Boo!

Halloween is always a fun time to get creative, both with kids' costumes and household decorations. The girls convinced me to pull out our limited decorations a couple of weeks ago, which include a fall wreath, cobwebs, and pipe cleaner spiders that Rebecca and I made last year.

After hanging those in our covered entry way, we decided we needed to add something this year. A trip to the pumpkin patch sent us home with a couple of sticker and marker decorated pumpkins, and then we came up with these simple ghosts. The girls really did most of the work, with the exception of a bit of stapling and cutting.

They glued on the googly eyes, came up with their own ideas for the ghost faces, and taped the crepe paper streamers onto the pre-cut pieces of white craft foam. We hung them in the entry, and the girls were so excited to see their daddy's reaction when he came home that evening. "Were you scared?" they asked him. Of course he said yes!

Oh, and here is a picture Rebecca drew of a haunted house.

Nature Collections

My kids are constantly collecting sticks, rocks, leaves and feathers, and for the most part I have allowed them to do so. We always have to have a conversation about leaving natural places intact when we visit National or State Parks, but on walks to school or visits to city parks it's not uncommon for us to haul a new stick or fancy leaf home. I figured we would do something artistic with all of these things they have collected, but the piles were getting so big I decided something had to be done. Plus, I thought it would be nice to have some way of knowing where different items were collected from, and when. For smaller items (leaves, dried flowers, etc), we created "Nature Books," full of plastic sheet protectors that they can tape their findings inside and document where they came from. Just last weekend after Mass the girls were thrilled by the red leaves on the ground in front of the church, so they each gathered up a handful and stuck them in their books. We even discovered a dead praying mantis on our back porch that the girls are anxious to make a page for.

With the larger items (pine cones, sticks, etc) I would like to build some sort of display that sits in our covered entry where they can show off their newest finds for a short while before they make their way to the green waste and are replaced by even newer treasures. More on that later. As for their collections up this point, well, they are sitting in paper grocery bags at the side of the house. Perhaps one of these days we will drag them out and rediscover all those things we have forgotten about.

Inch by Inch, Row by Row

As you can tell by the name of this post, we have a garden in the back yard, and after a slow start it is now growing quite voraciously. It's hard for me to keep up with during this season of school starting and being 29 weeks into my pregnancy, but we have been able to enjoy many helpings of tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, snap peas, and basil (Elliot loves green pasta). Butternut squash and pumpkins are finally growing, and I look forward to cooking with both of them as the weather cools off a bit.

Speaking of warm weather, while it has been a mild summer, one hot afternoon a couple of weeks ago the girls and I pulled out the watercolors and pencils and made a poster to document all that is growing in our garden. I brought in a few different kinds of tomatoes and a cucumber from the garden to help our paintings. Elliot mostly scribbled, but Rebecca was able to come up with some pretty good representations of both. I added a few of my own renderings to the poster as well. Take a look! We then cleaned, peeled and nibbled on our freshly picked snacks.

Valentines

Last weekend, other than watching parts of the Super Bowl, the girls and I made valentines. Using a marbled paper project idea that I clipped from our local newspaper last summer, we took shaving cream (thanks Dad!), food coloring, a squeegie, and lots of pastel-colored cardstock, and spent an hour in the back yard enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. Not to mention that Dad had an Ikea bookshelf to put together inside, so this was also a good way to keep us out of his way.

The process was very easy, though I recommend dressing everyone in playclothes because we all got messy. First, spray an ample amount of shaving cream onto a cookie sheet. Next, drop a few drops of food coloring into the shaving cream. Using a tool of some sort (a toothpick or a fork work well), swirl the food coloring around in the shaving cream to create an interesting, marbled design. Then press a piece of cardstock on top of the shaving cream, and after taking the cardstock off of the shaving cream, squeegie it so that all remnants of the shaving cream have been removed. What is left is a lovely marbled design imprinted on the cardstock paper.

At first I tried

to keep the process controlled, but before long Rebecca and Elliot were doing the whole thing themselves. They found the little bottles of food coloring to be absolutely irresistable, and when I let the girls have free reign over the quantity used in each successive swirling, the results were brilliant! We kept the hose nearbye for rinsing the squeegie of shaving cream, among other things. At one point Rebecca accidently stepped into the shaving cream cookie sheet, but she rinsed her shoes off with the hose, wiped dried them in the grass, and we were good to go.

After the paper dried, we cut it into heart shapes, glued the hearts to red lace doilies, and added a few heart stickers for effect. Now the girls have valentines to give to their grandparents, and Rebecca has plenty to bring to her preschool class on Friday.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Paper Princesses

During our most recent trip to the public library, we checked out a book entitled, The Paper Princess by Elisa Kleven. The book is about a young girl who creates a paper princess who is then separated from the girl by a large gust of wind. After many adventures, and after finding hair for her own head (the young girl hadn't yet added hair to the princess when the wind carried her away), the paper princess is returned to her maker. After reading the book, my girls and I decided to make paper princesses of our own. Using the book as a guide, I drew the outline of three princesses, brought out the crayons, pencils, and markers, and let the girls decorate their own princess. And yes, I did one too. Then I took out the glue and cut lots of strands of yarn, ribbon, twine, etc, and I let the girls choose which medium they wanted to use for hair. Finally, I cut out crowns from tin foil for each princess. It was great fun, and the girls have been playing with their princesses ever since. We even went so far as to make beds and pillows for our princesses, just as the girl does in the story.

More Resolutions

Another year is upon us, and I'm one of those people who insists on setting resolutions for the year ahead. This blog stemmed from a resolution to plan and carry out art experiences for my children on a weekly basis. While I didn't stick to my original plans completely, I'm still glad for the many art projects my kids and I created together. The following is a picture of the Advent Tree before the Advent decorations were removed and replaced with Christmas ornaments on Christmas Eve. It was a fun project, and decorating the tree on Christmas Eve added to the anticipation of Christmas in such an exciting way. Not to mention the fact that we weren't wrestling ornaments from the girls' possession for the entire month of December as we have done in years past.

I have two resolutions for 2011, and they sadly don't involve art projects at all. Instead I am determined to learn Spanish and teach my children Spanish, a language which my husband (and their father) teaches to high school students as a profession, and a language that is incredibly beneficial to know living in California. My other resolution is to organize our belongings. Our garage is starting to get out of control, and the closets in our house just might be crammed with kids' clothing and old toys that I need to go through and give to a consignment sale or pass on to another family. I of course still want to run more and cook more and finish paintings of mine that remain incomplete, but I have found that setting a few serious goals is more realistic for me than is setting multiple goals that I might loose track of and be defeated by.

Nevertheless, you can be assured that we will continue to pursue art projects, and that I will continue to blog about our experiences with those projects here. The next few photos are a recap of some of our Christmas-time crafts, including graham cracker gingerbread houses that the girls made at Elliot's second birthday party, as well as drawings I had the girls do of said gingerbread houses. So often kids spend their drawing time coloring in coloring books rather than drawing on their own, and they don't learn how to use their own mastery of lines (or lack of) to create images from what they see. I will definitely spend more time giving my kids a blank piece of paper and asking them to draw something that is put in front of them. I've already noticed that Rebecca has a standard human form that she uses when drawing people, including round circles with straight spokes sticking out of them for hands and feet. I'm not sure if she came up with this herself or if it has been adopted from one of her preschool friends, but I am determined to help her see past these simplified shapes to what things actually look like. A slow process, to be sure, but an important one just the same.