Fabric upcycle: make a chicken door stop
September 11, 2014 – 5:55 am | No Comment

To make this chicken door stop I used the template kindly offered by Bake and Sew. I adjusted the sizes in mine to make it a little larger by adding 4 cm on each …

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Build, create and have fun with Happy Mais, the ecological bricks

Submitted by on November 2, 2009 – 5:17 am2 Comments

happy-mais

I get so excited when I find new toys that are educational, stimulating and safe for the kids as well as  the planet, environment friendly, produced within a fair working environment and distributed in total respect of fair trade.  If you add to that an affordable price you have a winner.

Happy Mais eco bricks are made with maize extract and coloured with non toxic food dyes so they are totally safe for young children.  Completely biodegradable and compostable, they are very easy to use to build anything. The pieces stick together like magic just by moistening the side you need to attach no glue necessary just natural ecological maize extract and water. The images below are only some of the great sculptures you can make; the possibilities are enormous with a little imagination.

happy-mais-animalshappy-mais-snowman These eco bricks are a great alternative to plastic bricks and are so much better than plasticine, they don’t make terrible marks under the little fingernails and you don’t spread around the house the little pieces of plasticine that somehow find their way under little feet that then spread them all over the house…including your favourite rug! No I have never been a great fun of plasticine.

Such a natural product could not live up to its name if it wasn’t ethical too. In fact the manufacturing company, Ecotoys Srl, makes a donation for every packet sold to the “Soleterre” association (Earth Fund Association), which protects and conserves large areas of tropical rain forest.  happy-mais-dinosaur-and-castlehappy-mais-house

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2 Comments »

  • Did you make the sculptures in the pictures? Impressed if so! We tried the maize stuff, but I think the children were too young. They got them all wet and everything turned to a flat mush!

  • maria says:

    I have to admit our sculptures are not as good as those in the photos, but they are improving by the day. We had the same initially as we were soaking them too much, but once we got to grips with the amount of moisture needed the sculptures improved massively

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