paint cut paste

autumn is upon us next week… tis the season of harvesting the fruits of our labor. when we’re lucky, summer “labor” looks like a long walk on the beach. if you’ve got a lot of beach booty laying around, this could be a simple fun one for you and your littles.

our summer vacation to carova, north carolina, left us with plenty of beautiful shells with natural holes in them. perfect for jewelry, garland, and ornaments!

we set a few larger shells and some ribbon scraps aside with the intention of creating keepsakes for 12 of our family members (5 households) who shared this trip together.

first, i wrote “carova 2011″ on the inside of each shell with a sharpie.

then N got to work painting the shells with one of my favorite glimmery paint additives called “make it shimmer.”

this paint gives such a lovely mostly-silver, somewhat-pearly glisten to anything it touches. N applied it directly to our shells, but as a paint additive, it is meant to be mixed into plain paint to heighten it to shimmery loveliness.

once the shells were dry, we added colorful ribbon scraps from our stash.

while this project has roots in summer, it extends through the winter holidays. we are excited to give these to our family to display on their christmas trees or in their homes whenever they’d like.

it’s a fun memento from a sweet summer vacation. (surprise family – these will be coming your way before the holiday season! )

a few weeks ago, decoart was kind enough to send us this awesome package of free art supplies, and among them was glow-in-the-dark paint! of course this was N’s big favorite, so we decided to use it to celebrate with our friend deborah over at teach preschool today, who has reached 20,000 facebook likes! she is seriously stellar – go check out her blog if you don’t already — congrats deborah!

thank you for inviting us to join you in the ABCs. today N and i are presenting the letter N for Night light! when i asked my N what she wanted to do with the glow paint, she immediately said, “paint rocks!” hmm, okay. why not!? we got all set up with a few big stones.

and painted them with this milky yellow-green paint on both sides.

we also decided that we’d use some of these tiny pebbles as a glowy treat.

we let them dry (and charge up) in the sun.

once dry, we put the pebbles in an adorable tiny honey jar and the stones on the windowsill to soak up some more rays.

then it was the moment of truth — do they glow? we tested it out in our window-less guest bathroom, and YEP! glowy rocks!

pardon the shaky long exposure photo

okay, so maybe not the most useful night lights, as the luminescence isn’t that intense, but they are like magical phosphorescent stones that N is psyched to put on her night stand, next to her real glass-encased glow-in-the-dark jellyfish from the monterey bay aquarium! what kid doesn’t love things that glow?

i just found a batch of bloggy photos that i forgot to blog about earlier this summer – bean sprouts! (oops.) this was such a fun, satisfying, educational activity i remember from my own preschool days, so i thought it’d be fun to do it with N at home.

we picked up some baby lima bean seeds while at whole foods one day.

we soaked a paper towel with water, put it into a ziploc bag, and dropped in a buncha beans. we taped the bag to N’s bedroom window, where she gets full afternoon sunshine.

about a week later once they’d sprouted some roots, we tried two different things with them (because i couldn’t remember what to do next. i’m not a green thumb, people.) we planted half of them into some potting soil to see if they’d sprout green shoots from there.

N even made a cute phoenetic “lima bean” sign for the plants.

but nothing happened to this batch at all. (yes, i shoulda googled this, admittedly, but it’s all about the experimental method, right? no newfangled internet shortcuts.) meanwhile, the ones left in the sunshiny wet paper towel bag grew all sorts of greenery.

we planted these into a pot in our backyard and nurtured them to grow throughout the summertime….

and they were great, until our snail friends ate them.

on our last day of vacation in the outer banks of north carolina, N found some reeds in the dunes. then she said six words that are music to my ears: “let’s make art out of this!” (i love that she says this A LOT.)

indeed we did, and the creation was all her idea. N said, “can we take this home on the plane? and when we get home, i want to make a pen out of it!” we smuggled the reeds home, and almost immediately upon arrival, we got them out and pondered how to make her pen.

i let her decide how to create this. she asked for a real pen and a feather. we found a ballpoint pen (to take apart) and N chose a feather from our stash.

she had great fun destroying the ballpoint pen to get to the inkwell inside.

she slipped the ink well inside of the longest reed she had. then we put a dot of elmer’s glue inside the other end of the reed to hold the feather in place.

it sure does make a sweet addition to her art materials. the best part of this is that the project was entirely kid-centered and kid-initiated. she sourced materials, thought of the idea, executed, and takes so much pride in the final product.

