Pounded Flower Shirt

Following Jen’s fern printing tutorial and taking a cue from Spring Thinking I pounded out this shirt a couple weeks back. I had a bouquet that was past it’s prime just screaming for me try. Once I had exhausted the viable flowers from the bouquet I was hungry for more. So I raided the herb garden for some chives. I placed a paper towel covered board between the two layers of fabric and more paper towel on top of the flowers and bashed away to my hears content. Boy did my eyes water when I was pounding those chives! I had a lot of fun and even let Seth take a whack. I still want to try ferns but I think other plants in the garden warrant a try as well. Next time I’ll remember to place a towel under the whole thing a lot sooner. Luckily there were no holes but there was a bit of discoloration on the side facing the patio blocks. Oops!

Once all was said and done I actually liked the back of the shirt the best. Also, after washing, the chives held up the best. The flower portion has faded somewhat but not the blades. The Gerbia’s from the bouquet did fade a bit but still are recognizable. I wonder if the result would have been different had I used flowers that were fresher.

Glitter Cards & Painted Canvas

Now that Father’s Day has come and gone I can post this with out ruining any surprises. I’ve been on a kick to de-emphasize the value we put on material things in our household. This is especially true when it comes to the kids. I think all of their toys scatter about the house pushed me over the edge. In the case of Father’s Day this meant no big store bought gifts for Papa. Something homemade by the kids sounded good and art even better. However, I wanted something more permanent than your average kids painting stuck up with a magnet on the fridge. I finally settle on painting canvases inspired by Jean at The Artful Parent. I bought a two pack of cheap 16×20 stretched canvases for 1/2 off at a discount craft store and set the kids up. However, after watching Eleanor’s reaction to painting with water I thought it best to allow the neighbor girl to paint the 2nd canvas instead of Eleanor. I let them each have a dollop of three different color paints at a time on a paper plate. I’ve finally smartened up about not letting Seth have access to all the paint colors he wants. The paper plate served as a pallet for them to mix colors. This was a suggestion from Seth’s teacher and it worked marvelously.

Then we needed a card to go along with the gift. Seeing a post by Kristen at Pepper Paints for a Weekly Unplugged Project I pulled out some supplies to make glitter cards.

Here’s the how to for our version:

Supplies:

• Cardstock - one 8 1/2 x 11 sheet per card
• Self laminating sheets - one 8 1/2 x 11 sheet per card (or you could easily use contact paper)
• Glue - any old kind will work
• Crayons
• Glitter - For the less coordinated I really liked these little squeeze bottles. I found a packet of 6 colors for $1.99 at a party supply store

Steps, best done out of doors:

1. Let the kids color on one side of the paper. This will be the inside of the card.
2. Cut a self laminating sheet in half and peel the backing off of one.
3. Let the kids sprinkle the sheet with glitter. The beauty is you don’t have to worry about glue and these little squeeze bottles really controlled the amount of glitter poured out. They also took a lot more time for the kids to apply, which in my book is good.
4. Meanwhile fold the card stock in half with the drawing on the inside.
5. Once the kids are satisfied with the glitter distribution, affix the other half of the laminate sheet on top.
6. Then trim down the glitter sheet and glue them to the outside of the card.

The kids, ages 22 months to 5 1/2 yrs in this case, really enjoyed doing this project and it was much more successful then my previous projects with glitter. Interestingly, the 22 month old was the hardest to get to stop. He would have gone for another 15 minutes minimum if he hadn’t been pulled away due to his bedtime. The best part? We were able to pull this off in relative secrecy. Rather unusual for us.

Caterpillars!

