Art – Page 9 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

Bell Pepper Shamrocks

In our house, we do a lot of abstract-type art… more just art to be creating art instead of a “craft” with a specific end-product in mind. Today’s activity is sort of in between the two – because I had a definite picture in my mind of how it would look in the end… so my own paintings conformed to that set “craft” end product. And Becca’s? Well, thankfully I didn’t share my end product vision with her. Because that would have spoiled her fun, and her learning experience.

With St. Patty’s day coming up soon, we decided to welcome in the month by stamping shamrocks on paper… using bell peppers. I had carefully selected both a four and a three chamber bell pepper at the store so that we’d have three and four leaf clovers. We pulled up Google images and looked at shamrock pictures and then dove in. She ended up mainly creating “bushes” and “trees” – and of course, painting her hands. (What use is finger paint if you don’t paint all of your fingers? I mean, that’s what it means to call it finger paint, right? HA!)

So – whether you are planning (and end up actually creating) a great shamrock printed paper to turn into greeting cards, or perhaps to use as a background for your March page in your 2016 calendar, this is a super fun activity that only involves a little bit of preparation (add two bell peppers to your grocery trip… at $.50 a piece, it’s a pretty cheap activity, too!) and you and your kids are guaranteed to have some more… Fun with Art. 🙂

Make Your Own Foot Book!

Typically on Fridays, I try to share ideas that you could add to your 2016 Calendar… but this one is a little off topic… yet still right in line with keeping the ART in STEAM… so… we made our own Foot Book! As you know from Wednesday’s post, Becca LOVES The Foot Book (Aff link, thank you!) So I thought we’d have a little fun and make our own.

I grabbed some old shoes that we couldn’t do anything with anyway, and we did some paint stamping. But, we also stamped with our actual feet, and had fun (LOTS OF GIGGLES!) running to the tub (after having painted in our skivvies) and hopping in to wash all the paint off. WORD TO THE WISE: Tempera pant washes off tile super easily… the grout, well… the grout is still blue. (Insert super embarrassed Mommy face here, and a not-so-thrilled Daddy face… sigh. Please learn from my mistake and use washable finger paints… and still, be careful of the grout.)

Anyway, after all of our art was dry, I taped the pages together with the Washi tape of her choosing, and then she helped me pick what words to put on which page. We didn’t make enough art to do a page for the entire Seuss book – we just picked our favorite pages. Definitely had a blast making it, and she loves reading back through it and giggling all over again about running to the tub with Mommy to wash off our blue and yellow feet. Good times. (Even if I do still need to make a baking soda paste and see if I can scrub the grout with a toothbrush….)

Painting – With Cars

On my own, I never would have thought of taking Becca’s cars and running them around on paper… after running them through paint. But there is a really neat place here in town called Artworks Studio that has a great “open art” play time. Our MOPS group went to it and one of the activities was painting with a car. Becca LOVED it. So, I decided to recreate that activity at home with some of her cars – and her monster truck. Note that yes, we did use acrylic paint, and yes, some little bits of it stuck permanently to the cars. That wasn’t a problem for us. If you want to maintain your cars, be sure to use something washable like a fingerpaint. We had a really great time with this, and then were able to take one of our sheets and immediately turn it into something super useful – I punched flowers and butterflies out of one of the pages and ran them through my Xyron Create-a-Sticker Sticker Maker (aff link – thank you!) and Becca was able to use the stickers on a birthday card to send to my grandma. So it was really neat to mail out some of her art the next day afterward. Usually we keep it around to use for our 2016 calendar. Here are a few pictures of our fun… and yes, Becca painted her hands. I just didn’t fit those pics into the collage. This silly girl… can’t paint anything without totally painting her hands!

I’d love to have you follow my Facebook page, where I share fun ideas from lots of bloggers, as well as run a special series each day at noon where I share favorite books to help build your home or classroom library. Please note that the way Facebook selects pages to view on your timeline is based on your interaction with that page. Be sure to click on over to my page frequently to see what Facebook might not be showing you, and click “like”, “comment”, and “share” on my posts to ensure that Facebook will show you what’s going on on the page! The more you interact, the more that should show up on your news feed! www.facebook.com/butterbeesandbumbleflies

Super Simple Playdough

Happy Valentine’s Day!! If you’re like me, this day has snuck up quickly – quicker than usual, it seems. And somehow I recently realized that I haven’t made any play dough since Christmas. Yeah. We go in phases of play around here, and we’ve been out of a play dough mode for a while. But, Becca’s been asking for some, so I thought I’d make her a wonderful surprise and make glitter play dough! So, I looked online at a million different recipes and decided that I guess I’m just lazy. Or maybe I’m stuck in a rut. But whatever it is, I’m just not willing to try a new play dough recipe. I like mine, and I’m stickin’ to it!

Maybe you’ve been looking for an EASY recipe, too. So many of them require the stove or an electric skillet. And honestly, this was the first time I made my recipe without the electric skillet, and I felt so silly that I had ever used it in the first place!! Here’s what you need to do to make my Super Simple Playdough.

In a bowl, mix together 1 cup of flour, a little less than 1/2 cup table salt, 2 tsp cream of tartar, three packages of your favorite Koolaid for vibrant color (I used cherry for this to make it red. Fyi though, if you do grape wanting to make purple, only use one pack b/c three comes out almost black), and then if you want, stir in some glitter, too.

In a larger mixing bowl, heat 1 1/4 cups water and 1 overflowing Tbsp of vegetable oil. Make sure it’s boiling when you pull it out – I heated mine for 3 minutes. Dump in your dry ingredients and stir well. You’ll have a sticky mass in your bowl. Let it cool for about an hour. Then it’s ready to be played with! No adding extra flour or any stovetop mess! Super simple.

Store it in an airtight container, and it’ll be great for play for a couple of weeks. After that point, you’ll need to add flour if you want it to not be sticky… or just throw it away and make a new color/scent!

So if this Valentine’s Day you need something fun to occupy the troops… pull out a few packs of cherry Koolaid and make some play dough! 🙂

NOTE: If you don’t have any Koolaid on hand, food coloring works just as well – add it to the boiling water. You can add a drop of essential oil to the water for a scent if you’d like. If you have a child who is eager to dive in and doesn’t mind the CAUTION – HOT! dough, you can throw a little flour on the counter and let them go ahead and dive in to kneading the dough as soon as it is mixed!

Bubble Painting

Well, once again, the link that I had to credit this idea to has disappeared from my Safari tabs, and Googling has not produced the blog post that I originally saw. So, as with most things, please know that I’m not the original genius who thought this up… I’m just the Mommy who made it happen in our home and is now sharing with you so you can try it too!!

Bubble painting is super simple and fun – just add food coloring to bubble solution, and blow bubbles onto your paper! The bigger the bubble, and the longer it sits before it pops, the better the marks will be. Also, we learned that the yellow dries pretty lightly, but the blue turned out good. So, definitely use white or creme cardstock, and when you add your food coloring in, you might want to make darker colors like purple or green. Becca had great fun just spreading the soap solution with the bubble wands, too – there’s just no limit to the fun that can be had with this! You could even try one of those bubble blowers that makes lots of bubbles in one cluster, and see how those painted. There’s just a never ending list of fun things to try when painting with bubbles! I’d love to have you try this with your kids at home, and then share your photos with me! We’ll definitely be doing this activity again and again.

Can easily be done indoors with activity trays, or outside if it’s a nice sunny day!

Just think how awesome these are going to look added to your collages for your 2016 calendar!