Wise Men's Gifts ~ Celebrity Hairstyle

Tuesday, 6 March 2012

Wise Men's Gifts

22:30

Unknown

We are continuing to do the weekly bible story school assemblies through Open the Book.

We have finally reached the New Testament. We did do the birth of Jesus as our last one before the children broke up for Christmas, so now we go back and cover the Epiphany.

We are hopefully going to be able to borrow wise men's costumes from another Open the Book team, but those costumes don't come with gifts for them to carry. Actually for this story the Wise Men are called Star Watchers, but you all know who I mean.

One of the problems we have with props is making them look clear and bright enough when we are standing at the front of the school hall, with a white wall behind us. I saw this awesome post on another blog about using paint on the inside of bottles and knew I could use that technique to make something really good!

So I went on a charity shop trawl and this is what I came up with.

I love the shape of the orange container and the chunkyness of the other one. You can see I paid £3.50 for the 2 items and each pot of paint cost me £1.

I wasn't sure what colour the orange one would turn out with the pink paint inside it, but it came out OK in the end.

The first thing to do is give your bottles a good clean and remove any labels.

Give your paint a good shake or stir, then pour it into the vase, bottle or other container. This paint is quite thick and in hindsight I might have chosen to add just a tiny bit of water. It's ordinary household emulsion (wall paint).

If you can choose (and believe me I did not even think about that when buying them and it made me laugh) a vase that has an opening that the paint pot just exactly fits into, so much the better, you don't have to stand over it.

Once the paint is in there, tip and tilt the bottle so that the paint coats the sides.

In this case, of course, I was also able to stand the bottle upside down, balanced on top of the paint pot. That saved a lot of effort.

Keep tipping and tilting until the paint covers all inside surfaces. With thinner paint, you might need to do more than one coat, but with thicker paint it can be difficult to get into all parts of the vase.

If something like this happens, you need something long and pointy, but flexible, I used a bamboo skewer and just poked it in there and fiddled around with it until the paint went into all areas.

Leave to dry. You can see, some parts didn't quite get covered first time, but as the paint came out and fell onto the tray I just scooped it up with a teaspoon and poured it back in there.

But that's only 2 gifts. I knew I wanted to do something gold for the other gift. I have lots of gold wrapping paper. So, I found a mailing box, and just wrapped it off. I chose this gold wrapping paper that has a bit of a pattern on it, rather than the plain one. I like this.

I wrapped it as neatly as I could, but used double sided tape roller between layers of paper, rather than sellotape over the top, to keep it looking really neat and tidy.