A Collection of Random Ideas and Little Crafts

I was looking for some art for the  girls playroom. I didn't really want to spend any money. Lying around my garage was an old cheesy painting of of a women playing the guitar in a cool old green frame. I had some chalkboard paint lying around. I painted over the guitarist with 2 coats and turned it into a chalkboard. Using colored chalk I wrote on it what you see below. I worked out perfectly. It's placed somewhere the girls can reach it so it will remain like this for awhile. Eventually I can take it down let the girls use it or draw something new. Easy to do, less than $5.
Lydia is loves butterflies so I cut a paper plate up to look like one. I let her use the glitter glue and pom poms we had. It was an easy craft. Quick to do but tough to finish because we had to wait for the glue to dry repeatedly to be able to do the next part of it. So we had to let the head pom dry before we added a face which also had to dry before we added the antlers. It's a tough task for a 3 year old to wait.


Obviously you see what I mean about butterflies. I bought these a while ago at the dollar store. I believe there were 4 in a packet. I let both girls (ages 1 and 3) paint them as they saw fit, but then there was nothing else to do with them. I could have added them to anything really, but I chose to glue them to clothes pins. I use them to close chip bags and to hang kid art on our display line provided by Ikea.

The last completely random mom artsy moment was this set of dice. Eliot brought home a couple of boxes that were almost perfect cubes. I taped them up and spray painted them white. I used sharpies to make them sort of like dice. Instead of the normal dots I made each side with different shapes. So we can throw the dice and count the squares, then the circles and then all the shapes. I found a couple of dice games with fun printables, so Lydia can practice counting and then match the total with the actual number. We play bingo with them. She counts, finds the right correlation and then place a coin on it. We fill the sheet. It's easy. And fun and once we get bored of the giant dice we will recycle them, a nice Earth Day project for sure.

Gaurkee O' Lanterns

Over the past month we have participated in various Autumn celebrations all of which have pumpkins at the center. Instead of buying huge pumpkins every where this year we bought small pumpkins along the way and purchased our big pumpkins at the grocer which was a rather massive savings. 

In my eternal craftiness I wanted to be sure that both girls had something that was age appropriate to do with their respective tiny pumpkins. I spray painted two of them for no reason except I had the paint and I wanted to do something a little different. My mom had gotten both girls Halloween coloring books with stickers. So for Vivian who is almost 15 months, I pulled her stickers out and let her stick them on the pumpkin. The stickiness of the stickers was a new experience for her, and her dexterity wasn't quite ready to unstick them from her fingers at first but she did great. Above all she really enjoyed turning her pumpkin to see all her Sesame Street favorites.

For Lydia I let her squirt her ever favorite glitter glue all over them. She sparkled them all over with various glitter colors. About midway through, dad got smart and out a plate underneath the pumpkin. I purchase a pack of glitter glues that were Crayola and I don't think they were as nice. These ran a little too much in my opinion. I am perpetually annoyed with myself when I don't by Crayola. The couple of bucks I save aren't every worth it, I think at least. However, Lydia didn't notice and she loved it.

The next creative pumpkin endeavor was painting them. This was Vivian's first time painting and I have to say, that she was very good at it. She dipped her brush in the paint and wiped it on the pumpkin. Occasionally, she painted her face and the inside of her mouth but she figured out on her own that it wasn't too tasty.

Lydia for the first time was a little frustrated that mixing all the paint colors didn't mean a rainbow on her brush. She didn't like her brown that manifested from her casual dips in the colors. I got her more paint and a couple of other brushes and it helped a little, but I think it may be time for her to have a brush for every color. We will see if that works a little better for her.
Meanwhile, Eliot was cutting the tops off the big pumpkins. Just when the creative portion was finished he was ready for a little extra help from the girls. Lydia was a little apprehensive at first. She's not one for surprises, so sticking her whole hand, well really whole arm into a large orange vegetable, was not a great idea according to her. Once she saw Vivian, who is totally the kid that will do such things, not lose a limb she was extremely helpful in this process. More importantly she really enjoyed it.

When Lydia was about this age we purchased a potato head pumpkin person. I still think it was one of the greatest ideas. We craved same holes onto another pumpkin and let Vivian work on this one. She loved pulling the pieces off and putting it back in.
Meanwhile, Lydia drew the face of her own pumpkin. I gave her a marker and she just drew whatever she wanted. It was a great one! Once it was craved out and we put a candle on the inside, she was thrilled with her creation. She was very pleased with her big girl self.


For the other pumpkin Lydia wanted us to make Priscilla, the cat. So I did my best but I still think hers was better. The girls colored $1 masks which were fun throughout the night especially as they chased each other and smacked each other on the head. When all the carving and coloring was completed we took the pumpkins to our stoop and lit them, so we could be proud of our work as they glowed in the crisp of the night. We ate candy and laughed and it was a great Halloween night.

Permission to Make a Mess with Cheap Preschool Halloween Crafts

Last week we went on a family walk and passed a house in our neighborhood is that is vacant, falling apart and on sale. The nosy neighbors that we are we  peeked in the windows and did not see much however on our way off the property I saw a pile of rocks, so I grabbed a couple with these projects in mind.