now if we could just keep the cats from pouncing and chewing on the feather, especially as it’s flitting around while she draws… (speaking of our kitties – happy 10th birthday to one of our kitties today!!!)

our beach vacay has been full of fun… and art! today we tried sandcasting on the beach, which is something i’ve been wanting to do with N for a while now!

i remember doing this when i was in elementary school, but in a sandbox. in retrospect, i now see that my teacher that year was obsessed with the many uses of plaster of paris – fun year! my copy of Ecoart!: Earth-Friendly Art and Craft Experiences for 3-To 9-Year-Olds brought this sandcasting memory back to the forefront a while back, and we finally got around to doing it. we (now) west coasters are all the way on our home coast in the east right now, and since i wasn’t about to fly with the extra poundage that plaster of paris would create, my sister was kind enough to bring some down to our family vacation (via car.) today we toted it to the beach along with an old bucket, stick, and cups for measuring. we began by digging little holes. N discovered that twisting her fist into the sand created the perfect little cups for the small paperweights we were intending to make. she and her teenage cousin, G, created several of these pockets in the sand.

then N helped to mix the plaster of paris concoction. then she and her cousin chose shells to line the bottoms of the holes (which would become the decorative tops of our paperweights.)

i poured the plaster into the holes, hoping it would level off on top to be somewhat flat and smooth.

then we waited about 20 minutes for the plaster to harden. (it didn’t take that long, but we became engrossed in the task of digging a huge hole – not for plaster.)

meanwhile, our creations were becoming solid…

N came back to check on the plaster and for the big reveal.

score – beach treasures preserved!

the minimal clean up was great – we used old buckets and sticks that could remain plastered. hands rinsed easily in ocean.

the picture below was taken fresh off the beach, but after brushing these off with an old toothbrush, i think they’ll reveal a bit more shell detail. of course, N wants to keep her purple shell one for herself, and we will gift the others to family members who are with us on the trip. i know i’ll be nostalgic for our family beach vacation when looking at these next week, when we’re back to the grind — they make such sweet paperweights or tokens for a summer nature table!

i’ve been wanting to try this one for a while now… and we finally did! remember that plethora of stones we got from the beach recently? well, we chose a few…

and baked them and colored on them with crayons. visit our guest post all about it over on moms by heart.

happy summer solstice! the solstices are special to me, as my birthday is the winter solstice and our wedding anniversary is the summer solstice (on the years when solstices fall on the 21st.) so this (legitimately HOT day in the bay area – whoo hoo!) first day of summer was a day of celebration and fun for us!

during N’s “summer camp” in the morning, my husband and i had a breakfast anniversary date to celebrate our eight years of marriage. (as a gift, i gave him some redstone meadery juniper honey wine from boulder for old times’ sake – we lived there for 3 years, during which time we got married, and so enjoyed this mead!)

table 8 for 8 years! (that card is in the shape of INFINITY by the way

after camp was over, we hit the kiddie pool in the backyard! i’ve been obsessed with making lemon juice ice cubes that i saw on one of my favorite blogs, salt & chocolate. what a simple idea and yummy for summertime water, lemonade, tea, and arnold palmers. i bought a bag of organic lemons (i’m not one of the lucky ones with fruit trees in my yard) and N helped me wash them…

then with lemon squeezing…

i froze them in ice cube trays for later… (note: this bag yielded 2 cups of lemon juice, and i added about a cup of filtered water to it to fill 2 ice cube trays.)

…which made me think about making sun tea! what a perfect day to let the strong summer sunshine do its thang brewing some delicious tea!

as all of this was going on, N grabbed a paintbrush from her play shed and randomly began water-painting on her little (freecycled) picnic table and on some driftwood.

N also made “nature soup”

we noticed that the mama bird who made a (pimped) nest in our play shed had three more babies, and she was teaching them to fly today, which we got to witness firsthand! here’s a baby bird standing on the ledge of our shed shelf… which he did for HOURS while watching mama flit around inside the shed.

look at that little cutie!

we had a beautiful day together, soaking in the rays — and, of course, blocking the harmful ones with mad amounts of sunblock. we finished the day with a yummy glass of lemon-iced sun tea.

and an adorable homemade (and sounded out) half-birthday sign from my favorite little artist.

happy summer! happy soltice! happy half-birthday to me! and happy 8 year anniversary to my special sweetheart!