I saw this little fairy house at the state fair last year. I thought it was cute.
Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Fairy House
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011Shrinky Dinks
Thursday, March 10th, 2011
My husband remembers Shrinky Dinks from when he was a little boy. I’d never heard of them. One year we bought Shrinky Dinks as a stocking stuffer for one of our kids. It came with strange sheets of translucent paper. You draw and color whatever you want on them. We used colored pencils. Then you cut them out and put them in the oven.
They shrink to one third the original size. You bake the artwork one by one for 1 to 3 minutes each at 325 degrees. (I ruined my first one because I had no clue what I was d
oing, but the others came out perfect. So you might want to start with one that doesn’t matter if it gets messed up.) If you put your oven light on, you will see it start to shrink. Then count for 30 seconds. Pull it out, and there it is, teeny weeny.
The kids squealed with laughter when they saw their artwork shrink through the oven door. My 10-year-old artist drew a detailed dragon, and the dragon shrank down and looked even more detailed. It was a fun “do-it-once” kind of activity.
The Mysterious Cracking Pots
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
So much for my cool idea of making easy terra cotta Greek pots. I’m talking about the ones I referred to in my Ancient Greece Unit Study YouTube video, the ones where you get clay and smoosh it onto the side of a bottle. Then roll a snake to make each handle. The kids loved making the pots. But the pots became aged in a matter of a couple of hours! I do not remember this happening five years ago when I did it last time.
The next day I tried it with a thinner layer of clay. Nope. It still cracked after about two hours. So now this is my recommendation: After forming the shape of the vase, while it’s still wet, use black paint to decorate with Greek figures. Then hold it up and snap a picture. Tell the kids it will mysteriously age because you’ve pretended to go back in time to get it. They will be excited and happy two hours later when they see how old their pots look! Cool after all!
Pipe Cleaners Gone Wild
Friday, February 4th, 2011
“Why don’t we make some fun pipe cleaner crafts?” I thought to myself, since my daughter pesters me every day to do crafts. If I do a craft with her, she says, “But I want to do lots of crafts.”
Glancing around the local craft supply store, through the mountains of pink, red, and white stuff for Valentines Day, I found a package of pipe cleaners, pom poms, and google eyes. I grabbed it and went to the checkout.
A couple of my kids made caterpillars, which they stuck together with hot glue, with my help. But my 10-year-old son went into the dining room and was quiet for a while. I got a surprise and a shock when I saw what he had made with the pipe cleaners. It was an old-fashioned car!
He had apparently wound the pipe cleaners together until they formed the figure that he was imagining in his head. This was a way more interesting and intricate pipe cleaner craft than anything I imagined when I bought the pipe cleaners at the craft store. It opens up a whole new world of things we could make with pipe cleaners…