Let me introduce you to our new house mates and my new dining table centerpiece. Seth’s not really into naming his buggy finds but his Papa and I call them Thing 1 and Thing 2. I believe they are both Forest Tent Caterpillars and will become rather common moths in due time if all goes well. I would prefer to be raising beautiful butterflies like Kristen but it wasn’t really up to me. Seth found these little guys over the weekend. One he carried home from a picnic at the park and the other was found on the walkway to our front door. He was very intent on keeping them so I immediately did a little internet research. I found that Discover Life has a great little caterpillar identification system for North America. (If you’re in Europe, try What’s This Caterpillar?) I found a large jar in the basement with a chipped lid and dried out rubber gasket. I tossed the lid as it had quite a potential for slicing open skin. However, I kept the metal wire hardware to use to secure cheese cloth over the opening once the little guys are in cocoons. I love how it turned out and feel it makes for a mighty fine centerpiece. Taking photos through glass is rather tricky but I hope you enjoy these shots.

Even if I didn’t have kids I think this would make for a cool conversation piece. It appears that there is quite a bit of concern brewing over reduced numbers of various butterflies. Seeing as the little caterpillars have a better chance of survival in captivity than the wild, raising butterflies may in fact be very beneficial to the environment. I for one, am going to keep my eye open for any caterpillars OTHER than the Forest Tent variety. Interested in making a Caterpillar house of your own? Here’s some details you might be interested in:

• Pay attention to where you find your caterpillar. They can be picky eaters caring for only one or two types of plants/tree leaves. Test out a leaf with your caterpillar and you’ll quickly know if he likes it. Our little guys like oak and choke cherry leaves. It’s amazing to watch them devour a leaf in a short period of time.
• Be very gentle while handling caterpillars. They bruise easily and even a broken whisker could do them in. It is beyond me how ours survived my son’s little fingers but they seem to be doing ok. I would recommend coaxing them onto a twig or leaf to transport them instead of just plucking them up.
• Find a jar that has good visibility and enough room for the butterfly or moth to spread their wings and fly out when the time comes. A box with mesh sides would work as well but that takes more effort. An old aquarium would work wonderfully if you have one sitting around.
  
• You will need a lid once the caterpillars go into cocoons unless you don’t mind butterflies or moths inside your house. Caterpillars can’t climb glass but if you have a stick going right up to the top you may want to consider a lid right from the start. Cheese cloth, wire mesh, tulle, a lid with holes cut into it, you name it.
• Place a layer of sand on the bottom of the jar. It doesn’t need to be too thick, just cover any bare ground. This will help keep the humidity steady.
• Add a stick or two or three for the caterpillars to rest on and possibly build their cocoons off of would be helpful. It also adds quite a bit to the look. Thing 1 and Thing 2 like to sleep up on the sticks and then come down to the bottom at feeding time.
  
• If you so desire you could add additional elements as well, a nice rock, some star wars figurines. You get the picture.
• A caterpillar can devour a leaf in a very short period of time, so make sure to keep a steady fresh supply at the ready. In other words don’t try to raise a caterpillar that has a craving for leaves you can’t find within 50 feet of your door.
• You will need to clean out the leaf remains and caterpillar poop every couple of days at a minimum. Simply lift out the twig the little guys tend to rest on and replace the sand with fresh stuff. Trust me, you WILL see the poop.
• If you’re lucky after a few weeks and some hardy feeding your caterpillars will go into the chrysalis stage and a week or two later emerge with wings! What an amazing transformation. Nothing seems to compare to the magic of a caterpillar change to a butterfly or moth.

I can’t wait to see how our little guys go though the circle of life. It’s been fun just having them hang out with us. For more information and other methods check out:

• How to Raise a Caterpillar
• Butterfly School
• Caterpillar Nursery

For those of you doing this with kids, don’t forget the best caterpillar book of all time - Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We have a giant board book version that I just adore.

Variations on a Theme

After figuring out my original wave bottle earlier this week I wanted to make something similar with corn syrup and thought I’d ask Seth if he wanted to help. Not only did he want to help make one for Eleanor but he almost had a breakdown because he wanted to make a wave bottle for himself. Anna had commented on my earlier post about using different oils for different effects so I tried to encourage a variation for Seth’s bottle. Well, this didn’t go over too well. He was more than willing to make other varieties for Eleanor but he wanted a blue wave bottle almost identical to his sister’s as his own. Alrighty then!

