Posts Tagged ‘pipe cleaners’

Fuzzy Animals

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Sometimes on Friday I am at a little bit of a loss as to what the heck we are going to do. Sometimes I blog surf for a little while, sometimes I go stare at one of the, um, five(?!), (okay, so one of those is just paper…), places that I keep the kids art supplies, and hope for inspiration to strike, with various levels of desperation, depending on whether or not there are *already* hordes of 5 year olds and their siblings running amok and I still don’t have any ideas. And honestly some weeks I never get there, and no one cares, except possibly Ellie, who likes ritual and predictability.

This week we fell back on ‘what is in this box in the closet?’

Which was a large unopened bag of pompoms, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and stick on googly eyes. I threw in markers and glue guns for good measure, and said we were making monsters, or anything else you could think of.

We went through a stunning number of popsicle sticks, I mean, we’ve slowly been going through that box for YEARS, and then bang, the last half box was gone. I also thought it was interesting how many pompoms they could attach to the popsicle sticks just by wrapping them with pipe cleaners. Lots of wrapping and sticking and drawing and glueing, and out came lots and lots of monsters and some other curious frames and constructions. This turned out to be a very absorbing project for most of the 5yos, but not the younger kids.

Where do you get your art project ideas from when you are stumped?

Letter Necklaces and Peanut Butter Cups

Friday, April 29th, 2011

Rebecca came up with this art project on her own, always the best! Somewhere I picked up a set of glittery chipboard letters, the kind you can find with scrap booking supplies, thinking that they would make good glue-ing fodder. Which they did, more or less, but here Rebecca has decided to turn them into a letter necklace, by twisting them up into a chain of pipe cleaners. She spent quite a while wrapping them up, with no particular rhyme or reason. I’m sure you could turn this into some sort of literacy activity, but we were just playing.

And peanut butter cups! I’ve had a lot of ‘and’ posts recently. I could split them up, but whatever. I guess I feel like I have a lot of little things to say that don’t really ‘rate’ their own posts, whatever that really means!

But peanut butter cups! They are delicious, and they are easy to make, even for a 4 year old! You can even make them look ‘official’ if you buy the kind of peanut butter cups that come in a little plastic tray and then re-use that as a mold. We got these molds from some Newman’s Own peanut butter cups.

To make your own peanut butter cups:

1) Find some Newman’s Own peanut butter cups, eat them, and clean the tray.

2) Dump some chocolate chips in a bowl and microwave them stirring frequently until they melt. The stirring part is important.

3) Spread the melted chocolate around the inside of the mold, smearing it up the edges and leaving a hollow bowl shape in the middle. Put the mold in the freezer for a couple of minutes to solidify the chocolate. We had three trays, and by the time we were done with the second two the first one was ready to come out.

4) Put a spoonful of peanut butter into each of the chocolate cups, keeping it away from the edges.

5) Spoon more melted chocolate over the tops of the peanut butter, making sure that the chocolate gets down around the edges of the peanut butter to meet up with the first layer of chocolate.

6) Stick them back in the freezer to solidify the top chocolate.

Enjoy! We stored them in the fridge, but they’d probably be fine out on the counter too. And since they are made out of real chocolate and peanut butter, not that suspicious vegetable oil stuff, they taste really good! Rebecca had a lot of fun making them too. What 4 year old doesn’t enjoy smearing melted chocolate around?

Egg Carton Flowers

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Doesn’t Rebecca look like a model here? Ignoring the chocolate stains around her mouth? Because, frankly, my children are very rarely clean.

This flower is made by ripping the cup off a paper egg carton (it started as a mottled grey-ish color), shoving a pipe cleaner through the middle (sometimes with a button), and then spray painting it with liquid water colors.

Here you can see a button, and the edges of this flower were cut to be more flower like.

Don’t you want to eat up these baby fingers? They are working so hard to squeeze that spray bottle.

These flowers were inspired by these flowers via The Crafty Crow