Catching Up

Here are a few pictures of art projects we've been up to these last few months.  You didn't think we were being idle, did you?

Bead-covered vases as Easter gifts

Crayon shaving Easter banner

Home-made Kentucky Derby hats

Fence murals

With summer vacation just three days away, I am scrambling to come up with other fun ideas to keep the kids busy.  There will be plenty of swimming and reading of course, but I am determined to keep the creative juices flowing.  More to come!

Happy Valentine's Day!

February's theme was easy to come up with.  Valentine's Day presents the perfect opportunity for kids to create special gifts for their loved ones, so I supplied stickers, construction paper, glitter glue, ribbon, and stamps, and I let the girls create on their own.  There were many evenings spent making secret Valentines for family members rather than the usual free-play.  They were very proud of what they came up with.  They even decided to wrap presents to go along with their Valentines, which usually meant wrapping an object each person already owned and surprising them with it on Valentine's Day.  Although Elliot took it upon herself to cut a Box Top off of a cereal box and wrap it for her big sister, whose school is collecting them.  So thoughtful!  Here are a few examples of what they came up with:

Then for the girls' school Valentine exchanges we used a project from www.artfulparent.com using melted crayon shavings with watercolor paints.  Superbowl Sunday provided the perfect afternoon to complete this project, which turned out beautifully.

Now I just have to figure out what March's craft table will look like.  Perhaps something having to do with the garden we will be planting soon?  Stay tuned!

Let It Snow

Just as this blog was started as a result of a New Year's resolution, so too I am here once again as a result of such a resolution.  While Elliot has the opportunity to do lots and lots of crafts as a part of her preschool curriculum, I have been feeling a bit sorry for Rebecca, who, currently in first grade at a public school, seldom does any.  So I made the goal to keep the workspace in my bedroom clear for ongoing art projects for the girls to do at their leisure, each month changing up the theme.  We might do an organized project together each month, or we might not (life is busy with three kids), but I really want the girls to be able to be creative in their own way when inspiration hits them.

We started the month with a special activity to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany.  I printed out black and white pictures of the three wise men with Mary and Baby Jesus, we colored the pictures with crayon, then we brushed them with canola oil to make the drawings more transparent.  The effect is supposed to be similar to a stained glass window.  I have seldom seen Elliot spend such a long time at and do such a detailed job coloring as she did with this project.  They turned out very nicely, though it took so long for the oil to dry we didn't actually hang them in the window until after Epiphany.  Oh well!

For the rest of the month the theme was snow.  Okay, so we don't happen to live in a part of the world where it snows, but in lots of other places people get to play in, admire, shovel and curse (that's for you Alaskans) snow.  I pulled out a bunch of leftover origami paper and let the girls try their hands at making paper snowflakes.  I was impressed by how many they wanted to make.  This lasted for weeks and weeks, and I am still finding pieces of cut paper that has been tracked around the house.  Eventually we strung them in the window near our dining table for all to enjoy, next to a few of Elliot's snowman projects from school.  I suppose the color in the designs make them less chilly, but it was good scissors and folding practice.

Last weekend we added to January's theme by making our own snowglobes.  The girls were sad when we had to put the Christmas snowglobes away with the other Christmas decorations, so I thought it would be fun to make snowglobes we could enjoy all winter.  I found a few babyfood jars that had been cleaned out for re-use, then I had the girls pick a couple of small toys that they hadn't played with in a while.  Rebecca chose a Princess Jasmine figurine along with some greenery from the dinosaur tub, and Elliot chose a little plastic sheep, to which I added a lego tree.  We glued the toys to the lids of the jars, added water and glitter, and presto!  Our very own snowglobes.  Aren't they cute?

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!