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.

Advent Tree

The season of Advent is upon us, and Rebecca and Elliot are extremely excited for Christmas! They are singing Christmas carols and enjoying Christmas lights and decorations on the houses in town. Normally our family spends the weekend after Thanksgiving buying and decorating our Christmas tree, which we will then enjoy for over a month. This year, however, we will be buying a living Christmas tree so we can plant it in our back yard after Christmas. Living Christmas trees, unlike cut trees, are only supposed to be inside one's home for four to five days, but because we still want to have a tree brighten our living room and keep us in the holiday spirit, we have decided to do an Advent tree until Christmas Eve, when we will bring in and decorate our living tree.

Our Advent tree is a small, artificial tree that we inherited from Jared's grandmother. It is just the right size for our two girls, and it is the perfect precursor to what will replace it in a few weeks' time. Several times each week we read a portion of the story of Christ's birth from the Bible, and then we have the girls decorate an ornament for one of the important characters in that part of the story. The ornaments are simple, just coloring pages of Biblical characters (Gabriel, Mary, Joseph, Herod, etc). After the girls color their ornaments using crayons or markers or colored pencils, even glitter, they are mounted onto a piece of construction paper and placed on the tree. Our goal is to keep the Christmas story at the front of all of our minds as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas morning. We are using our Advent wreath, and the girls both received Advent calendars from their Godmothers, all of which are other ways to keep Advent holy and count down the days until Christmas, but I wanted to do something that my four and nearly two-year-old can actually interact with and make their own, so this is what we came up with.

Speaking of Christmas, I just finished our fourth knit stocking (above are three of the four), and it's about time too! I started it one year ago, and since I was unable to finish it before Christmas, I put it down and didn't pick it up again until last week. There's something about the holidays that makes me want to be knitting something, so I've decided to knit a tree skirt as my next project. We don't have one still after years of celebrating Christmas together, and it's about time we did. I likely won't finish it before Christmas 2010, but Christmas 2011 should be easy to pull off.

Fall Fun

So I guess we have dropped off the face of the blogging world, at least for the last two months! This is in part due to the fact that we have been BUSY! Between hosting out-of-town family, Halloween, Rebecca's fourth birthday, and now Thanksgiving, we have been up to our ears in planning, cleaning, cooking, and everything else. What's more, I have decided not to try and stick to my one art project per week regimen and instead work toward less frequent but more extensive projects. The truth is that between preschool, story time at the library, and our Church's child care, my kids do lots of art without me, and instead of throw together a quick project before the week's deadline is up, I want to plan projects that are more involved and more meaningful. With the holidays upon us there will be no shortage of ideas and opportunities for art experiences to introduce to my kids, and I am excited to see what we come up with.

For now I will share a few pictures of crafts we made at Rebecca's fourth birthday.

It was a chilly afternoon party, so we went with a fall theme. This picture is a leaf book that the kids at the party put together. I ordered plastic leaf rubbing forms from Oriental Trading, and each kid was able to create a collection of leaf prints to take home.

Also from Oriental Trading,

this second picture is a cardstock leaf with a paint-covered design the kids could reveal by scratching the paint away with little wooden sticks. Some simply scratched designs in the paint, while others decided to scratch all the paint off.

Finally, the third picture shows two contact paper trees I cut out and stuck to the wall of our covered porch. Rebecca and Elliot and I went outside and gathered as many different leaves as we could and put them in baskets for the kids to press onto the sticky contact paper. We found that the green leaves stuck better those that had already dried out.

Digital Photography

So it's been a while since my last post. A vacation to Alaska happened. And then the start of preschool happened. Now we find ourselves finally settling in to our fall routines, and I suppose it's about time to resume our weekly art projects. Even though this blog is short on posts, Rebecca and Elliot have not ceased dabbling in art projects. Rebecca's preschool class is making a paper vegetable garden in their classroom, and so far they have crafted carrots and broccoli to plant in said garden, not to mention their painted blue sky, brown dirt, and glittered raindrops. Elliot continues to scribble with crayons and colored pencils without end, and already she is using strokes that her older sister didn't try using until she was over the age of two (this is what happens when a child has an older sibling to imitate).

Before our trip to Alaska one of the girls' California grandmothers gave Rebecca a digital camera to use to take pictures. It was an older camera that she had since replaced, and it was red! Rebecca was in love and set to taking pictures immediately. We actually started Rebecca her own free flickr site on which she can post her favorites. Take a look!

www.flickr.com/rebeccasflickrphotos

Elliot has even taken her turn at snapping a few shots with the camera, though we haven't started a flickr page for her, yet. Let's just say that I just recently uploaded 71 pictures to our iphoto application, all of which Elliot had taken, and most of which were nothing more than close-ups of her fingers. Here are some samples for you to enjoy. And yes, the picture at the top of this post is a self-portrait that Elliot took of herself.

The Hole Punch

This week's project was another one that developed on its own. After a fun weekend getaway I was planning to spend the morning doing laundry and cleaning house while the girls played nicely with the toys they so missed while we were gone, but instead Rebecca decided to get into the art materials, and Elliot followed soon after. Still afraid to give up complete supervision of the art stuff, I decided to hang around and help as needed. Rebecca stumbled upon a kid-size hole punch

that came in a flower press kit she received from her aunt and uncle in Atlanta and was immediately intrigued. I showed her how to punch holes in paper and then string ribbon through the holes. At first she had a little trouble lining the hole punch up so that it made a complete circle for stringing ribbon, but after a little practice she figured out the technique. The ribbon stringing concept was also a bit tricky for her as far as weaving the ribbon in and out of the holes. With my help she was able to approach the first hole from the top and the next hole from the bottom, but when left on her own she preferred wrapping the ribbon around the edge of the paper and putting it through the top each time.

Elliot also had fun pressing the hole punch handle down with her palm, and after helping her punch several holes in a sturdy cereal box I tried to teach her how to string a shoelace through the holes she had made because, let's face it, she really does want to do everything that her older sister does. Instead of weaving the shoe lace she liked to pull it completely through each hole.

The hole punches were also a big hit. Rebecca used some of them to glue onto the papers she had strung along with pressed flowers from earlier in the spring, and Elliot enjoyed pressing the punches through the holes they came from in the first place, as well as scattering them around on the carpet. I guess laundry and house cleaning will have to wait until after naps today, with an unplanned but necessary vacuum job in order after this morning's art fun.