paint cut paste

over spring break in april, it was time for me to plant some potted herbs for the season. with all of the fairy house excitement as of late, N wanted to make them into “fairy herb gardens,” naturally.

even without her own pinterest account, this trend seemed to seep into the consciousness of my 5-year-old. go figure. first we potted the herbs into two large pots. N said that she would decorate the basil and rosemary pot, and the other (sage, cilantro, and parsley) was for me to adorn. i felt honored to get to do one, as i assumed she’d do both. yay!

she decided we needed our shrinky dink herb tags here, but the ones we made a couple years ago weren’t the same types of herbs, so we spent an afternoon making new shrinky dink tags. (easy steps: scribble with colored pencil on rough side, cut shape, write herb name with sharpie on smooth side, heat shrink, stick in soil.)

then it was time for the houses. i gave her a choice of using natural materials (like she does in the yard) or painting some wooden birdhouses we have ($1 bin at michael’s.) she chose the painted route, and we got to work on our fairy houses.

next we gathered up some items for landscaping… like colorful marbles, stones, shells, sea glass, and even a few of the lovely painted sticks we made a couple years ago. N excitedly designed her fairy herb pot.

she spent a lot of time getting everything just right for the fairies. what a hostess!

the herb pots are so darn sweet… and we’ve spent some time over the past month (has it been that long!!!??!) clipping sprigs of herbs for our dinners and sprucing up the fairy neighborhoods.

in mid-april, i went out of town for a long weekend to celebrate a friend’s baby blessing while N stayed at home with daddy. i don’t get the opportunity to travel sans-kiddo very often, so as my trip approached, N found herself getting anxious about my departure. i wanted to share with you this story of how she used art to find a way to cope with this.

before my trip, we got a book at the library called the kiss box. this was serendipity, as we did not pre-read it before checking it out, but it came in  handy in the days leading up to my weekend away. the story is about a momma bear who needs to go away from her little bear for a while, and the little bear suggests creating a box to put kisses in. the momma can take this with her and get a kiss whenever she needs one while away, and the little bear asks momma to make a box for him to have at home for the same purpose.

and wouldn’t you know it… the day before my trip, when i came home from work, N gifted me with a kiss box of my very own. she told me that she put 116 kisses inside for me to have while i was away.

she asked me to make one for her, too. and i did – immediately. she wanted to listen to me fill it with the kisses. i put 121 inside while she counted.

i carried my kiss box in my purse during my weekend trip, and kept it by my bedside when i slept. i did get kisses from it every morning and night, and a couple throughout the day.

when N and i spoke over the phone while i was away, we asked each other how many kisses we used that day. it was a fun way to stay connected despite the distance.

in addition to being fun, this art activity really shows how art can serve as a transitional object, and thus be therapeutic for children throughout their individuating from parents and when experiencing separation. according to mahler’s object-relations theory, transitional objects are external symbols for internal needs, though the child thinks of these objects as an extension of the body. object relations theory dovetails with attachment theory in that the primary care giver is the first transitional object, and often a child’s blanket or teddy bear can end up becoming a transitional object.

what’s so lovely about art therapy is that it can uniquely support this concept because the art made can also be viewed as an extension of the self, neither external nor internal. the art then becomes a holding environment for the child, which will increase his or her ability to tolerate object attachment and loss. in this case, the kiss box was a good reminder of my presence when i wasn’t able to be there with my daughter. and let me tell ya, the homecoming was spectacularly sweet!

airport welcome

in the past month, i’ve been practicing with needle felting, as you might recall from my first needle felted fox project. i haven’t been able to share these creations with you yet, as they were all gifts. now that each lives with its rightful recipient, they’re blog-safe. along with these little felty friends, i’ll share some tips i’ve gleaned (often the hard way) along the way when feeling my way through needle-felting. and gosh, i’m sooo very green at this art form, so i’d love to hear from more experienced felters, too!

tip #1: purchase the thick, dense sponge to use as your work area. make sure it’s at least 12″ x 10″ as i tried my first felting project (the fox) on that tiiiny sponge that came with my needles. ack! many an injury. (those needles are wicked sharp!) here’s how i began a dove for two friends’ baby blessing ceremony altar gift…

sure, it looks like a seal at first (and i could totally begin a seal this way sometime,) but she later gets her wings and beak. (and a pretty handmade necklace, too.)

tip #2: when felting the body (the main base) for an animal, try not to make it too dense. wool roving is made harder and harder with every poke of the needle. in fact, you can make wool as hard as a rock, but then it would not be moldable once it is in that state. if the wool isn’t too dense, you can shape it easily with the needle, and sometimes even tweak it with your hands, just as you would sculpt clay. i am seriously amazed at the responsiveness of this molding medium!

