One Inch World

I was shopping for something at the drug store, and there was a half gallon of epsom salt. Needed to be tried, so I bought it for our art group.

The basic idea is to make a salt solution, super saturated or not, mix it in with different colors of liquid water colors, then paint. As it dries it forms different crystal patterns, the type depending somewhat on the salt concentration that you mixed in, and whether the salt was fully dissolved. Epsom salts are cool because they naturally form much larger crystals than NaCl – table salt. Don’t ask me why, I’m lousy at chemistry. But it looks really pretty!

Starting the wee one off with the painting thing. Liquid water colors and fingers. Two months ago technically, looking at the EXIF. Oooh, I’m too busy, aren’t I? Hmm. What to do. I’ll have to think about that one.

I think we were actually just painting, but everything always turns into ‘Mom, is it okay if I paint myself today?’ The answer is usually yes.

Isn’t this beautiful? I’m pretty sure the paper never really got taken out. We started stirring paint around in the pie pans that I use as pallets, and ended with it all over legs and bellybuttons. And oh. No one caught one little girl before she went inside to use the bathroom. Oh my. It is really amazing the number of things that small people bump up against and touch on their way through a bathroom. I could have saved the room as a conceptual art piece about bodies in motion, but, I didn’t.

I helped with Rebecca’s class science fair project (she goes to a co-op preschool), and we did plant dyes. It was a lot of fun, I did a live drawing story, telling a story and drawing pictures at the same time, for the motivation, which I’d never done before. Thankfully it was an easy audience! Here is my story:

One day the kids in Miss Leslie’s class went to the farmers market, looked around at all the different tents selling all kinds of different fruits and vegetable, and bought a red cabbage, carrots, onions, and beets. Then on the way home at the top of a hill someone thought it should be their turn to carry the carrots, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the onions, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the beets, and there was a little disagreement about who should be carrying the cabbage. There was a little bit of tugging, someone bumped somebody, and the whole class rolled down the hill together with the vegetables. At the bottom they picked themselves up, and being sturdy 3&4 year olds no one was hurt. But someone noticed that there was orange all over their pants, someone had a green knee, someone was brown all over, someone’s shirt had a big red splot and one kid’s face had turned purple. Well, they wondered, where did all these colors come from? So they went back to the classroom and set out to find out.

And let me tell you, a jar of cabbage juice that has been unrefrigerated for a week smells awful!

We didn’t set the dyes with anything, we just juiced the vegetables, stuffed muslin in with the juice in jars and let it sit for a few days. In addition to the vegetables we also used dirt and grass, which the kids collected. What smells worse than a jar of old cabbage juice? An art rack full of hanging strips of muslin that have been marinating in old onion skins, beet juice and cabbage juice. It was raining outside, so the rack was drying inside. I’m glad I wasn’t working in the classroom that day, when I came to pick Rebecca up, wow did the room smell. But it was all for SCIENCE! Hmm.

There are 8 spots in the watercolor tray, and we have 8 fingers. Obviously this is not coincidence, it is a mandate. Today we had a very spotty watercolor painting.

I’ve seen dying rice with food coloring before, we used liquid watercolors, which worked pretty well. Rebecca really liked shaking the bags and squeezing the paint in. We also had some white beans which didn’t dye as well as the rice, the color rubbed off on our fingers, but maybe I just used too much?

After making an excessive number of colors – in my opinion, Rebecca kept saying “Now let’s make some this color!” – we made a big mess sprinkling and glueing. Looks like we had the spray bottles out too.