Start with a large target. This one we built with a hinged head and openable mouth for our city parade. It mounts on top of our wagon, and was great fun walking down the street operating it like a puppet with sticks and strings. Obviously you can substitute a LARGE sheet of paper or plain cardboard box rather than a two hour hack cardboard monster.

Add some children’s medicine syringes and paint. The paint should be deep enough that you can suck it up with the syringe, the ice cube trays worked well.

Suck up some paint. Multiple colors are allowed!

I found I got the best splats if I sucked up some air after the paint, that helped the paint splatter satisfyingly rather than just shooting out in a coherent stream and making a cow plop of paint.

We briefly experimented with paper, but it wasn’t as satisfying as standing back and spraying the dragon and friends. You can get a good 20 feet spray. The tarp was laughably insufficient. At least we managed to keep it off the very tolerant neighbors house and car! And, er, *most* of the colors we were using were washable…

We made a big mess and we had a good time!

Ready to roll! Can you see the little kitty door in the side? The girls rode *to* the parade in the dragon, then promptly got out. I had to rejigger the controls to operate from outside rather than inside. Ah well. At least the ‘hair’ rattled quite satisfyingly when he reared his head back and spread his fierce cardboard jaws.

Last Friday for Art Playgroup we made Terrariums. I really really wanted to try again to make a closed ecosystem terrarium, but I don’t think I’m there yet. Despite my friends all thinking that I have a green thumb I’ve managed to kill every closed terrarium that I’ve made so far! This time I went so far as to follow directions! Sort of. And use a charcoal layer. But I guess I need to take sterilization more seriously too. Or get the moisture level right, or I don’t know. So, yes, Penelope’s terrarium is molding after a week. But Rebecca’s, which the top has been left cracked open, and which she made entirely herself, with wonky dirt levels and general mayhem, is doing beautifully. More proof that I should just step back!

We used all sorts of jars, including some bail top jars the girls keep making ‘potions’ in, aka gross stews of decomposing plant matter. Mmmm. And apple sauce jars, those vases that accumulate from florist deliveries… If you can get your hands on some one gallon glass jars from sauerkraut, those are awesome.

We tried to properly follow the directions at The Fern and Mossery Step 1: Materials and Tools Step 2: Adding Soil Layers and Step 3: Adding Plants. But right off I got the order of charcoal and pebbles backwards (pebbles THEN charcoal). Luckily I had sent out the tutorials ahead of time, so those who bothered to read the instructions themselves got theirs right.

There are a million terarrium examples from Terrarium Man, if you are looking for inspiration, I was especially delighted by the Tiny Tiny Terrariums!

As I am apparently incapable of either-or decisions we made both. And the girls decided that it was most proper for their tiny terrariums to be located inside their larger terrariums! That way, the fairies that lived in the cave made by the plants would have their own terrarium. Of course.

We used these tiny bottles from Amazon. I decided not to get the ones with the screw hooks on top, because the idea of rampaging girls wearing charming glass bottles around their necks… not so good. I’m glad they decided to put their mini terrariums inside their larger ones, because now I’m not worried about stepping on a glass bottle lost on their floor somewhere! Woo.

I made my own mini terrarium, which is sitting on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. It makes me happy. And it is actually not molding.

Have you ever succeeded in making a completely closed terrarium? Do you have a secret?

Pardon the dust.

Such a lovely title, reminds me of the pain of refinishing furniture. I think the last time I scraped paint for real was when we stripped off the paint on our kitchen cabinets and refinished them with a clear coat. Horrible lot of work, I’m so optimistic jumping into projects. Moving on, moving on.

This project, thankfully, has absoloutely nothing to do with refinishing cabinets or chemical paint removers. Instead it has to do with the abstract works of Gerhard Richter a German painter. You can find videos showing a bit of his working process if you are interested, it is pretty interesting.

I got this fascinating project from Léon, Pas Sur Le Murs! via The Crafty Crow.

Unlike her version we skipped the spreading a base paint layer with a brayer step, and just went straight to drizzling paint and scraping it with rulers and fat popsicle sticks. Worked fine, good thing, since I only own one brayer.

Quite a lot of experimenting (and copying) happened. What happens with drips and blobs instead of lines?

Ah. Too bad the photo is blurry!

I would say the only downside to this project was the great drippy blobs of paint that ended up on the ground. But some water and a scrubby broom took care of that. Many of the kids went away with paint smeared across their legs or chest where they scraped it right into themselves. I love that then they are so surprised to be covered in paint when they step back, they are too absorbed in the work to notice they are using their tummies to take the extra paint off the scrapers until they step back to reflect.