First I let Lydia paint the rocks. I set her up only orange paint for the big rocks and then let her paint a couple of the smaller ones any way she liked. We had to let the rocks dry before phase 2 began. The transition activity I picked up at Michael's for a dollar. They are little watercolor pages which have the paints on the bottom that are activated by the water and brush. These are by Creatology and were Halloween themed.
  After the rocks were dry I had Lydia glue faces on the rocks.  She loves to use real Elmers glue. She feels like she's a big girl. One rock was a pumpkin, the other a cat. I used scraps of paper to make the parts of the face, I also had googly eyes which Lydia really enjoyed. She attached them all on her own. On the smaller rocks I used a regular sectioned plate and placed random items in it like sequence, buttons, pieces of ribbon, scraps of crafty things I had or had been given. So she could decide to make faces however she wanted.
I love the way her projects turned out this time. They are certainly fun and creative. I was thinking about my approach with her during these times and for almost all of this activity I was making dinner, so I would set her up and let her just do it. I have no fear of her making a mess, because well that is part of it. She spilled water, so we moved her to the other side of the table. She got paint on herself, so before dinner we washed it off. She wanted the stick buttons on random places of the rockfaces and I certainly didn't stop her. She got glue on the floor, we wiped it up.

I truly believe that part of the process and purpose is to let them have a creative outlet and be guided by their own whims. This is not to say that all of these endeavors always go perfectly, but I try to pick times that I am willing to be a gamer about it, meaning I am in a state of mind that is patient and open-minded and prepared to redirect the preschooler. Some may wonder where was Vivi? Well she was napping. Gluing is not quite the right toddler task, so timing does have  a lot to do with a successful kid craft experience.

 

Another Halloween craft which was very simple and a lot less prep I gave Lydia a wooden Bat mask to color with markers, also a dollar at Michaels and she wanted to color it pink and purple. I let her use the glitter glue squeezers and she decorated it with glee and for a long time. Once again, I just gave her the tools and the directions and waited to see what the result was.

Rainy Day Activities

The last couple of days it has been rainy. It is always tough to entertain the kids on those types of days instead of flicking on the television. It is also a challenge with kids of different ages and abilities. Luckily, Vivi is now 13 months and she is more able to participate in a few activities. I had some empty containers that I was saving but I wasn't sure why. I quickly filled them with different objects: dominoes, couscous, a bell, a little person, a couple of little bouncy balls and even one with colorful pompoms. They all made a different sound and some loud some none, but she loved it. She picked them up and shook them up. She loved the one with couscous the best. It had a nice shaker sound.
Meanwhile, Lydia got a few crafts for her birthday that we decided to work on. One was a little mirror to decorate. She loves the glitter glue much to any mom's concern but she did a good job keeping it on the mirror. I have to say it was an easy activity to do and she was able to not only be creative but use various small motor skills.
For Vivi I had an only busy bag set of colored popsicle sticks that have Velcro on them. I prestuck them for her and she liked unsticking them. She isn't quite ready yet to stick them together but it was still a great activity. I have about a dozen of them and so it would take her bit to unstick them. I would simply reconnect and she would start over.
The mirror took Lydia almost the entire time we were sitting together. There was jewels and stickers.
Once she did finish we worked on a princess sticker book she also got for her birthday. The book had little descriptions and outlines of where to put the stickers that Lydia called their shadows. I pulled the stickers out so once I read the description she could find the right picture. There was a page for the princesses, their friends, and the villains.  We did the first page before dinner and the last couple pages after dinner. It provided a lot of opportunities to have conversations about princesses in general.

Admittedly, my 3 year has a much better grip on all that stuff than I would have imagined. And yesterday her favorites were the villains. She chanced Vivian around the house growling like a wicked witch and Vivian ran away laughing so hard. It was delightful.
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Freedom Crafts

Eliot has been working a series of evenings shifts this week. I always plan activities when this happens partly because I am a camp counselor and teacher through and through and I like to have my little campers focused. Last night we made crafts in honor of the 4th of July.

Lydia has been working hard on using her scissors and so I had an old pack of calendar pages from on of those page a days. The whole week before Independence Day had various festive images. I let her practice her cutting and then glue.


For my two year old a glue stick is like magic. You wipe it and things stick to it. This could entertain her for hours. This project is also a great Earth Day project because everything involved is recycled even the sheet she is gluing on is a random piece of found paper.

In between crafts, I always have an activity. I love the Melissa and Doug reusable sticker pads. They work sort of like window clings. The first packet we had was various animal habitats and animals, now we have acquired the Play House! and Make-A-Meal. As she has gotten older she has enjoyed these more and more, last night was definitely a success.
I was trying to get ready the next activity which was making a cotton ball flag.  I took a piece of red paper, drew a square on the upper left hand corner and added stripes. I cut a blue square for her to glue in the corner. She added glue spots to attach cotton balls onto every other row. Later we had stars of many colors she glued onto the blue square.