So here you have it. The bottle above was made with corn syrup a little food coloring and more of the bug buttons with the shanks cut off. Again I super glued the cap back on to avoid a spill. I left a little air at the top this time though. I’m not so happy with the color as I meant for it to be light green but accidently grabed the red at one point. The bugs do eventually float in the corn syrup but it takes them some time to slowly make their way through the goo. It’s great for little bug races. We spent quite a while turning the bottle over and waiting to see which bug would make it to the top first.

These bottle were made according to the directions in my previous post but with some variation in the ingredients. Seth’s wave bottle was filled to the brim with blue water, vegetable oil with blue glitter and seashells. We also varied the height of the water. Unfortunately, we did have to make this one twice as we found out you must mix your food coloring with the water prior to pouring in the oil or the oil gets rather cloudy. At least we think that’s what did it.

This last bottle was made with orange colored water, olive oil and a few pretty pebbles. That’s it! We filled it right up to the top and glued the cap in place. I love the color combination and the olive oil makes great bubbles when the rocks go through it.

We haven’t given these to Eleanor yet but I can tell you that a neighbors 21 month old liked them so much he tried to steal them. So I have no doubt Eleanor will find them intriguing. If nothing else it was a great project for my almost 4 yr old. He got to play with color mixing and learn about the density of certain liquids. What more could I ask for?

Collage for the Old and the Young

I created a travel project for Seth involving sandpaper with yarn and set it out to see if he would have any interest. After feeling the sandpaper and twirling the yarn he asked for paper & scissors, which I gave him. After cutting up a few pieces he asked for crayons and green glue (his term for a glue stick). And after a couple more minutes he had whipped up this lovely collage of his own design with his own chosen materials. He even got some tape and chose what wall to put it on. I was thrilled. I was also reminded that I really needed to work on getting his art supplies where he can reach them whenever inspirations strikes. Mind you, I also have to consider how far Eleanor can reach now, which makes this a bit more complex.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on my own collages since early December. I’ve posted on the one I made my sis earlier. I was able to finish that one because I had a deadline of a trip to see her. These other two are mine. Which means there was no motivation other than my desire to complete them. Although I really wanted them done, it’s the sort of thing I push off because the kids need caring for, the dishes need washing or any number of daily chores. “I’ll do it next weekend” was always at the tip of my tongue. Not only did life get in the way but I kept making silly mistakes. I forgot to attach hardware to the back before affixing the ephemera even though Jen had warned against this in her mini tutorial. Then I used inappropriate adhesives to put the drift wood on causing it to fall off a day later. Finally, when putting it up on the wall with 3m picture hook adhesives I neglected to take into account that the hook might be longer than the actual piece. Twice. Geeze! Could anything else go wrong? Well, after about 5 different attempts at putting it on the wall I finally realized I could use 3m’s command strips. To the close observer you’ll note that means I didn’t have to attach hardware to begin with as these little strips stick to both the wall and the art piece with no need for traditional picture hanging hardware. They’re like heavy duty removable Velcro. Yes, I realize I could have just pounded a nail in the wall but as I have old plaster walls this can be a dangerous proposition. So, even though I apparently could only take crappy pictures of these pieces I just had to post that it’s finally done!!!! They are complete AND up on my wall. Hip, hip hurray!!!

Here I give you my Duluth memory collages made from dirty 2×4 scraps, digital photos printed on plain recycled paper, gel mat medium, epoxy, beach sand, stones and drift wood. Phew, that was a rough one!

