Thanks to everyone who stopped by our Fall Open House this year! Just fyi, that glitter will eventually wash out of their hair.

Inspired by the long shadows and different angle of light that streams through the studio windows this time of year, we dreamt up these whimsical Karla Gerard suncatchers for our 5-9 year old classes this week.

Sure you could spend all afternoon trolling Pinterest for a super cute DIY cuff bracelet to whip up to impress your crafty fashion-forward friends, only to be left feeling like the world’s most over-scheduled & creatively stunted human being on the planet. Or you could just spend two minutes making this!

Cooler Fall weather signals the reminder that soon kids will be spending most of their time indoors, shuffling around the house on Saturday mornings in their footie PJs and inventing sneakier, more permanent ways to stain the carpet. While the weather is still nice, this classic bubble print project is perfect to set up outside on the patio!

One afternoon in late summer 2010 a pretty, vibrant mother with long dark hair will come breezing in to the studio to buy the largest quantity of art classes available. She will tell you how much her daughter just loooves art and will mention almost as an oh-by-the-way that her daughter has cancer.

With this creative project, kids dream up a kookie creature, write a biography about it, design it on paper, construct it out of papier mache, and build a little home for it!

Inspired by the classic mix and match books that we all loved so much as a kid, we dreamt up this three dimensional project and I’m not sure who had more fun with it – us or the kids. In our humble opinion this project totally rocked – it has all the elements of a super fun summer DIY project for bored kids and frustrated moms!

In the studio, we often set up a really simple low-budget spiral art station with our toddlers and pre-schoolers, using a $7.99 Ikea Lazy Susan. Snudda, for those of you who speak Svenska. It’s a great activity for kids to practice their hand-eye coordination while improving fine and gross motor skills and making a really cool piece of art!

The younger kids created decoupage collage portraits of their Dads in Open Studio today! It was amusing to listen to them banter back & forth about their Dads as they deliberated one eyebrow or two…

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.