One Inch World

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!

We like playing with Gak. We make the borax and glue kind, which is kind of like silly putty, but ours is a little closer to the jello/snot end of the spectrum than putty. You can blow bubbles in it, break it, bounce it, stretch it, let it drip off the table… and apparently you can cut it with scissors. Not my idea…

Filling it with tinsel also wasn’t my idea… But I fully accept that it was very interesting. We could have made more, but I had more fun dripping it out of the tinsel.

Here is the recipe we use, we got it from the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose:
1. Mix 1 cup hot water and 1 1/2 tsp. of Borax until dissolved. Set aside.
2. Mix 2 cups of clear glue and 2 cups of warm water together in a plastic bowl. (We use 1 cup hot water and 1 cup of washable tempera paint for color, and a glass bowl.)
3. Using a metal spoon, slowly pour Borax mixture into glue mixture while stirring quickly. Stir until the mixture leaves the side of the bowl. Gak will be sticky.
4. Knead until Gak is not sticky. The more you work with it the easier it will be.

We leave ours on the kitchen counter (in a plastic container so it doesn’t dry out) for months. If you use washable tempera in the mixture eventually (after a couple months) it goes runny and you have to make more. If you just use water it eventually gets solid, or sticky, I can’t remember, our friend made it that way. But in anycase, it lasts a good long time, probably it will be full of dust and hair before it goes bad.

Gak is fun, but remember that Borax is a poison, you don’t want to inhale the powder, and you don’t want to eat it. So if you think your children might eat this I wouldn’t really recommend making it. We first played with it in the Discovery Museum’s under 5 room, so I’m not sure what to think.

Today, through Kiva.org, I loaned $25 to a woman in Tanzania to support her used clothing store. Join me in my December drive to give a helping hand to people in poverty.

I got this idea from MaryAnn Kohl’s Math Arts, although I think the math connection is pretty weak it sounded like fun from a sensory perspective. The version in the book was more involved, but what we did was paint with glue and then sprinkle spices over the glue. Then there was a lot of spice layering, and then we were making ‘mudge’ according to Rebecca. Mudge being a paste of white glue and aromatic spices apparently. Although I was not deemed competent to make mudge, maybe someday if I practiced enough, but I was just making spudge. Which was fine with me. I don’t care what you call an art activity if it lasts for almost two hours, which this did!

So find those five year old spices in the back of your pantry, put them in jars with shaker tops if they aren’t already, and some paint brushes and watered down white glue. It may look like, uh, awful, but it smells really nice. Ours is hanging on the kitchen wall for Rebecca to sniff. I think we’ll do this with our artfriends on Friday.

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.

I was going to go all fancy pants with this, but then I just went and did it. Textures. No stitched edges or reinforced pages, no textures front to back, no glue, no labels or embroidery to distract, just some rectangles of stuff to touch that is sewn together. I even included some pages that probably won’t last, but that’s an interesting discovery of its own, destruction!

Step 1: Gather stuff. Different papers, different fabrics, whatever you have lying around. Something crinkly, something fuzzy. You can see from this picture that I did have something with embroidery, it happened to be the only linen in my scrap bag, but I might have gone with it anyway because dragonflies are cool, and who cares about rules anyway. Also the wildly mushroomy paper, but that went on the back – I decided I did want the non-patterned side facing forward in the book.

Step 2: Decide on a book size – I chose 5″x5.5″ because of the width of some watercolor paper I had in my stack of stuff.

Step 3: Cut everything the same size. I used my fabric cutting mat and rotary cutter for the fabric, for the paper I used my cutting mat and a box cutter. For some reason it never occurred to me until about a month ago that I could use my cutting mat with razor blades and such. I’m sure it will shorten it’s life, but hey, so useful. I used pinking sheers on the most ravely looking stuff.

From the top left: watercolor paper, blue craft felt, the metallic liner of Annies whole wheat bunny crackers (shiny, crinkly, and sturdier than tinfoil), white denim, hand dyed flannel, some weird woven silver fabric (I have no idea where this came from, but it also happened to be exactly 5.5″ wide, so clearly it was destined), pink fleece, linen with dragonfly, fake suede-y stuff with little metal dots and glitter randomly scattered (who designs this stuff? My husband bought it for me to make a dice bag for him, and it was awful to sew), dark red velvet, doubled up wax paper (not going to last long), and scrap booking paper embossed with a woven pattern. My original musings called for some other things, but the day I made this that was what ended up in the random collection pile. I’m sure you can come up with your own wonderful collection of textures, maybe throw in some wood veneer and a layer of cork!

Step 4: Put them into a nice order, possibly with the papers alternating with the fabrics so they slide flat and don’t stick to each other, but whatever.

Step 5: This is the really exciting one, jam the whole thing under the foot of your sewing machine and stitch down one edge. Use a long stitch, and don’t sew too close to the edge or the whole thing will squeeze out the edge like when you’re trying to eat a melty ice cream sandwich, only less sticky. My first seam is about 1/2″ in. Then sew another line of stitching closer to the edge, and aim to get it straighter than mine.

Alternately, if you have real book binding skill you could stab bind it, or whatever you would do if you knew more about book binding than I do.

Step 6: Find a baby to play with!

There are all kinds of ways you could cute this up, adding ribbons, binding the edges of the fabrics with a zigzag stitch or sewing the more ravely fabrics face together along three sides and then turning them out… But this way I got it finished in the spare moments of a baby filled afternoon.

P.S. I really wanted to get the pattern for my Witch, Imp, Ghost and Bat Treat Hiding Balls into my sad empty Etsy shop before October (tomorrow!) but it’s just not going to happen. Wish me luck and bravery to get it all together by the end of the weekend. I’m making good progress. Here’s a picture of my finished Ghost, does he look a little psycho?

Our playgroup is still going, no sign of baby #2, other than too many Braxton Hicks contractions. On the one hand, I’m ready for the baby. On the other hand, I think babies should stay in the womb another three months, because they come out half baked as it is.

This week the girls mixed up a big batch of gak, which bounces, stretches, rips and jiggles. It’s the borax-glue version, which we made with purple tempera paint this time, and it is an excellent tactile substance for little ones to get their fingers into. We didn’t let them dissolve the borax, but other than that they are great little pourers and mixers.

We also did some big painting on a foam core sandwich board large pieces of foam core board make great huge white expanses to paint on. It is a little extravagant and not particularly ecological though. I bought this for Rebecca’s party, then turned it inside out and painted the third side this group. Someday I’ll salvage a large whiteboard and turn that into a washable easel, reusable rather than disposable.