I suspect my parents are among the seven people who regularly read this blog, so I’ll just say up front that I don’t mean to hurt your feelings Mom & Dad, or make you feel guilty in any way for the mysterious circumstances in which the only surviving original artwork from my childhood, a small green clay frog that I “sculpted” in first grade, has vanished from Dad’s top dresser drawer (its last known residence).  Inquiries into its whereabouts only seem to heighten suspicions of foul play.  Was he in the wrong place at the wrong time, an innocent victim of your recent purging in preparation for downsizing?   Or was his disappearance the result of pre-meditated malfeasance?  I covertly collected hair & fiber evidence during my last visit, and we’re anxious to see what the forensic lab results reveal.

Don’t get me wrong – I appreciate that you continue to prominently showcase in your hallway one of the most embarassingly hideous watercolors that I painted in high school, but it’s the earlier masterpieces I’m more interested in.  I feel a strange need to reconnect with my childhood self (though friends would claim that I do that on a daily basis).  My baby book says my favorite pastime was to “draw and color”.  So where are they?  hhhmmmm?

If there are any parents out there reading this and feeling a twinge of guilt about what you just hauled out to the recycle bin, let me share with you this fabulous find!  During a recent toddler class, we got to know a local mom who owns a cool company called The Pampered Pixel, where designers turn your digital images into archival quality, customized photo books.  We got one for the studio as a momento of some of our favorite projects, and as someone who periodically orders photo books online, I can tell you that the ten minutes it took to select pictures to give them was way preferable to manually creating the book myself, not to mention there was simply no comparison in the quality! Plus, the customized editing & layout design they came up with were so creative and unique.   This is such a great way to memorialize your children’s artwork ~ a beautiful keepsake album as a gift to grandparents and even your children, to be passed on to future generations.  I personally would love to have seen some of my grandparent’s childhood doodles.

Let’s face it, despite my tongue-in-cheek comments above, it’s just not realistic to keep every single green ceramic frog your kids bring home from school!  And professional framing is not always an affordable option, particularly if they attend class at small hands big art ~ where we always feel a little apologetic about the oversized odd-shaped paper & canvas we are so fond of using.  { Sort of. } And only taking photographs of their artwork may not be sufficient ~ where will those digital images end up after iPhoto crashes and irreversibly corrupts 5,475 images from 2001 – present when you innocently attempt to upgrade to the latest release?  Just asking.

Now run back out to the recycle bin!  And then go check out The Pampered Pixel!

This video may be as close as we’ll ever come!  Enjoy! 

OH. MY!  We can’t take an ounce of credit for having dreamt up these adorable little paintbrush people, but when we saw them we knew we didn’t have to walk too far across the room to gather all of the supplies we needed!  They were inspired by a super talented mixed media artist in Beckley, WV named Karen Lilly.  Run ~ don’t walk ~ to her blog right this second and feast your eyes on all of her whimsical creations!

Thanks to her, every artist and art studio on the planet now has what seems like such an obvious answer to the dilemma of what to do with all of those rusty old ratty paintbrushes that sit on the shelf collecting dust, but that you hate to throw away because technically the brush (though having degraded over the years into some sort of stiff appendage no longer very brush-like) is still attached to the handle!

The kids in our Monday afternoon Upcycle Open Studio class had a fabulous time making these out of odds and ends, little pieces and parts of old jewelry, hardware, wire, buttons, ribbons, fabric, & other do-dads.  We attached them to a piece of cork and they fashioned a decorative wire hanger to turn these into swanky little bulletin boards so they could keep better track of all of their important meetings, appointments, playdates & such.

We’re kind of baffled as to why kids today don’t really know how to wad up paper.  They just stare at us confused, even after we show them several times as we grasp for more descriptive verbs – scrunch it, squish it, squeeze it.  Ok, grab it!  Go!  ~ Nothing.  Followed by a few attempts at gently folding.  We’d like to think it has to do with the popularity of recycling and how rarely one has a compelling reason to take a perfectly decent piece of paper and just wad it up for seemingly no good reason.

We used a water bottle filled with plaster to form the fox’s body to hold the head.

And aluminum foil to sculpt the shape.

~ A lot of wire & duct tape to attach the tail.

We’ve suppressed the memory of this part.

A gravity-defying pile of foxes in the window.

Speaking of gravity, not sure how this one is even standing upright, his nose is so long!

