Posts Tagged ‘paint’

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Potatoes and Cookie Cutters

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

What do you do when you have a bunch of potatoes that have gone green? (Well, you *could* eat them, but I think they taste awful and I’m paranoid about poisoning my children. So instead:) Potato stamping! This variation that we did uses cookie cutters for the shapes. Whee!

1. Cut your potato in half.

2. Stick your cookie cutter deep into the potato

3. Pretend you are trying to cut a 1/4″-1/2″ slice off the cut side of the potato. Since the cookie cutter is still in the potato you will run your knife around the potato hitting the cookie cutter with the tip of the knife. The cookie cutter will protect the center part of the potato, creating the stamp shape. (Yes, I should have taken a picture of this step, hopefully you can figure out what I’m trying to say by looking at the result!)

4. Pull off the slice of potato from around the outside of the cookie cutter.

5. Pull out the cookie cutter.

Now you have a nice cookie cutter shaped potato stamp with a round potato handle on the back good for small hands to hold onto.

We also cut some textures into some of our stamps. The (4yo) girls practiced cutting the potatoes in half, putting the cookie cutters in, and cutting around the outside by themselves, with varying degrees of success, and no injuries!

We love paint!

Yes I haven’t been blogging recently, no particular reason. I have a lot of backed up things to talk about though!

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Posted in Art Activities | 8 Comments »

Things to Do, Things We’ve Done (Not Sleep.)

Friday, November 5th, 2010

I haven’t been getting enough sleep, which means my life starts falling apart and I start throwing mommy tantrums. Usually I’m pretty good at avoiding those. Must get more sleep… We’ll see how the weekend goes.

So anyway, here are some fun things we’ve done over the last several months that I never got around to blogging about.

We’ve done fishing with paper fish with paperclips and magnets-on-a-string, but this is much cooler. Valerie over at Frugal Family Fun made her fish out of pipe cleaners, which makes them easy, cute, and their whole bodies are ferromagnetic! (I had to look that term up… ferromagnetic materials are the ones that are strongly attracted by magnets and can be magnetized. Now we know.) Since the pipe cleaner fuzz keeps the magnet from directly contacting the wire you need a relatively strong magnet to put on the end of your string to go fishing. We cut our pipe cleaners up into different lengths, and made lots of fish! Now they are living in a fish patterned tea tin on our game shelf.

Here we made a stamp pad out of felt and wet it with acrylic craft paint. Then we stamped Totoro and Hello Kitty all over a pair of pants that were already in sad sad shape. Be sure to clean your stamps promptly afterwards or the acrylic paint will gum them up. Acrylic craft paint is great for painting clothes, you don’t really need fabric paint. This activity is an easy way for little kids to personalize their clothes by themselves. Getting out the letter stamps would be fun too.

Play dough with your feet. Why should hands get to have all the fun? This is home made glitter play dough. More sparkles is better. Rebecca had fun kneading the sparkles in. That may have been where we started using feet, I can’t remember!

If you get a box in the mail and it is full of bubble wrap, put it in the driveway! It is super fun to zoom over. Then you can revert to the traditional mad stomping dance to pop the rest of the bubbles. At our preschool they buy a big roll of bubble pop just so the kids can do this once. The environmentalist in me cries, but the kids loved it.

You can tell I’m tired from the preponderance of short declarative sentences. I’ll go work on that sleep thing now.

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Posted in Crafty, Homeschool | 6 Comments »

Glowing Play Pumpkin

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

This is a mashup of a felt board dress up pumpkin and a decoupaged candle holder. With it you can have a different pumpkin friend every evening, or experiment to find your favorite pumpkin face for carving!

We made two, one is a round plastic cookie tub, the other is a glass peanut butter jar.

What you need to do this:
* Clear container
* LED candle
* One 1″ square of stick on velcro (just the sharp half)
* Black felt
* Orange acrylic paint (tempera might work)
OR
* glue and orange tissue paper

Cut up the black felt into lots and lots of pumpkin eyes, noses and mouths. Size them to fit comfortably on your container.

The peanut butter jar we painted inside with watered down orange acrylic paint. Once it was dry I took the prickly half of a stick on velcro square, cut it into 5 pieces and stuck them about where I thought the face features should go.

The cookie container we decoupaged on the inside, using watered down school glue and 1″-ish squares of yellow and orange tissue paper. Rebecca worked on the lid, and Penelope helped me with the main container. She loves mashing a paint brush around! We added a little bit of Crayola Glitter It! Tempera Mixing Medium, (which is basically just glitter glue), to the watery glue to make our pumpkin glittery, because glittery is better. :-P

For this ‘pumpkin’ I just cut the velcro square up into 4 pieces. Both layouts worked.

We decoupaged the inside of the container, but if you are using a real candle (and hopefully a glass container) you should decoupage the outside so that the glue and paper don’t catch on fire! We used an LED candle so that I didn’t have to worry about the girls tipping it over when they were playing with the felt shapes, and of course, I wouldn’t put a real candle in a closed plastic container!

Put your LED candle into the container, and Play! And then of course, cut out more faces. Keep extra felt and scissors next to your pumpkin, because you never know what sort of shape you will need next!

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Posted in Crafty | 3 Comments »

Painting on Wood

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Sometimes you just need a different canvas.

Step 1: Scrounge around on trash day, someone will have tree trimmings out to be collected. Free is good.
Step 2: Slice. We used our handy dandy bandsaw, but a hand saw would work fine.
Step 3: Paint. We didn’t do any sanding, it’s all about the process! Besides, the wavy saw marks gave it some interesting texture. :-)

The girls also used these for stamping on their paper, monoprints (or tri-prints) of painted wood. The texture and irregular shape made these fun printing blocks.

Once you are done decorating them you can add them to your block collection too! Or they can be doors for hobbit-fairy houses. There are so many things you can do with flat rounds of wood!

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Posted in Art Activities | 2 Comments »

Squeezing Paint

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

If you put out squeeze bottles of paint, for filling up trays, or for using for painting, it seems that inevitably they are squeezed and squeezed and squeezed into a giant puddle until they are empty. So sometimes when that seems to be happening quite a lot, we make up paint just for squeezing. Mostly flour and water, with some paint for color, it is very cheap, somewhat thick, and very satisfying to squeeze out of old food containers like this old honey bear.

One of the benefits of accidentally buying student tempera instead of washable tempera is that there is so much pigment in them that a tiny bit was enough to dye the flour paint quite brightly. I was actually trying to make pink as one of our colors, so I added just a little red, but I got red. I was quite surprised, as I remember trying to get red with our old washable paints and ending up with pink after what seemed like a ridiculous amount of paint. I’ve tried making the student tempera washable by cutting it 50/50 with castile soap, which sort of works, perhaps I need to go more like 10/90! And add corn starch. Or something. Anyway, squeezing paint is great fun!


[This second picture is mostly regular paint. It may be a giant puddle, but isn't it pretty? :-) ]

Have you done this before? Have you squeezed paint onto anything other than paper before? I think there are probably some good ideas around this and I’d like to hear them!

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Posted in Art Activities | 3 Comments »

Cassette Tape Art

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Decluttering leads to lots of interesting art materials. This particular Friday I put out a pile of old cassettes for the girls. First they grabbed the tape and ran around the yard, around the car, around each other. Then there was a little bit of screaming and whining. After we untangled everyone and gather everything back up the girls made big crinkly birds nesty heaps and covered them with paint. Big messy process work, and I confess I threw the whole pile away when we were done.

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Posted in Art Activities | 1 Comment »

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