So many experiments. Dragging in circles, wiggly lines, many layers of paint… And it was another fabulous exploration for the moms too. Like dyeing you can get lovely unexpected results and don’t have to worry about ‘skill’. I thought it was a wonderful open ended exploration of the properties of paint.

For Art Group the Friday before Easter we drew on blown eggs with sharpies. It was a lovely project, and worked for everyone 3 year olds to moms. I was inspired by Gingerbread Snowflakes Faux Pysanky.

The very first thing we did was blow eggs, let them dry, then cover the inside with Mod Podge, which we learned about from Aunt Peaches: How to Make Hollow Eggs Last Ten Years. We didn’t cover the outside with Mod Podge until after drawing on them. I found if we did it at the beginning the Mod Podge would get on the sharpies and clog them up, maybe I was just imagining it, but it seemed to work better if we left the outer Mod Podge coating until the end.

The eggs were all dry and waiting when all the girls came over to draw. We had scads of eggs, everyone helped to blow them, and 33 colorful sharpies. We even had 33 colorful sharpies when we cleaned up at the end, bonus! I gave each of them a plate to set their egg on when they weren’t holding it, to keep them from rolling off the table. And when you have this many absent minded girls reaching for sharpies, that is going to happen. It did anyway, a few times, luckily the inner coating of Mod Podge was enough to protect against a short fall onto concrete. We did have one dramatic egg shatter, when Alara squeezed a little too tightly. Everyone else learned from her tears! And none of the 3-4 year olds broke their eggs, thank you Mod Podge and Aunt Peaches!

After drawing on the eggs we strung them up. To make the loops and we used pearl cotton (I think), beads and florists wire.

Double over the pearl cotton and knot it, string on a bead, string on your egg, string on another bead, and then you can unfold the florists wire and pull it out, leaving your loop out the top of the egg. If your hole in the top of the egg is especially small, stringing the egg on can be tricky. I found that if I held the egg right up to my eye I could see to guide the florist wire out of even tiny holes. But it took practice and patience.

Tie one more knot, and you have a hanging ornament.

Then, lower string, beads and all, we coated the outside of the eggs with watered down Mod Podge. If you were being fancy you might rest the eggs on skewers to do the outer coat before stringing it, so as to not get drippy Mod Podge all over your lower bead and string, but the Mod Podge on the beads didn’t bother me, it just gave them a frosted look to match the egg. And the work flow for the kids was much simpler, their project just needed to dry at the end, and not in the middle.

So now I’m sick of blowing eggs, but also so glad that everyone got into the project. And it was a good chance to talk about symmetry and how repeated patterns can make things attractive.

We have done snap painting before, but this time we wanted to do it bigger. Following Teacher Tom’s lead (Snap Painting: Not Killed, But Tamed) we bought some Chinese jump ropes and got out our easels.

We ended up with smaller Chinese jump ropes than he used, it seems from the pictures, so we ended up putting ours together a bit differently. I doubled over the elastic ropes, tied the ends to an upright on the easels, and the middle to one end of a knee-high stuffed with nylon netting, then the same on the other side.

We had quite a bit of fun, and because you could stand so far away when snapping you didn’t even really get splattered. At some point things did devolve to finger painting for some, but I think almost everyone had at least one go with snapping, including the adults! It was a good bit of fun! It was also quite loud, at the first snap most of the 3 year olds jumped, and observed, ‘That was scary!’. But they still wanted to try.

I’m not sure it should be called snap painting with the nylon blobs though, more like splat painting! I think this activity would be fun to pair with The Big Orange Splot, and you could talk about what you see of your dreams in the splots that you make, like reading tea leaves or clouds. But that would involve sitting down and talking about things in a coherent manner at Art Group, which typically is not what happens!

This year with art group having grown a little bit larger, as it always does, and most of the mom’s wanting in on the action, I had orders for 17 sets of plants, which was a little overwhelming! (The picture only shows 13/17 sets.) I think last year we only did 6! I had a moment at the nursery where I realized that I might not actually be able to fit the required number of plants in my car, and I wasn’t going to be able to fit them into one cart. In the end I used all available surfaces in my car, and I stacked all the sturdier plants. Exciting! What will I do next year? Who knows! (Oh, practice delegating, right!)

Lucky for me planting gardens doesn’t require a lot of explanation. ‘All the plants want to have their dirt at the same level’, being the only often repeated one, some of the nursery pots were taller than others, and those flowers were often seen sticking up on little dirt pedestals out of the surrounding garden.