A lot of little orange people just got up and ran to the sink.

Can you hear me?  Can you hear me now?

An arctic fox.   So clever, these kids!

“Roxy the foxy”

Motivated to whip up a less predictable spring craft involving something other than pastel colored eggs for a change (!), these papier mache carrot pencils seemed the obvious answer!  Sure, any of the kids at school can boast an impressive collection of perfectly sharpened Ticonderoga 2Bs (with erasers), but show us a single kid who has one of these in his backpack!! mmmm…hmmmm.

We took a little inspiration from one of our favorite books, Carrot Soup - a beautifully illustrated book about a rabbit who toils in his carrot patch all spring, only to find that when it’s time to harvest his beloved carrots, they’re GONE!  He sets out to apprehend the perpetrator(s), but when interrogated, all of his sneaky little friends claim to have no knowledge of the missing carrots.  Turns out they are covertly planning a huge surprise party for him when he gets home!  And you’ll never guess what they are serving!

“It was spring – Rabbit’s favorite season!”

You Need:

1.  Pencils (all sizes).  We thought the little nubby ones made the cutest carrots!

2.  Bowl to make papier mache paste

3.  Whisk

4.  Strips of craft paper or newspaper

5.  Flour

6.  Warm water

7.  Aluminum foil

8.  Orange, white & brown tempera or acrylic paint & paintbrush

9.  A few stems of artificial leafy greens for carrot tops

10.  Tape

How to Do It:

1.  Sharpen the pencils.  Here we must confess a slight design flaw, in that once you make these into carrots, you may only be able to sharpen the pencils a few times.  So, as we’re always saying to the kids in class – don’t press so hard!  Or, the obvious solution would be to make them using a pen, but then you might not be able to show them off in class or use your lucky carrot on your math test. Life is a series of trade offs.

2.  Secure the leafy greens to the top of the pencil with tape.

3.  Gently crumple the aluminum foil around the pencil to “sculpt” your carrot shape.  Foil is highly underrated sculpting medium – we use it a LOT with papier mache!  Make sure to vary your carrot shapes and sizes, just like Mother Nature.

4.  Mix the papier mache paste.  There are a ton of recipes you could follow, but the simplest is to just pour 3/4 cup of warm water into a bowl, and using another cup, slowly sprinkle the flour into the water while stirring briskly with the whisk.  The warm water and rapid stirring helps to ensure there are no lumps.  You have added enough flour when the mixture gets to the consistency of yogurt.  That’s all there is to it!

5.  Dip the strips of newspaper into the paste and gently wrap around the foil on the pencil.  Keep layering the strips until all the foil is covered and you have at least two layers of paper.  Smooth the paper around the tip of the pencil and the top so the carrot will look realistic.

6.  Let dry overnight.

7.  Paint the carrots.  A few tips to make your carrots look realistic:  Mix a few shades of orange so that there are varied shades and splotches of different colors on each carrot.  You may have to apply two coats.  After the orange coat is dry, dip your brush into watered down brown paint and holding the brush about 6″ away from the carrot and using your thumb, splatter the carrots to give them some realistic looking speckles.  After that is dry, you can also take a light brown magic marker and very lightly draw lines here and there on the carrot to look like natural striations.

8.  Consider giving a carrot pencil as a gift to the Easter Bunny with a thank you note for the lifetime of peeps and jelly beans he has bestowed upon you.  He rarely receives any acknowledgment of his generosity, let alone written correspondence, so we’re sure he would be most appreciative!

A song’s not a song ’til you sing it.

Love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay.

Love isn’t love ’til you give it away.

~ Oscar Hammerstein

[ click twice on the photos to zoom ]

orange + pink love.

Drizzled & swizzled & sprinkled with love.

This Valentine’s Day, nothing says love quite like a giant tub of flubber!  It wiggles and jiggles and jumps for joy!  It slips, it drips, it stretches & flips!   It bounces and flounces.  { You get the picture. } This stuff is so much fun to play with, we have to warn you that you’ll want to wrestle it out of your kids’ hands, so definitely make enough for the whole family to enjoy!

Because the main ingredient is glue, choose your work surface and clothing accordingly.  If there is a run away globule, it tends to just stay in the form of a little ball and doesn’t rub into clothing very easily  – so you mostly just want to make sure you don’t step in it and track it around the house or get it stuck in your hair.  It’s fun to play with on a solid surface with cookie cutters, pastry scrapers, sticks, etc.  If you let it sit for a few minutes it will “melt” into itself.  Our hearts melted together after about 5 minutes.  And they had only just met!