owl for a 5-year-old's harry potter themed birthday

tip #3: you can create the body parts separately, and affix them to each other (or to the main torso base) easily. after they are formed, attach them to the base by poking the needle completely through the body part (head, leg, etc) and into the base repeatedly. by doing this from different angles over and over, the pieces will join. to smooth over the joint (and simultaneously strengthen it) wrap a thin layer of wool around it and felt it into place.

bunny for N's easter basket

tip #4: you don’t necessarily need a pattern to needle felt an animal. if you find an image of one you’d like to make (google image search works great for this) you can break the body down into its parts in your mind, like i did with the seal-turned-dove up there. there’s really no need to invest in a book or patterns. if you’re gonna spend money, spend it buying pretty wool roving!

improv turtle design for a sweet turtle-loving 3-year-old's bday gift

tip #5: have fun with it! the possibilities are endless!

now, please tell me your needle felting tips — like i said, i’ve only been at it for about a month (and three needle injuries) so far…

one of the staples of the waldorf kindergarten art curriculum is wet-on-wet watercolor painting. in N’s class, painting day happens weekly, on “rice day.” often days of the week are identified by the snack at her school, and every monday it is rice with gomashio. (i’m so addicted to gomashio -have you made this stuff?? i digress…)

N wanted to “play teacher” after a rainy school day a couple weeks ago, and decided to teach me how they do their wet-on-wet watercoloring in class. this was sort of impromptu so i didn’t set up our colorations liquid watercolors in the way i usually do, which is to put out some combination of primary colors (red, yellow, and blue… or cyan, magenta, and yellow, etc.) in baby food jars. i LOVE using baby food jars for liquid watercolors because i can put the lids back on them and save the remaining paint for another day. no wasted paint, and a good use for the zillions of jars i scored on freecycle.

on this painting day, we broke out our favorite palette of watercolor cakes and some student-grade watercolor paper. for intentional projects, we often use the heavy strathmore watercolor paper, and we also keep a large box of canson watercolor paper for N to use since she tends to blow through at least 10 sheets in a sitting, and paints often throughout the week. it’s not the toothiest, heaviest of papers, but you can’t beat $14 for 100 sheets of watercolor paper. we were all set to begin. the first thing we had to do to prepare our paper was to round the corners. all of the paper in the waldorf kindergarten has been pre-cut (by teachers) to have rounded edges.

then N showed me how to get our sheets of paper wet in the sink and how to blot them gently with a cloth before painting. she set up each of our painting areas how they do at school, and when it was time to paint, she recited the verse the teacher says as they wet their brushes to begin:

“the little bird comes down and picks up peter paintbrush, and peter paintbrush rests on the earth below. peter paintbrush dips himself into the well and dries himself off on the blue cloth and goes to play with the rainbow fairies.” 

then we painted together while N, “playing teacher,” sings the painting song her teacher quietly sings during painting time, which goes like this:

“rainbow fairies come my way. share with us your golden light today.” [repeat until your brain is numb.]

as i’ve mentioned before, all of the art in the waldorf kindergarten is marked with the child’s symbol (usually something in nature like the sun, a tree, a flower, a ladybug) instead of their name. because i did not have a symbol yet, N assigned one to me — i am the moon. i love that. so i labeled my painting as such, and included the date.

we generally paint (and make most projects) on a well-loved art board, but i saw this handmade painting board for wet-on-wet watercoloring on the waldorf homeschooling blog, and my new obsession is to make a couple of these for these peaceful times when peter paintbrush gets to play with those crazy rainbow fairies.

on a sick day home from school earlier this week, N got on a (pre)origami kick. i went out to see art therapy clients in the morning while she and her dad stayed home and created folded paper fortune tellers (and puppets!) did you create these as a kid? oh, it so brought me back to the 80s when i arrived home midday to see them excitedly playing with their creations.

my husband, craig, created one and N created one herself alongside him. (i wish he had taken photos of this!) the one you see above is one she created and colored. craig wrote the color names on it, N did the numbers inside, and craig made up the fortunes.

i love the fortunes they came up with on the inside, like “you will have magic in your hands” and “you will be surrounded by loving friends” and “you will discover a secret cave with treasure” — among others.

hours of enjoyment, i tell ya!

after N folded another one, she colored a face on it to make a puppet. she noted that “it’s hard to color it when it’s already folded!”

later in the day, N emerged from her room with “envelopes” she had created on her own by folding paper and taping it. this is what i found on my dresser as a gift.

and when i opened it, LOVE inside…

we capped off our paper-folding sick day with making origami bunnies that our friends over at tinkerlab happened to post that same morning my husband initiated paper fortune tellers. i love how the collective unconscious works, don’t you?

making our tinkerlab-inspired bunnies

perhaps we’re ready to try out some other origami animals. i was saving it for an older age, but we’ll see how it goes if the interest is piqued right now… at what age do you think origami is appropriate for kids?

