Archive for the ‘Art Activities’ Category

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Fuzzy Animals

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Sometimes on Friday I am at a little bit of a loss as to what the heck we are going to do. Sometimes I blog surf for a little while, sometimes I go stare at one of the, um, five(?!), (okay, so one of those is just paper…), places that I keep the kids art supplies, and hope for inspiration to strike, with various levels of desperation, depending on whether or not there are *already* hordes of 5 year olds and their siblings running amok and I still don’t have any ideas. And honestly some weeks I never get there, and no one cares, except possibly Ellie, who likes ritual and predictability.

This week we fell back on ‘what is in this box in the closet?’

Which was a large unopened bag of pompoms, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and stick on googly eyes. I threw in markers and glue guns for good measure, and said we were making monsters, or anything else you could think of.

We went through a stunning number of popsicle sticks, I mean, we’ve slowly been going through that box for YEARS, and then bang, the last half box was gone. I also thought it was interesting how many pompoms they could attach to the popsicle sticks just by wrapping them with pipe cleaners. Lots of wrapping and sticking and drawing and glueing, and out came lots and lots of monsters and some other curious frames and constructions. This turned out to be a very absorbing project for most of the 5yos, but not the younger kids.

Where do you get your art project ideas from when you are stumped?

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Cloud Dough

Friday, January 13th, 2012

I saw the cloud dough exploration over at TinkerLab and I knew we had to try it too.

We used 24c flour (two bags), and 3c oil, plenty for the 7 kids we had playing. It was fabulous fun, I thought maybe I could bring it into school when we were done.

At least it was plenty for the first hour. Then the yard started looking a bit snowy.

By the end it was a lot snowy.


We don’t usually get much snow here.

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Painting a Cardboard Fortress

Friday, January 6th, 2012

This was fun. Why paint one cardboard box when you can paint about 15 of them all riveted together with makedo? This fortress should have been more spectacular, but it and our entire cardboard stash was rained on the day before. Sad! Shoring up a damp wilted cardboard fortress with more soft cardboard doesn’t work so well. But it did help. The broom holding up the center helped more. Embarrassing, but practical.

The girls really did love it. I put out tempera paint in pie pans, then water color spray bottles, and paper + masking tape. They painted and argued and painted, and worked on learning to spray paint their names. I felt like I was educating the next generation of taggers. One day cardboard buildings & spray bottles, the next underpasses and spray paint.

What did you do with all of your holiday cardboard?

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Acrylic Stamping on Fabric

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

One of the projects we did for my textiles class was stamping on canvas bags. Before that class I made this example piece of stamping a leaf and custom sponge stamp. Stamping with leaves is so much fun! I put a bit of acrylic paint into a baking tin, brushed it think with a brush, then rubbed the leaf in it. That kept the paint mainly on the leaves’ rib and veins which let me get a good print. I didn’t even have to use a brayer, I just pressed down evenly with my fingers. I was surprised that it worked as well as it did with as little fuss.

One of the other things I tested for my class is cutting sponge stamps, but I wanted something light enough that little hands with little scissors could cut it. I found these lightweight sponge-cloths, and they worked pretty well. They are about 3/16″ thick and pre-moisened, so they are soft. They are a little fiddly to stamp with, because they are thin, but they are nice to cut stamps out of and worked fine with just a smear of paint on my tray. After stamping the tree branches I went back later and drybrushed in the foliage.

Here are some of the kid’s bags, in addition to leaves and sponges they had pre-cut potato stamps, lemon and apple halves, pine cones and other fall detritus, and of course, their hands.

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Texture Balls

Friday, November 11th, 2011


So… the picture could be better. This is a pre-no-brain-because-I-am-designing-curriculum project, harking back to my texture book tutorial but in 3D! Ooooh! (I am tired.) I used red, orange, yellow, brown and green, and I tried to arrange it (without actually buying any fabric) so that there were two textures for each color and at least two colors for each texture, if that makes any sense. So there was brown suede and brown corduroy, as well as green and red corduroy. It is fascinating! (pretend I’m one) There is this one silky texture in two different colors! And this one color, comes in two other different textures! And it goes around in circles! The patterns! Mind boggling! Clearly I need to go to bed.

