With this lovely warm weather we are out and about a lot more. Being outside is good for the whole family and helps the kids to run off some of their endless energy. We’ve been decorating and hiding rocks for a while now and wanted to make some summer painted rocks.

We used:

Bag of smooth pebbles or rocks

Selection of chalk pens

Varnish to seal the painted rocks (we use Wilko Gloss Yacht Varnish)

How to make painted bee and ladybird rocks:

We always wash and dry our rocks before painting them, this makes sure there’s no dirt left on them and there is a nice, clean surface to paint. We wanted to make 6 bee and 6 ladybird rocks so divided our pile into two and started with the ladybird rocks.

We covered each rock with a layer of the red chalk paint, adding a second coat when they were dry.

We added detail with a black chalk pen, black head, wings and of course lots of red spots.

Whilst they were drying we started on our bee painted rocks. We drew on black stripes and a black head, along with bright yellow stripes. We ended up with rocks all over the table!

We left them to dry before giving them a coat of varnish. I always seal our rocks with Wilko Gloss Yacht Varnish as we hide our rocks outside. This takes about 24 hours to dry but gives the rocks a really lovely shine. We made sure to add our local hashtag on the back of each one too. We took them out with us and hid them around our local library for people to find.

The children have played with our painted bee and ladybird rocks in the garden. We made enough that they could play noughts and crosses with them but they are also for decorating our fairy garden.