I had to go to two nurseries to get everything. First I went to el big box hardware store and, like I did last year, asked them for empty flats. They were all, ‘what? we recycle those immediately. No you can’t have any.’ ‘But you gave them to me last year!’ ‘I have no idea.’ Um, thanks. I bought plants from them anyway. They had flats of Irish and Scotch moss (finally I know: they are practically the same plant, but the two varieties are differently colored) and blue star creeper, low growing staples of the fairy gardens, and much cheaper to get there. (I know, I am funding teh evil, but I was on a budget!)

So then, after stacking plants up in my car and considering the insanity, I went to our local Summerwind. They were very nice! The gentleman in the front said, ‘oh yes, do you see those large stacks right outside the front door? Take as many of those flats as you need.’ ‘Yes!’ I thought. There were three 6′ stacks! I took about 2′! Why so many? They are rather flimsy, so I stack them 2-3 deep. This year we also added a layer of paper over the top, as most of the flats had a very large open grid pattern, suitable for holding plastic 6-packs of plants, but not dirt. I was also feeling a little shy and skittish about sifting through all their stacks to look for ones with finer meshes, and besides, only the first stack was really accessible.

At Summerwind I also got many more interesting small ground cover plants, and spent the second half of my budget. In the end this year I think we had:
Irish/Scotch Moss
Blue Star Creeper
Baby’s Tears (This has taken over a large section in front of my house from a small planting)
Sedum of several varieties
Creeping Thyme
Ivy, Marigolds, Alyssum, Lobelia and Ornamental (matting) Strawberries for height and interest. And I’m sure that the fairies will enjoy the strawberries!

In our fairy gardens from last year the Irish/Scotch moss did not do very well, but Chris said it did quite well in her garden. I think it must not like too much shade and damp. On the other hand, the baby’s tears and creeping thyme seem to have loved our sheltered, damp, north-facing spot, and have taken over quite well. This year I made sure to get a wide variety of plants, hoping that at least some of them will do well wherever everyone’s fairy gardens ends up.

In addition to the plants we had a pile of wood scraps, twigs, jewels and other nic-nacks the kids put to good use with the glue guns.

Alina and Yahui (I think) built this sweet little bench from twigs.

The cardboard houses were brought to the party by kids so excited about fairy gardens that they had to start early at home.

And when we moved the old gardens out to show, we discovered that we have salamanders! How exciting! I have found several around the yard now, and am wondering what we need to do to encourage them. The more (non-deadly) creepy crawly things around the yard the better! I found this nifty salamander identification page, Discover Life Salamander Identification Guide, which leads me to believe these are Aneides flavipunctatus (Black Salamander).

We had fun! Now we just need to remember to keep watering. I’m excited to see how the plants grow and change in the gardens this year!

What can you make with acid dyeing other than pretty yarn? You can dye something that you’ve already made out of yarn! Does that sound silly? Whatever, this is fun.

Have you ever made a yarn doll? They are simple and fluffy and fun, and greatly resemble making corn husk dolls if you’ve done that. The short explanation of this activity is, make a yarn doll, and then use the acid dyeing techniques from part 1 to permanently color it.

Remember, acid dyes only work on protein fibers, so for this to work you need to use yarn that is at least partially wool or silk.

Making a Yarn Doll
If you search the internet for ‘Yarn Doll’ or look in some old craft books you will find a million variations of this. This is how we did it:

First up, find a nice piece of cardboard. I think ours was about 4″ wide.

Wrap your white wool/silk yarn around your cardboard some number of times, I like 10 for this size doll, but 20 will make it plumper. Pull the wrapped yarn off and tie at the top and bottom for wrists. Make two more bunches of wraps and tie these only at one end, these are your feet.

Stick your arms through your other two loops.

Tie above and below the arms, holding them in place. You can also wrap the yarn around in a criss cross pattern, behind the back, cross in the front, behind the neck, wrap around to the back of the neck, cross in back, wrap around to the front and tie a bow. But you don’t need to get that fancy.

If you decide at this point you’d rather have a skirt wearing doll you can cut off the ankle ties and cut all the loops open at the bottom. (Or you could have thought ahead and not tied them!)

The only thing missing at this point is hair. You can wrap a couple loops of yarn around your hand, slip them through the head loops and tie the ends of your hair loop together at the top of the head. You can also make a long braid and tie that through the loops at the top of the head.