as we all witness within ourselves each day, emotions are fluid, flexible, and multi-layered. if you stay with any one feeling long enough, you will surely see it shift and move and change. that’s how we are built. when we look at our children, we often see emotions shifting (and totally mood-swinging) seemingly by the second.

and with good reason! if we could peek inside of the brain of a growing child and see the chemical chaos happening inside as cells are exponentially reproducing and learning is happening, we would have more appreciation (and compassion) for the fact that our child is even capable of putting one foot in front of the other to walk. i mean, it really is a wonder humans can manage all of this! there are ways of helping children to visualize something as seemingly ambiguous as their emotions — you guessed it: ART!

my husband and i are buddh-ish, and practice mindfulness meditation ourselves, so we take my daughter to a monthly meditation group for children, which she absolutely LOVES! the most recent session involved helping children to identify the quality of emotions through the metaphor of a wave. the speaker read a book to the children called my life with the wave, and talked a bit with the kids about how waves can be tiny ripples or steady crashes or huge tsunamis, and the parallel to how we sometimes feel inside.

the children were invited over to some art tables to create images of what their own personal “feeling wave” would look like in that moment, on that day.

after each child completed the art, s/he was to place it along a longer sheet of paper on the floor to add to the “ocean” of feelings in the room… made up of everyone’s individual wave.

we walked through the ocean gallery in the end to witness each person’s artful and isomorphic wave.

the parents and children gathered together on the cushions for the kids to talk about what they noticed. it was a lovely morning of being present to our feelings and expressing them through art… and, of course, the art therapist in me got all excited about that!

our kids organically live in the present moment – they are experts at it, and great teachers to us in helping us to do the same. (sometimes the shock of reeeally slowing down to BE HERE NOW is the hardest adjustment for brand new parents.) while kids’ lives exist only in the present (not in ruminating about the past or in planning for the future or multitasking,) giving children a language for their innate mindfulness provides a wonderful tool with which to understand themselves and express themselves. here are some books we’ve enjoyed with N ever since she was a wee thing:

• peaceful piggy meditation
• tibetan tales for little buddhas
• the sun in my belly
• starbright: meditations for children (moonbeam is a good one in this series, too)
• there are a couple thich nhat hahn books i’d like to get, too, like planting seeds: practicing mindfulness with children and mindful movements: exercises for well-being

do your children practice mindfulness? what sorts of tools have you found helpful with this?

for N’s fifth birthday, we gave her a small aquarium, and she was able to pick out two goldfish and a snail as new pets. well, sadly her sweet snail, marigold, didn’t last more than a month. (something about nitrates in the water, for which we have since gotten new water purification drops.) with this gift, we realized that the difficult lessons of mortality would soon be upon us, and here they are, sooner than we expected.

r.i.p. marigold

in its inherent transcendent nature, art is able to make the invisible visible, to make the unseen seen. according to carl jung, the processes involved in art making are most similar to spiritual processes than any activity – both provide comfort, order, and beauty. when the art image is the embodiment of a feeling, such as the grief of a loss (yes, even that of a pet snail,) the art object can becomes empowered as a talisman of sorts, providing containment and solidity for an otherwise nebulous emotion. the art we all made as offerings in the snail’s funeral helped to elevate the ceremony to that of a ritual, modeling for N healthy ways of saying goodbye and processing feelings that can be difficult.

artful altar for marigold

once we broke the news to N that marigold had passed on, we decided we would hold a ceremony the following day in our backyard to celebrate his life and return his body to the earth. i explained to N that we might each want to have an offering for marigold on an altar space at the ceremony. she said she wanted to make a backdrop for the altar, a small sign, and a golden candle.

N creating the altar "backdrop." details on this technique coming soon on the blog. stay tuned!

N rolled a golden candle from beeswax for the altar, and made a little image of herself and marigold.

my husband offered flowers, and he cut heart shapes out of petals for the altar. i chose to offer a yellow snail candle holder that i quickly crafted with sculpey when N was asleep the evening prior to the funeral. (i don’t like to bake sculpey near her because of the fumes, so i did it at night with the windows and backdoor open while she was asleep in her room with her door closed.)

dried berries & branches for antennae

we gathered together around the altar in the backyard last weekend. my husband and i both said kind words and memories about marigold. N said she was “too shy” to say anything, but stood quietly and chin-quivery in front of the altar.

we buried marigold’s body in our flowerbed, where so many snails swarm in the spring. marigold’s spirit will be in good company in the coming months. N added a rock for his gravestone, and she decorated the grave site with her daddy’s heart petal offerings.

here lies marigold. as far as snails go, he was fast and sweet.

after a mindful, heartful goodbye to her snail, N was ready to move on to the reception food (popsicles) and making fairy houses in the backyard.