Potpourri Collage

What do you do with potpourri after the smell has faded? We make collages. Here’s the low down:

Materials

• Glue - in bottle is best. Glue sticks and such won’t provide enough contact area
• Stiff paper - card stock, paper board, you could even use the inside of a flattened empty cereal box
• Old potpourri - smell gone, but not forgotten - spread out on a plate or cookie sheet (You may want to remove any larger pieces so as to avoid an upset child that doesn’t understand why his 4″ pine cone doesn’t stick on the paper.)

Let the artiest “draw” with the glue. The younger they are the better luck you’ll have with smaller, full bottles so that hand dexterity isn’t an issue. Let said artist choose and arrange pieces of the potpourri to his or her satisfaction.

The 1st time Seth worked on this project he was more enamored with squeezing the glue out. Now that we’ve done this a few times and the glue novelty is wearing off he’s getting a bit more into the placement of the objects. However, there is still plenty more glue than necessary.

I love how this project can be whipped out at a moments notices with no prep and minimal clean up. Here’s the result of doing just that during a recent play date:

The blue background was made by a friend of Seth’s. I love how she lined up the cinnamon sticks. She did leave it behind for the glue to dry so I took the opportunity to frame it in some cheap Ikea frames. Using Command picture hanging strips I was able to hang Seth’s and have a gift ready in a matter of minutes.

Sun Prints

Being at my parents always brings back memories. To top it off, they have a gigantic house filled with remnants of our past. They’re trying to pair down all the stuff in preparation for retirement and the simpler life. I’ve gotta tell you though, I almost don’t want them to. I’m proud of their efforts to reduce the material side of their life but I’ve also always been proud of how they never waste anything. All scraps and miscellany have always been kept for future projects. As we’ve always been a very prolific family when it comes to creative projects that means an unbelievable amount of miscellany. When I got the wild hair to do leaf rubbings, not only did they have the perfect materials, we ran across plenty of other inspirational items. One such was a package of Sunprint paper. Seeing as they use to sell these kits in their store which closed in 1981, this little kit was more than 25 years old. Would it still work? You betcha!

Although the kits are meant for ages 6 and up I thought we could give it a try. I’m guessing there are two reasons for this age bracket - danger of ingestion of the chemical paper and the patience needed to complete the project. Regardless it worked fine for us. As this was a spur of the moment project I, of course, didn’t read the directions very carefully and pretty much went from childhood memory. Luckily it all worked out OK in this area as well. For those of you that haven’t seen sunprints, it’s simply a chemical reaction to the sunlight hitting the special paper. We only made a couple due to that patience requirement I was talking about. That, and the fact that I didn’t want to go all gun ho only to find out the paper was too old.

The first step, in the shade I might add, was placing the paper on a board and something opaque on the paper. We then laid a small sheet of glass over the top to hold it steady. The kits actually come with plexiglass but our sheet must have been lost in the last 25+ years, so I used a small sheet of regular glass from a picture frame instead.

We left the paper for a few minutes until it turned white and then ran it under water to stop the development. I would recommend having a pot of water on hand to place the images in that you can then place a lid on to block out the sunlight. This would probably make for a more crisp print. After a few minutes under water we laid the images out to dry. As the papers dried inside I was a little worried as the whole sheet was turning blue. I guessed that the paper must have just been too old. Not the case! In fact the areas turned white by the sun then turned blue and the areas that were blue under the opaque items turned white. Obviously I had forgotten this part. We left the papers to dry on the counter and then flattened them under a heavy book and ended up with these:

Simple but still fun. This is not the best photo, still if I had read the directions and planned a little better the images would have been much more crisp. Now that I know the paper is still good, we’ll certainly be trying these again during our next visit. Maybe next time we can use some kitchen gadgets or get into my mom’s button collection to find our opaque items. I can certainly see Seth getting more into these as he gets older. It’s a nice little science experiment to boot. Check out the Sunprints gallery of images and tips page for more info.

