Well, we had a trip to Creative Space all lined up for the half-term holiday. Julie, my ingeniously clever bonus daughter, has been there several times and loves it. She went to college and studied ceramics, so she knows the ropes, but says it’s great for children too.
The first time, she painted some mugs as special birthday presents. And more recently, she made her dad a gorgeous fishy dish for Christmas because she knows he’s a keen angler.
Oodles of choice
She has explained how you go along to one of the two shops in Copenhagen (in Østerbro or Frederiksberg) and start by choosing a piece of crockery: a plate, coffee cup, animal or any of the 170 items on sale. Prices start at 150 kroner per item, depending on the size.
Next you browse through the books bursting with ideas or dream up your very own unique design. You can also use the sponges, stamps or templates available, and the friendly staff are happy to help. Choose your paints and off you go, up and running, dripping, stippling and splattering to your heart’s desire.
Then finally, you leave all the rest in the capable hands of Creative Space, and they will glaze and fire your creation just so. After a week of suspense, you can come back, pick it up and very carefully take it home, ready to wow all your friends with your unique imagination and artistic accomplishments.
Our plan backfired – or I did
Julie has talked about it in such glowing terms that we were all fired up to give it a go ourselves. The perfect way to spend a couple of hours having fun, we thought.
What wasn’t quite so perfect was that I happened to catch a tummy bug on the day in question, so we’ve had to postpone it until the week after the deadline for this column. Don’t worry, we’ll put the photos of our trip on the blog at helendyrbye.blogspot.com, so you can see what we got
up to.
Party, party!
Creative Space caters for groups and kids’ birthday parties – just call and they’ll work out the details and might even pack up their stuff and bring it out to you if it’s feasible.
If you know someone having a hen night this Easter, they could give it a go. Who knows, maybe a bunch of creative chicks could make the bride a tea set that will really take the biscuit!
Stranded! What now?!
As we still needed some photos for this column, the question was … what can you do with children without moving far from the convenience of your own home, so to speak?
With Easter coming up, we hit on painting eggs! Or rather, we very gently came up with painting eggs. You can suck the contents out first, if you really want to do it properly, by poking a small hole in one end of the egg, a slightly larger hole in the other end and then thoroughly ‘blending’ the egg inside using a thin piece of wire.
Then you can blow in the small hole and point the other end over a bowl. Gloop. Eggy breads for breakfast anyone? There’s a good YouTube video explaining how.
Or, like us, you can play it safe and leave the eggs intact in the hope that they’ll be a bit less fragile. After all, we had one two-year-old, only two eggs in the fridge and too far to the shops, so we decided to let the paint dry before scrambling about removing the yolk and white.
A blue rinse please
They do look pretty. So did the eggcups, high chair and table, and even Petra’s hair got a rather dashing blue rinse when she reached past Laura and grabbed the blue paintbrush. It had rather a longer handle than she was expecting, and someone had put the bristles on the wrong end! Fancy that! Luckily the paint washed out eventually.
When we’d run out of eggs, we ransacked the fridge again and did some potato printing by cutting patterns in the flat side of the spud once it was cut in half. If you want to change colour, you just remove a thin slice and off you go again.
Laura kept a slice shaped like a heart and it’s drying next to the eggs. It’ll be fun to see what happens: whether it’ll go mouldy, end up on the Christmas tree next year – or gets wolfed down by the dog.