Finally our last craft was simple. We have been working on letters. I made the letters USA for her. We traced them with our fingers. We looked at each one and talk about what it started with. She then used the magic glue stick and we were done with our USA poster!

She called it a house when she put it on her head. I took this as a teachable moment to tell her Yes, the USA is a house for all people. We live in Florida which is apart of the USA. She wasn't quite ready for the civic lesson.

So what was the 10 month old doing? Well at this stage it's all oral and it's all sensory. So I collected a bucket of stuff that I put on her high chair. As she threw things on the ground I put something new on there. She touched it all and put it all in her mouth and it went well.
I have a set of measuring cups that bend down and pop up. I would occasional stack these, she would push them down. Somehow she almost seemed to be stirring and playing kitchen.
I also put the items in a clear container I normally use to storage stamps and she enjoyed taking them out. We did this several times.


Eventually it was time for some milk and she played with the frig magnetic mini-puzzle. This has been great for both the kids.

No doubt there is some juggling going on in these moments, however, we all had a good time developing our senses in different ways. Tomorrow Freedom Cake.

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Failed Crafty Moments

For Easter I made Vivian her own finger paints. I bought Vanilla pudding and used just one drop of  natural food coloring for each little cup. After stirring it around the color easily took and put them in to little glass jars. They looked cute and I put them in her basket.
With all the excitement, colds and to-dos, we hadn't gotten a chance to use them yet. I happen to glance at the inside of her basket which was still sitting on our buffet and noticed aqua ooze splattered all over. Not really processing what had happened yet, I grab the jar to see that all the jars had ooze seeping out the lids. Apparently the pressure somehow caused it to implode, and then come out.

So I toss them out, assuming that if it combusted I couldn't in good for my baby. I did however, buy more pudding and I figure when we are ready to do it, I will mix it and let her play.



My other failed project was this giant large floral chair and a funky 80's giant ottoman that were both given to us and are both super comfy. Since they are atrocious we got chair covers. We got a green color because we found the ottoman and chair cover in the same shade. Now we have a beautiful new gray couch in that lounge library type room and this green ottoman and chair situation. Instead of getting another expensive cover I decided to dye it. I figured a darker shade of gray would be nice but the Rit Dye folks only had one gray option so that is what I got, a pearl gray that from the moment I saw it against the share, I knew it was likely not going to take, but I still had to try.
I boiled the water, added vinegar as instructed, gloved and stirred ferociously. I let things soak for over 30 minutes. I looked at the instructions repeatedly and I had followed them to the tee. I did notice that in small writing it said, will not dye polyester, rayon or wool. I looked at the cover label and it is 95% polyester and 5% spandex. I poked and stirred my bucket filled with material some more and then rinsed it in defeat.
I tried. I failed. It's still green, well like a greenish.

Reuse, Recycle, Art!

For the last couple of years after we dyed Easter eggs, I throw handfuls of pasta into the dye cups. I usually have a ton of different shaped pasta in the pantry. Our local grocery store seems to always have pasta buy one get one free, so we stock up.

 

The colored pasta work for us in many different ways. I used it for sorting skills, all the blues together, all the reds, all the weird blackish ones that are supposed to be purple ones together. I used them to help develop counting skills. For example, how many wheels do you have? Pasta is also perfect for threading skills; small motor skill development. I got out a piece of yarn, tied a big knot at the end of it and let Lydia put a bunch of different size pastas on the string. After a while, the pasta gets dropped and breaks and we throw it out slowly.

 

This year, I decided I would use our dyed pasta for more traditional endeavors of noodle art. At 2 1/2, there are fewer things that she likes more than glue. Good old fashion Elmer's white gold. This will entertain her for hours. I poured the glue onto a paper plate for easy disposal and gave her a plate of colored noodles. I set some examples up for her to make little people (wheels as heads, bowties for boys or head bows for girls, little macaroni for hair, ziti for body limbs) but she wasn't quite ready to replicate those, she really just wanted to dip them in glue and stick them on to the page.

 

Since I was reusing the dye, using some leftover pastas and a leftover sheet of lightweight foam, I declared this project an Earth Day endeavor. Once she was done, we decided to give it to Abuelo for his birthday, so it served yet another purpose, because all grandparents love art from their grandchildren.

 

I had some leftover pasta that I stuck in a baggie and kept for another day. The pasta from last year I threw out a couple of weeks before this year, so it last for a while. I would say that if your pasta gets limp after it has already dried completely, it may be the sign to toss it. Otherwise, get creative.

 

During this art time with Lydia, I finally let Vivian use her pudding paints. A few things I had forgotten about 8 months stage. I didn't need to put the paints on a plate. The plate was flung rather quickly and I was cleaning pudding off of everything in the dining room shortly after I gave it to her. I should have just put them right on the tray of the high chair. The fun part is smearing it all over, so prepare for a mess. And since it's pudding it is okay to eat but it makes for a very sticky baby. The sensory experience was so fun for her that it was well worth it.