Care-a-lot from stuff in the recycling bin

I wasn't quite sure where we were going with this when we started out this morning. One kid was dressed as batman and the other as a princess and all they told me was they wanted to make something to play with.

I started them off with a bunch of cardboard boxes that I turned inside out and we hot glued together to make some sort of generic base. As the conversation progressed and they were chatting away whilst drawing all over it with pens, they decided that they wanted to make a Care Bear house. I picked up a few Care Bear things at the local charity shop recently. A stack of early reader Care Bear books that my five year old is enjoying reading to her four year old sister, and a bag full of what I guess must be Care Bear party favour toys or something. They are just little plastic models of Care bears, but the kids have been enjoying imaginative play and reinacting the books with them, so they decided they needed a home for these little dudes. They are so cheap and nasty that the dodgy print registration on them leaves a lot of them looking in weird directions and some with totally red eyes. Freaky!
As far as I can remember from the 1980s the Care Bears lived in some kind of rainbow mad castle type land in the sky called Care-a-lot. There were the pictures in the books to go on, but really nothing specific, so a general theme of "house made from clouds" was what we went for. I've spoken before about how much I love my $1.50 foam cutter from Daiso. It's a fab little tool that allows you to cut crazy shapes neatly out of sheets of styrofoam. My husband now knows that if there are ever any deliveries to his office with styrofoam that's going to get thrown out then he's to bring it home to me so I can play with my foam cutter! With this fabulous little tool I cut out a load of cloudy shapes and we hot glued them onto the box structure. I didn't really have a plan in mind, we just did one bit at a time and let it grow.

Once we'd glued it I put it out in the garage for the kids to paint with white primer. They did a bloody good job! The only bit I had to touch up afterwards was the inside of the cardboard tube turrets.

We left it to dry in the garage and the kids coloured in a couple of rainbow bits to glue on. One was just for decoration, but the other was a rainbow slide.
A parcel arrive while the thing was drying, that contained a load of white styrofoam packing peanuts. Talk about good timing! So we glued a load of those on too and lastly I made a few flags with BBQ skewers to stick on.
We set it up in the livingroom on our blue bedsheet and I got out some of my polyester soft toy stuffing for them to chuck around it.

The kids wanted the little heart and star freinds that live with the Care Bears, so I cut them out of the styrofoam and coloured them with sharpies.

Yes, that is a Care Bear on the can you just saw.

Everybody poops, even Care Bears.

also, I bet you didn't know they had pet rats. I didn't.

I don't know how long it'll last for, but they are really enjoying it. We still have a load of the styrofoam left, so to even out the horrendous sickly sweetness of the Care Bears, I think we might have to make Superman's Arctic fortress of solitude to go next to it!