One Inch World

It may not be obvious from first glance, but we painted with bubbles. Take some bubble blow, mix in some liquid water colors, and blow bubbles onto paper. When it works you get perfect swirly circles. When it doesn’t work you get lots of drips and bubbles in each others faces… But, hey, drip painting is fun too! We won’t talk about the bubble wars, except to note that we (almost) always use non-toxic art supplies.

While playing we found out that our hangers from Ikea make excellent little marble tracks. Rebecca insisted on filling up the whole thing with my marble collection, good work for little fingers, also there was the challenge of keeping them from rolling where she didn’t want them as the floor isn’t flat..

We also had fun doing some wooden puzzles that I cut with our scroll saw. After Rebecca did them right side up she decided to give it a go upside down. They are small enough that it was a pretty easy job. So if you are bored of your puzzles, try them wrong side up. You could even draw a new picture on the back!

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!

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.