Messy play is something that we have always loved doing. It’s not about the end product, it’s about all the processes involved which is so much more important. One of our favourite messy play activities is conker rolling – an activity we have done both at home and with the children at playgroup. It is a bit of a seasonal adaptation of the good old marble rolling activity, and a great way of using all of those conkers that the kids seem to collect.

The kids have been asking if they can do some conker rolling, but we’ve run out of conkers. A quick look in the box showed us that we had rather a lot of pine cones to do something with. A-ha!! Pine cone painting it was…

You will need…

Pine cones

Paper

Paint

A box or a tray

We used big pieces of black sugar paper so that we could use them for Christmas wrapping paper. We decided to stick to just white paint to create a snowy sort of effect, but you could us whatever colours you want – I’m thinking it would be great to do with bright colours for bonfire night crafts!

I popped the paper in a box. You can use any sort of box you want. We went for a deeper box so that we could get really physical with it, without worrying about the cones flying out everywhere. We tried two different ways – firstly blobbing the paint on the paper and letting the cones pick up the paint. This had a really lovely effect, but meant that there was quite a big ‘splat’ in the middle (and took ages to dry!).

We then tried again, but by blobbing some paint onto the cones themselves, and then shaking them about. This was the messier option but I loved the snowy effect.

We tried different ways of moving the cones about, from rolling to shaking. We found that shaking the box definitely created the best effects – and was much more fun!!

They looked so pretty and we decided they would be absolutely perfect for wrapping up Christmas presents for a really special handmade touch.

The beauty with this activity is that you can use any objects you want – marbles, conkers, pine cones, even things like lego bricks or small toys – to create all sorts of lovely patterns and textures.