Even if you don’t want hair, it’s a good idea to tie a loop around the top of the head, otherwise your head spreads apart and looks rather disturbing…

If none of that makes any sense, here are some completely different tutorials for making yarn dolls:
Yarn Dolls at Wee Folk Art
Easy Yarn Dolls at AOK Corral
How to Make a Yarn Doll from WikiHow

However you make your doll it will be wonderful.

Dyeing Your Doll
For a more in-depth discussion of dyeing with acid dyes see Acid Dye Part 1.

Soak your doll in an equal mixture of water and white vinegar for 20 minutes, then squeeze it out and lay it out on a microwave safe plate. (You will need another similar plate or bowl to cover it for microwave steaming.)

Paint your doll with diluted food colors. (The acid dyes.) I use about 8 drops of food color to one ounce of water in a small squeeze bottle. Again, see Acid Dye Part 1 for more details on dyeing.

Ideally get the doll thoroughly wet but not swimming in dye. With smaller children it can help if you use a plate or container that is raised in the center, so some of the excess runs off to the edges rather than right under your doll. If you see the puddle forming you can pour it off before it gets too bad.

Once you are done dyeing cover your doll with another plate and microwave it until you hear the yarn start softly popping. This is the water turning into steam. The time is totally dependent on the size of your doll, and how wet it is, and the strength of your microwave. I think of it like making popcorn, put it on for longer than you think you need, and then stand there listening to it ready to press stop at any moment… Please don’t leave your yarn unattended and set your kitchen on fire. A minute was about right in our anemic microwave with our small dolls.

After microwaving Let the doll sit covered in the hot steam for another minute, and then rinse it out and blot it dry. If you want it darker you can soak it in the vinegar again and re-dye it.

Then love your crazy new friend.

So many wonderful variations. Efsun followed the sculptural method of continuing to tie on more yarn until she got something she was happy with. There really isn’t one way to make a yarn doll, and if you don’t like your first one, make another one! The more the merrier.

Have you ever made a yarn doll? It seems like something that everyone has perhaps done with their grandmother at some point? Or at school, perhaps in a module on pioneer crafts?

One of the neat things about different types of dyes is that depending on their chemical structure they like to bond to different kinds of fibers. In forensics this is one of the things they use to determine what kind of fibers fabrics are made of (MAKE Forensics Lab). Acid dyes like to bond to protein fibers like wool and silk. (And nylon curiously enough.) They don’t like to bond to cellulose fibers like cotton. This is one of the fiber demonstrations from my class, and I think it’s pretty neat.

To do this demonstration you need some white cotton and wool (about 10 wraps around your hand is great), food coloring, vinegar and some glass jars.

First the yarn needs to be presoaked in the vinegar for about half an hour. To keep it from getting tangled wrap it around your hand and tie it in at least one spot.

Next, take your two jars, fill them with water and add a drop of food coloring.

Then squeeze out your yarns from the vinegar soak and in one jar put your cotton and in the other your wool.

Heat your jars in the microwave (or pan of simmering water) until one of them has gone clear. This will be the jar with the wool in it.

The colored yarn may trick you into thinking there is still color in the water, but when you pull the two yarns out you will see that the wool yarn has sucked all the dye out of the water, and the cotton yarn has not. Neat!

Finally, rinse the yarn out. You will see that the cotton is lightly stained, while the wool is quite well and permanently dyed.

I think the coolest part is the clear water left behind by the wool. This demonstrates that the wool is not just sitting and soaking in some paint. The dye molecules are chemically bonding to the wool, being pulled out of the solution and lowering the concentration of dye in the water until it reaches zero. (Unless you add more color than the acid soaked fiber can bond with, oops!.)

Further chemistry reading:
How Acid Dye Works from Dharma Trading
Dyeing 101: Know Your Dyes – What’s the Difference Between an Acid Dye and a Reactive Dye? from Gnomespun

Next up, part 3, our art project from last week involving acid dyes.

I whipped these up in the scramble to get out the door for school Friday, because I realized that they would be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day on Friday at school, although my brain hadn’t caught up yet. We even made it to school on time, although I did have to ‘rush my head off’, so I know these are quick.

I just drew three hearts in a circle, cut them out in felt, put that on a darker felt and cut around with a border. After cutting I found I needed to go back and snip the points at the tips of the leaves and in between the leaves, because cutting a pattern out of felt never goes as cleanly as I would like.

A quick running stitch to add texture and hold them together, then whip stitch them onto some plain barrettes.

For my older daughter I’d recently bought some extra large barrettes for her thick hair, so I whipped two shamrocks on.

Did you make anything pretty for Leprechaun Day?