One Inch World

This project was inspired by Richard Shilling’s Land Art, via 5 Orange Potatoes. After looking at Richard Shilling’s inspiring gallery of work we gathered a big bag of leaves, a pile of Monterey Pine needles, some scissors and got to work.

There was some arguing about who got to use the blue scissors (vs green), and who wanted to sit in the pink chair, but there was a lot of leaf cutting and stabbing with pine needles. Dunno about the kids, but the moms had a lot of fun!

This is probably three weeks old. I am going crazy packing boxes! Monday is the move, I’m sad I’m missing all the great valentines day crafting I could be doing.

Yes, I realize that the winter holidays are so last month! And frankly, we did this last month, but there you go, right now my house is full of moving boxes and not so full of exciting crafts! Two weeks to go.

The pine cones were a Friday Art Group project, we painted them white and then sprinkled them with kosher salt – it comes in larger flakes than table salt, but not so large as rock salt, and makes reasonable glitter substitute. We have no glitter in our house. Okay, we have one bottle of clear plastic glitter somewhere, but I don’t know where, and if I did I might not say.

The mini tree is a dead bonsai tree my husband gave me… We stuck it in some flour play dough and baked it. Somehow the tree wicked up the salt (maybe it was salt dough, honestly I don’t remember, it keeps a disgracefully long time.) and turned whiter than it was to start with, kinda cool. We hung lots of little mini ornaments on it with tweezers and fingers. It was a great fine motor activity, and lots of fun. The mini ornaments consist mostly of plastic beads and sequins in various arrangements strung on earring wires from the craft store. I have them from years ago, but next year I should find more earring wires (just short wires with a flat bump at the end – you could just twist a loop instead) and let Rebecca make the ornaments. I don’t think that tree is going to make it to next year, maybe we will have to use one of the still-living bonsai, it would be much sturdier too, even if it wouldn’t give as much of the ‘winter’ aspect.

Catch up art activities. We’ll be packing for the next month, so things are falling behind everywhere, but this is a no-apologies blog, so we just keep going!

Salt watercolors – we painted with diluted liquid water colors using brushes, and sprinkled flake salt over them. Always pretty and fun. I was experimenting with the amazing dilut-ability of liquid watercolors – I think I diluted them about 10:1, and got colors as strong as the girls often get with dry water colors, reasonable pastels that is. Thinking about it makes me want to put out a color mixing activity for today. (^_^)

This was a variation on working with starch packing peanuts, I thought it would be fun to use tempera paint to stick them together instead of water. The girls seemed less inclined to mash the peanuts into the liquid until they were mostly dissolved lumps, I thought that was interesting. They are more used to gently dipping things into paint vs soaking them in water I think. Because of that the building went a little more predictably. Anya delicately made very long twisty walls, Rebecca randomly mushed hers into puddles, and Felicity decided to use hers as dissolving paint brushes. Same materials, vastly different outcome!

We modified this idea from Kohl’s ‘Science Arts’. Take two pieces of paper, and in between them stick colorful flowers and leaves.

Tape them down to the kitchen floor, and rub with the side of a crayon. This is both fun, and it lets you know where to bang in the next step. (Now when we do rubbings Rebecca talks about ‘finding’ things hidden under the paper.

Bang bang bang with a rubber mallet.

Peel the papers apart and see how the plant pigments have transfered to the paper.

We used our geranium (Pelargonium) hedge (yes we live in California where geraniums grow and flower in the dirt year round) and the colors were really lovely. The rose petals we tried weren’t so colorful, but they were from a lightly pigmented flower. (Yes, we also have roses flowering in front of our house in December. It gets a little boring frankly. I miss snow.)

The girls loved whacking the heck out of the plants with the rubber mallet, that’s why I suggest you use the kitchen floor and not a table you don’t want dented.

Also, have you seen Filth Wizardry’s Lego and hole punching card post? Combine paper crafts with LEGO blocks. Brilliant brilliant brilliant!

I got this idea from MaryAnn Kohl’s Math Arts, although I think the math connection is pretty weak it sounded like fun from a sensory perspective. The version in the book was more involved, but what we did was paint with glue and then sprinkle spices over the glue. Then there was a lot of spice layering, and then we were making ‘mudge’ according to Rebecca. Mudge being a paste of white glue and aromatic spices apparently. Although I was not deemed competent to make mudge, maybe someday if I practiced enough, but I was just making spudge. Which was fine with me. I don’t care what you call an art activity if it lasts for almost two hours, which this did!

So find those five year old spices in the back of your pantry, put them in jars with shaker tops if they aren’t already, and some paint brushes and watered down white glue. It may look like, uh, awful, but it smells really nice. Ours is hanging on the kitchen wall for Rebecca to sniff. I think we’ll do this with our artfriends on Friday.

Our art playgroups have been a little spotty recently, with new babies (two) and preschool starting for everyone. Yesterday though we did liquid watercolors in spray bottles, which I thought was beautiful and interesting with all the colors bleeding and dripping, but no one lasted through more than one painting. I should have put up pages for the moms too, I keep asking Rebecca if she wants to go out on the patio with me and do it again…

Last week we made mud pies. I was really surprised by who got the most involved, the same girl who usually refuses to put her fingers in the paint or shaving cream! I guess it’s all about the substance. Of course at least half of what went on with the mud pies turned out to be dumping dirt into the baby pool and jumping in it. Once that got too cold there was smearing mud all over the patio and pouring water over it and squishing it between your toes. Mmmm, mud.