We’ve been having lots of fun this season turning our allotment harvest into veggie animals, so I thought I’d share this fun craft activity with you.
Every year my local horticultural society holds their annual show in September. There are lots of categories you can enter your produce into – things like ‘heaviest pumpkin’ and ‘best floral arrangement’ – and there is a whole section exclusively for children. The kids were planning to make entries for the miniature garden category, but we haven’t been very organised and ran out of time – next year we’ll do better! We did manage to find some time for Lily to make an entry for the ‘animal made from fruit and/or vegetables’ category though, here’s what we made.
First of all we chose some veggies from the allotment that were either ripe or mini-sized, here’s our selection:
Then we had a chat about what Lily might like to make. The mutant tomato (it’s ‘green zebra’ variety which doesn’t turn red, by the way) you can see at the top of the picture seemed an obvious choice for a body / head so we started with that!
Lily had a play with the tomatoes and chillies to see what would work best. She went for chilli ears…
and a tomato nose…
We used the little green bits from the tops of the tomatoes (is there a proper name for these?) as whiskers. We made a little hole in the green tomato with a cocktail stick to poke each piece into – it’s worth leaving a bit of stalk on things for this reason. We dipped into our french bean harvest and snipped the stalk off a couple to make the eyes.
Here’s our creature having a little cuddle! We had a bit of a challenge getting him to sit upright, so we added chilli pepper feet and a tiny tomato bobtail to stabilise him.
The final touch was to give him a bed of carrot leaves to sit on, and he was finished! Lily can’t decide if he’s a rabbit, a cat or a red-nosed reindeer, what would you call him?!
Making creatures out of fruit and vegetables is a great craft to do with the kids, it really gets their imaginations going and you don’t need much in the way of preparation or equipment. I’d say it’s well worth having some cocktail sticks handy, they’re brilliant for making holes and stabilising things in general, you may also need a sharp knife to add details (an adult job, obviously).
Oh, and Lily won third prize for her creature – she was so proud 🙂
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