it’s January and cold and the garden can cope. I wonder idly if the birds will like it. Guess we’ll find out. We get through the little ones quite quickly which leaves the really big one. Its hard for her to lift but she does and it takes several throws to finally split it. Then she continues with the bits, throwing them over and over. They don’t get much smaller but they bounce in lots of interesting ways.
When she’s finished with the pumpkins she turns her attention to the big metal fire she was planning to burn things in and adds some of the pumpkin to the bits of plant already present. It had the remains of a fire in it so there are burnt twigs and charcoal bits as well. She ponders.
“We need water”.
We get the hose out, fill a bucket and she adds it in. The pumpkin bits and the wood bobs spookily on the surface and she stirs it.
“It’s a cauldron”.
It does really look like one and we’ve gone back to the potions challenge (above) again. She stirs a bit and then she gets a stick and splashes it a lot. She’s definitely right. She does have the best ideas.
< Adventures with litter picking (345)
329 – Looking for wands in the woods
Thursday 6 February. Sunny, 5°C
A lovely challenge this. It’s early February, grey and cold and has been for a while. We’re losing impetus and need a pick me up and a bigger outing. As is becoming customary, when in doubt I ask B what she wants to do.
B: “I need to find a wand.”
Turns out the school have challenged them all to find a good stick to make a wand out of as part of their Harry Potter themed term. I like this idea a lot. Finding things has always been a good starting point. I’d like a wand too! I plan a trip to the local country park (about ten minutes drive away) and reckon we can find some really good ones. It feels like a nice spin off to our other stick related challenges.
It takes a bit of effort to get out and get to the park. The joys of February. We make our way over to the woody section and immediately things get easier. It’s really beautiful in there. It’s almost dusk and the setting sunlight is shining through the trees. My hunch was right and the ground is covered in marvellous stick possibilities. We spend about ten minutes searching and find some lovely ones. B wants one about 20 cm long and not too thick, so we’ve brought a ruler with us. The longest we keep is 38 cm but most are shorter. The ground is dry thankfully so they’re not too muddy. We like best the ones with pointy ends and nobbles all the way down to make them them crooked. We end up with far more than one each. It’s like free shopping!
Like with the potions task this one has more life to it when we get home, sorting through the wands and working out which ones are best. The school pick it up from there – B comes home a few weeks later with a stick decorated in wool and glitter in a lovely hand made box! I don’t know why we haven’t done this before but suspect we’ll pick it up again.
328 – Blowing bubbles in the cold and the dark >
< 5 minute challenges (331, 330)
295 – Spotting frogspawn by the light of the full moon
Wednesday 12 March. Clear skies. 8°C
This is another quick challenge aimed at fitting in around brownies night. I’ve remembered that there’s frogspawn in the local park, discovered excitedly by a neighbour a few weeks ago. Frogspawn is one of those activities which I read about it my childhood but never actually did. A bit of research confirms my suspicion that it’s illegal to take it out of ponds (not that I would have in this case anyway- it’s a very small pond and it needs it all!). The park is close to us though so we can check in on it every few weeks and see how it grows.
It’s surprisingly unobvious to spot – I’m very glad someone wiser than me has pointed us in the right direction. We finally work out the bubbly, slimy looking stuff on the top of the pond is IT. We watch it for a bit and become aware of things moving slightly in the bubbles. B gets quickly distracted.
“Look. The suns’ setting over there and the moons exactly opposite it”.
She’s excited and I’ll take that. She’s right too. I hadn’t noticed. The full moon is round again and I’m chuffed we’ve noticed it for the second month in a row (see Looking for the moon 353 & 323). Coming back from brownies later it’s really bright and we watch it all the way home. It’s only later, when we post the challenge, that we realise what a witchy challenge it was with the slimy frogspawn and the full moon. I’m celebrating with a consolidate post of witchy challenges. They’ve been a lot of fun, particularly in the darker months, and I suspect we’ll revisit most of them at some point.
294 – Signs of Spring scavenger hunt >
< 296 Collecting things: Ghost leaves
288 – Checking in on the frogspawn… and finding tadpoles
Wednesday 19 March. Sunny. 13°C
A week later and we go back to check in on the frogspawn… and find hundreds and hundreds of tiny little tadpoles. It was really satisfying. B was fascinated. Most were still and then you’d get a crazy one racing across the water. We carefully hooked one out with a little flat wooden stick we’d taken with us and it wiggled till we put it back in the water. This is definitely going to be a weekly check in now!
287 – Spotting things: Birds >
< 289 – More fun with hand shadows
274 – Checking in on the tadpoles…
Wednesday 2 April. Sunny. 17°C
Two weeks on and they’re definitely getting bigger… I think they’ve grown a lot. B is a little disappointed they’re not the size of golf balls! They have a good wiggle motion going now.
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