Art – Page 8 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

STEAM Celery

Today I wanted to share some ideas for you using something that might already be in your fridge!! (Also be sure to visit my post about Bell Pepper shamrocks for another idea of a way to use bell peppers.)

If you’re like us, I buy celery for a specific recipe, and then the rest of it just sorta sits there until I throw it out. We aren’t big fans of eating raw celery like some folks are. (If you are fans of it, please, don’t consider this blasphemous. HA!) So, I saw somewhere (sorry, I don’t still have the original link) about painting with celery, and I thought that looked fun. But I also have done celery science with students in the past, so I thought that would be cool too. So, we tried both things, and I thought I’d share with you these ideas in conjunction with always trying to share a lot of STEAM ideas for you, and give you some ideas to use up what’s already in your kitchen in new and different ways! 🙂

Celery Science is as simple as just cutting some stalks of celery and sticking them in water you have colored with food coloring! It’s a great way to teach about capillary action, and how plants absorb water. If you split the bottoms of the celery stalks, the water climbs faster than if you don’t – so that also makes a great experiment. It’s most fun to watch the leaves change color, so this is a great use of the leafy part of the celery if you aren’t using it in a salad. (Did you know celery leaves add a great flavor and lots of vitamins to your salad without the stringy yuck of the rest of the celery plant? The leaves are also great to chop up like an herb and add to soups and stews!) Be sure that you allow a couple of days for your science project so that your little scientist can watch over time and really see how much gets absorbed into the plant.

Another fabulous use for the other end of your celery is as a stamp for painting! Use a strong rubber band to hold the stalks together for those smaller hands to be able to hold on and grip the stamp. They make beautiful flowers, or cover the whole page using several different colors for some fabulous texture… this would make an awesome background sheet for your 2016 calendar!

Do you have another idea on how to use celery in a creative way? Please share in the comments!!

Cling Film Art

I recently saw this idea from Rachelle Doorley over at TinkerLab, and decided that we’d give it a try! It was a lot of fun, and adequately messy to make my little hands-on gal really happy. First, she used a spikey ball and a wine cork to make various sizes of dots all over the paper. Then, we covered the paper with cling film, and she set to smearing! It was lots of fun, and the outcome was beautiful, and will look great in our fall designs for her 2016 calendar!

Tape Resist Name Art

Subject: Art

Typically, I share the art portion of STEAM on Fridays in my “Fun with Art” segment, but honestly, we do so much art around here, that sometimes I just have to take time on Thursdays to share art too! SO… today is all about ART! (And tomorrow will be too, so be sure to check back! 🙂

I’ve seen lots of different examples of tape resist art, but I wanted to do something Becca could really take ownership of… without spending a bunch of money on a canvas, or waiting until they were on sale at Hobby Lobby. Instead, I just put some painter’s tape on some regular pink card stock, pulled out some blue, green, yellow, and purple acrylic paints, and we just had a blast. We both painted on each piece, and of course, true to form, she ended up sticking her hand in the paint cup and painting a couple of the pieces with her fingers. She even ended up with some of the paint in her hair (acrylic paint is interesting in hair… does NOT wash out… but after a few days it was all gone).

We both really enjoyed this activity, and now that it’s done, I want to extend it by getting some frames and putting her name in frames in her bedroom.

An important thing to note if you haven’t ever done a tape resist – use painter’s tape, and be sure to peel it off while the paint on the paper/canvas is still wet. It should peel right off.

Coffee Art

I recently learned from a friend the benefits of adding used coffee grounds to the soil in my flower beds – the nitrogen really helps enrich the soil. And, I had a bunch of old coffee that I had found in the back of my fridge that I had just stuck in the pantry thinking I’d do something with it someday. So, rather than take the time and put the wear on my coffee maker to make up like 10 pots of coffee, I just dumped the grounds into a tin carton and added some hot water. Then I got to thinking – I bet this would make some really cool coffee “stains” on white paper. So, I strained a little of the water off, and Becca and I used Pipettes (aff link – thank you!) at the easel to drip the coffee down onto the paper. And the result was really cool. We had a blast. And as a bonus, it smelled good!

I think we’ll probably use one of these sheets for our September or maybe November page background in our 2016 Calendar, and they’ll also work neat for little pieces of our collages throughout the calendar as well. Are you working on art for your calendar? I’d love to see pictures of what you are coming up with! Please share – and you might get featured on our Wednesday guest posts!

Mess-Free Painting with Your Baby Bee

I do so much painting and art stuff with Becca, but really wasn’t doing anything in the way of art with Grayson. Then I read this blog post by CanDo Kiddo… and was like – WOW! I can do that! That’s as easy as falling off a log! Grayson doesn’t have trouble with Tummy Time at all (she suggests it would be fabulous for encouraging a baby who doesn’t like Tummy Time… a fabulous idea!!!) – he’s crawling everywhere, but I still found that he loved seeing something new on the floor and got right in there with squishing the paint! The end products turned out really fun, and definitely worth keeping as his first works of art! And of course the bonus was – he wasn’t messy when it was done… and neither was I!

So how do you do it? It’s simple. Just trim the ends of some sheets of card stock so that they’ll easily fit in a Ziploc freezer bag. Then squirt a few drops of squishy finger paint onto the paper, and slip it carefully into the Ziploc bag. Then get the air out and seal the bag. Tape it to the floor with painter’s tape, and present the activity to your Baby Bee! Watch them explore and have so much fun! Then, when they are done, just cut both sides of the bag off, unzip, and peel it back to reveal the finished art! Let it dry and then display!

I can’t wait to do this activity with him again sometime soon and use different colors. He really enjoyed it so so much – and it kept him occupied for a good ten minutes!!

As recommended in the CanDo Kiddo article, you could also tape it to the table, or to a high chair tray if you need an activity off of the floor for your child to do while you do dishes, etc.