Leaf Rubbings

Funny story. I, of course, stopped reading blogs for a few days. When I did start reading them again there were so many posts I mainly just skimmed and looked at pictures. One by Jean at the Artful Parent caught my eye and reminded me that I’ve been wanting to do leaf rubbings with Seth for quite some time. Had I actually read her post I might have held off. But as it was I just saw the images and it was a sunny day in a location that actually had a lot foliage unlike Minnesota right now. I tried to get Seth to collect leaves with me but he ended up falling in the lake. Don’t ask. Half an hour later I tried again but all Seth was interested in was tossing stones in the very same lake. Fine, I gathered some foliage myself, including a plaster impression of a large leaf one of my parents had made. Recognizing that Seth needs to do art on his time schedule not mine, I simply waited. Luckily things turned and he decided to join me. I think it was actually the plaster leaf that peaked his interest the most. Whether it was because Seth is a year older than Maia, the plaster leaf or that we found cool large flat rectangular crayons the project worked pretty well for us. I can see this working even better for ages 5 and up. He did request a bit of help as he tired out quickly from rubbing large images so I’d say the younger the smaller the leaf should be and sticking to just one at a time would be good as well. The large flat crayons helped with motor control and covering large surfaces more easily. Maybe use some little soap molds to make melted crayon blocks? The older the child the more complex you can get - imagine arranging leaves into the shape of a person or landscape and doing the rubbing.

When all was said and done we had 4 lovely pages and Seth wanted to make a book out of them. When he’s in the mood I’m not about to stop him so I quickly came up with a plan and grabbed a glue stick. Here’s the skinny:

Using all same size papers, these are 8 1/2 x 11 text weight, fold each page in half and one extra for the cover.

Arrange, glue and press each “signature” into place.

You should now have a stack of glued together, folded little pieces of art. 4 sheets worked well but you could probably go up to about 6. More than that would be too thick for the cover. Glue the stack to the inside of the folded cover sheet. Front to left half, back to the right half.

After a little more pressing, you’ve got a completed book! Let the child decorate the cover or title it. Don’t forget to put his or her name and the date on the backside.

The next day before we left the grandparents house I suggested to Seth that he give the book to his grandma or grandpa. Normally, he likes this idea. This time he hugged it to his chest and emphatically stated “no! it’s mine!”. I guess he liked the project. Sometimes it’s good to simply be inspired by images and go with the flow instead of always reading the “how-to”.

Glitter AND Glue vs. Glitter Glue

The Easter Bunny left Seth some little bottles of glitter. You might be thinking that three is a little young to be introducing glitter, and your probably right. My thinking here was a) those little bottles of glitter glue are expensive for how long they last and b) I wanted to expose him to yet another art material. It seemed like a great alternative.

In the end I think glitter glue requires less constant supervision and creates less of a mess, but I won’t be buying anymore of either for another year. We’ll just use up what we have. Seth’s thoughts? It was fun to squeeze the glue out. Pouring the glitter on was ok but he prefers glitter glue. However, he did really like the end result which is much more shimmery than glitter glue.

Live and learn.

Finger Printin’ Fun!

The other day Seth and I got on the topic of fingerprints. Well, to be exact, Seth was asking about the “wrinkles” on his fingers which lead to a discussion of fingerprints which led to these fingerprint creations. I got out some water based ink pads that I had spent good money on and have never been used, instead just sitting on a basement shelf collecting dust. What’s the point in that? We set to work experimenting with different colors, different fingers and different parts of our hands. It looked like so much fun I couldn’t just sit back and watch. Mine are the really poorly taken pictures below that look like an 8 yr old did them. Of course, Seth felt the need to cut out his creations and glue them to other sheets of paper, his form of framing. He did get a little upset a couple times trying to line up one print next to the other, but with a little practice he’ll be a pro in no time. The idea of wiping off his fingers between colors didn’t cross Seth’s mind. Next time I’ll just plop down one ink pad and a few sheets of paper and he’ll be good to go. For older children I can see using multiple colors to create more complex pictures such as houses or large butterflies.