Recipe:

• 1 ½ cups warm water
• 2 cups white glue
• food coloring or liquid watercolor
• 1 ¹⁄₃ cups warm water
• 3 teaspoons Borax (found in the laundry aisle at the grocery story)

How to Do It

1.  In one bowl, mix 1 1/2 cups warm water with the glue and a few drops of food coloring or watercolor.

2.  In a second bowl, mix 1 1/3 cups of warm water and the Borax.

3.  There are various methods, but we prefer to pour the warm water/glue mixture into the bowl with the Borax, and gently stir with a stick.  There will be quite a bit of liquid left over.  The glue is still a liquid but it stays together, and within a few seconds  it will begin to turn rubbery and you can stick your hand in the bowl to mix it a little.  It will be a little slippery and very stringy at this point.

4.  Gather the glob of flubber in your hands while standing over a sink and work it a little with your fingers for about 30 seconds until all the liquid dissolves and it turns very rubbery.  The right consistency should be a little like putty – very pliable -  it will stretch very slowly when you hold up, but it won’t be too solid or too runny.

5.  Store in air tight container.

When it comes to matters of the heart, it’s challenging to find the best way to express our heartfelt sentiments to the objects of our affection.  We want to tell them.  But we don’t. Yikes!  Let’s face it, it’s not easy to muster enough courage to plop down in the seat next to your bus crush and announce that you’ve loved her since kindergarten.  And trusting your best friend Billy to deliver the message on your behalf could backfire if he spills the beans to everyone on the bus except your bus crush.  Or worse, what if he sits next to her and is so overcome by her sweet shy smile that instead of declaring your love for her, he declares his own?!?  It’s just too risky.

So we’ve come up with a fabulous Valentine’s Day craft that takes all the pressure off of you, and puts it squarely on the shoulders of your beloved! Your job is simply to write sweet nothings in your most legible second grade handwriting (cursive if you dare!), and cut them up and stuff them into a pretty translucent valentine heart, along with lots of beautiful little sparkly things.  Her job, if she chooses to accept it, is to unscramble your message and attempt to make some sort of sense out of it.  Just like real life!  And if she can’t make heads nor tails out of your mixed-up musings, at least you haven’t embarrassed yourself, and maybe she’ll give you credit for the cute presentation!

You Need:

1.  Two sheets of semi-transparent paper (velum or cellophane work great).  We used one sheet each of light pink and clear vellum.

2.  Pen and paper with which to write your sweet nothings.

3.  Scissors

4.  Hole punch

5.  Red or pink string or yarn to “sew” your heart closed.  We used red & white baker’s twine.

6.  Small paper hearts or other Valentine’s Day inspired sparkly do-dads to tuck inside the heart.  More is more.

7.  Courage.

How to Do It:

1.  Tackle the hard part first!  Compose at least 15-20 rough drafts of your love note and then select the one that you feel best articulates your feelings.  Use proper grammar, and a dictionary to check spelling.  Don’t leave your drafts laying around where your mother or {gulp} older brother could find them.  We caution you against procrastinating with this most important step because dashing off a haphazard note in sloppy penmanship will show a lack of conviction that will no doubt cost you dearly!  Don’t forget to sign your name (and last initial if there are a lot of Connor’s in your class).

2.  Cut every single word out, one by one.  Don’t chop off the tails of your g’s and y’s.  Details, details!

3.  Draw a big heart on one sheet of the vellum paper.  Don’t be skimpy here!  A tiny little heart will send a mixed message and cause confusion and/or hurt feelings.

4.  Layer the two sheets of paper and cut out the heart.

5.  With the two sheets still together, use the hole punch to punch holes evenly around the outside permitter of the heart.

6.  Lace the string carefully through the holes, leaving enough space open at the end to insert the words from your note and sparkly pretty things.  Take care not to wrinkle or outright mangle the heart during this delicate process as the recipient could infer certain things from your lack of control.

7.  Finish lacing the heart, tie a knot, and leave a little extra string at the end to tie into a loop for hanging.

8.  Personally hand deliver to your sweetheart no later than Valentines Day, with a confident smile and friendly greeting.  Resist the overwhelming urge to shove it in her hand and run away screaming.