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.
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.
What are we doing? Making cheese. The easy way – scald milk and add a little acid – lemon juice or vinegar. We got the idea from ‘The Toddlers Busy Book’, which I haven’t used much, but has a bunch of fun ideas. There is a good description of cheese making here, the bare bones section is basically what we did.
One of the reasons I wanted to do this is Rebecca will not eat cheese. I think she wants to like it, but she really doesn’t. She used to adore cottage cheese when she was really little, then no more. Although I think she’s starting to come around, we made this cheese about a month ago, (yes, I am working through my photo backlog, what gave you that idea? Good thing I ‘blog without apology’, or I’d be feeling guilty that I was ‘behind’.) and she ate an entire string cheese last week. I was really surprised.
Anyway, she was very excited to make cheese, and then she couldn’t eat it, too bad! She thought it was awful. But that’s okay, dad thought it was great! We used lemon juice, and it gave it a nice flavor. We did squeeze it much too hard in the cheese cloth though, it came out very dry. And we forgot to add the salt, oops. I think we should try again. It is cute though, isn’t it?
[Recently all my comments have started being flagged as spam by Akismet, so if I don't respond to your comment by email promptly, okay, it always takes me a couple days, but if it takes me a week, sorry, I forgot to check my spam comments again. Dunno what I broke...]
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.
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!
Scatter brained crafty mama. I craft with a little bit of everything, during those precious nap time minutes.
I reply to all comments by email, and if you leave a link to your blog I'll definitely check it out.
Feel free to link to my projects and use images from this site if they link back here.