In other news, I survived my spinning class yesterday. It went pretty well, there were a couple of kinders and first graders who needed more hands on help than I could give them, but really everyone managed it, in the end I think there was just one kinder who refused outright to spin, and one first grader who in the end had to hold the end of his wool up while I gave his drop spindle a few mighty spins and we twisted up the whole (3′) length at once. Sometimes you just need to move on to the next project. Out of 23 though, that’s not too bad, I think that means I made my 90% success goal. (We used this method if you’re curious.) It also means that there were several kinders who with a few minutes of personal attention actually did manage to successfully use a drop spindle with pre-drafted combed top. I learned it’s not actually called roving, unless it has some twist. But I need to be further educated there. So many new words! Diz, hackle, noil, long draw, short draw, rolag, woolen vs worsted, drafting, combed top, roving, sliver (rhymes with diver!?) so many words! If you are curious there is a lot of great information about spinning at the Joy of Handspinning. But like the snap of fingers, now I am on to weaving, because that is what I am teaching *next* week. I am learning SO much teaching this class! And weaving, it is so cool! Go read/watch this introduction to backstrap weaving! Now I want to make a backstrap loom, but my living room is currently full of a bajillion different table looms from school that I have to figure out and warp, so I don’t think I’m going to be doing that! At least, not this week.

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Card Weaving

Friday, October 14th, 2011

Rebecca's bracelet in progress

Card weaving, the beginning of a run of textile exploration posts, because as I’ve mentioned, I’m (co)teaching a class at Rebecca’s school. It’s really pretty cool, twice a year they get a run of six classes on one art subject for 3 hours on Thursday. And for these special classes the K-5 classes are all mixed up and they get multi-age classroom experience. So I need to test six weeks worth of textile exploration activities. Not going to make it, but I’ll be tackling the tricky ones. Like spinning. Not sure how well mixing kindergardeners and drop spindles will work. Actually I have a pretty good idea, but I’m going to try anyway!

But card weaving! It’s an ancient weaving technique that is incredibly flexible. You create the pattern by turning the cards different ways, each card can be turned independently of any of the others. (You can also just turn them all together as a stack to create simple stripes and chevrons.) It’s fun! And incredible! Way more interesting than the ‘plain weave’ that you get out of a simple one-heddle table loom. And very strong. I am learning so much about textiles and getting so excited I know, but look at the incredible gothic text worked into this Cursed Bookmark (I think Donna’s kids would love this) and these adorable little sheep and people (There are many more galleries of examples at weavershand). The Society of Primitive Technology has a good solid tutorial on how to get started, including how if you thread all your cards from left to right your belt will twist. This Basic Tablet Weaving page mentions how you can twist the cards around their vertical axis (flips the direction the threads are going through) which was a non-intuitive manipulation, but helped me rescue a twisting belt. And totally made sense once I figured it out. So many patterns! I love patterns!

Here is the basic loom I set up for the girls, you can hook the warp on a door or your toe & belt, any two points to tension it, but I thought they would do better if they weren’t tied to the work and they could get up and abandon it when they needed to! So I tied the warp from one end of a milk crate to the other, and that worked pretty well.

For the weaving I sat with Rebecca and said, ‘twist’, ‘pack’, ‘throw the shuttle’, over and over again, and both she and Ellie made it all the way through weaving a bracelet. There was a little bit of competition, which they did need to make it through the project. I would have adored this technology in high school, I think it will be great for the 5th graders, the kinders thought it was okay, but it didn’t light their fire. Finger loop braiding is another weaving technique I want to learn too, thinking about the grade school me. I remember seeing someone at my school doing it in 6th grade, and really wanting to know what they were doing, but being to shy and ‘cool’ to ask. Now I have the internet! Internet, I love you.

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