paint cut paste

yesterday i made egg salad with all of our hardboiled easter eggs, and as i was peeling these colorful little orbs, i thought that the pretty shells must have yet another life in them. then it hit me – mosaics.

i have always adored making mosaics. i made a huuuge one in grad school from tiles i painted, fired, cut, and grouted myself… mixed with mirrors and photos under glass. whew! this was going to be quite a different feat – so much tinier, so much easier, right? so i saved the shells.

then i organized them by color while novi napped – way satisfying for this ROY G BIV nerd!

i decided that the colors would really pop on a black background. i took the liberty of drawing butterfly and dragonfly shapes on the papers before novi woke up that we could fill in together later. your kids can draw their own shapes, or no shapes at all. the eggshells are so pretty in their own right that they don’t need a design, but i thought the colors and broken shapes lent themselves well to winged creatures.

when novi was awake, we got out the trusty elmer’s glue and tried the mosaic. um, fail. okay… if you have older kids (like kids who have the dexterity to peel the tiniest, most delicate stickers off of sticker paper with half-dried glue on their hands and not get frustrated, that’s the age we’re going for. fyi: even i am barely mature enough to tolerate this.)

fill the design with glue, and start putting down the tiny shell bits. try not to scream. i totally lost novi within about two minutes of this, though she was my colorist and told me which colors to make the insects’ body parts.

then she ran around a lot and drew on her magnadoodle, eventually revisiting to check on how i was doing.

she helped me to spread the remaining eggshells in our flowerbed when we were all finished.

all in all, i feel like this would be a great meditative exercise in patience for adults and older children, but hardly for toddlers. i thought i’d include it here, for those individuals. enjoy every little bit and piece!

where would my home be without ikea ribba frames?

i entertained the thought of naturally dyeing easter eggs this year. i’ve wanted to every year, and even found a great tutorial on martha stewart for veggie dyed eggs, but then we paased anyway. 99 cents for a paas kit is hard to beat, especially when compared to purchasing beets, yellow onions, cabbage, etc.

we did, however, try out some new strategies we saw all on the web this season. good stuff.

like using a rubber band on the egg (and double dipping) to block out certain areas:

and criss crossing electrical tape to make a grid (yellow and blue make green lesson here.)

i also tried to make a “cracked egg” effect on, well, a cracked egg. kinda cute.

as stepford as i feel saying so, martha is a genius. (or rather the people who work for her at her empire are geniuses.) i mean seriously,  look at this slideshow of eggs!!!

we did the usual crayon resist thang.

and all in all, we had some good springy fun together!

happy springtime of blooming and rebirthing! it’s an egggggscellent time of year, isn’t it?

and they made for a wonderful breakfast –

especially when all dolled up like chicks paired with lemonade scones… thanks to just jenn’s recipe blog.

after making so many wooden easter and springtime friends, novi really wanted to make more out of “clay.” since we don’t have a kiln over here, i busted out the model magic, and she got down to business.

novi made lots of eggs and a caterpillar. i also helped her make the 2 spring chickies you see above, and a bunny.

it took two days for the model magic eggs to dry (they’re dense, even though they’re lightweight.) when they were ready, we painted them with acrylics. we first had a lesson in what-happens-to-each-color-of-the-rainbow-when-mixed-with-white-paint? PASTELS FOR SPRING!

we had a little painting party…

we probably got more paint on our hands than the figures and eggs, but it was all good clean fun.

we loved decorating our home with our new little spring sculptures…

we’ve been having lots of fun over here with some of my most favorite materials – wood and watercolors!

at my pink & green mama friend’s suggestion, i bought a bag of wooden figures and some awesome wooden eggs from casey’s wood products. i also had an opportunity to bust out my woodburning tool – fancy!

i made a few large eggs myself, for our dining room table basket.

then novi and i got busy painting lots of great wooden eggs and other springtime figures.

and some gifts for friends (shhh…)

after the watercolors were dry, i sealed each piece with my homemade wood creme.

we love having these natural little friends around our home!

bunnies... not cats?

happy easter, happy spring, happy bloomin' everything!

i remember the curious process of making paper when i was a kid — it was always sort of odd to me that we’d take perfectly good paper, shred it up, get it wet, and make it into new lumpy paper. curious, indeed, but making your own paper is a fun and wonderful way to recycle scraps you may have laying around the house into something lovely (and something that blooms – read on!)

i was inspired by a guest post on make & takes and decided that creating plantable paper with flower seeds in it would make for lovely mother’s day cards. so novi and i got busy collecting select colors of paper scraps we had around our art studio. (we chose analogous colors so that when they blended, they’d make a color that was not brown. novi’s favorite colors are purple and red, so this worked out well. she helped in hunting for the scraps in our art room, and chose to recycle some of her own preschool art work and valentine hearts, too.)

then the ripping process began! little did i know that tearing is a good lesson for little hands! i sometimes forget that these seemingly ordinary tasks are things we learned along the way, so i took the opportunity to teach novi about tearing. we tore them up into little bits no bigger than a square inch.

next we put the colors into our blender.

we added just enough water to cover the paper shreds, then we blended until it looked like, as novi said, “a raspberry smoothie.” after that, novi sprinkled flower seeds into the pulp. (we chose zinnias.)

do not blend after the seeds are in – just stir them into the pulp with a spoon.

after that, i strained the pulp through a mesh strainer, pushing the water out with a wooden spoon. (if you don’t have a mesh strainer, just place a thin towel in the bottom of your colander and that should work, too.)

i had prepared a cookie sheet with an art rag/towel on it, then a layer of felt. once i pressed the water out of the pulp, i attempted to spread it out evenly onto the felt sheet. (this is where i realized that it may be really hard for this pulp to dry in such a way as to make a sheet of paper – it seemed really clumpy and separated.) i pressed on it (to squeeze water out) with another towel on top. novi even helped with this using her small rolling pin.

i put it aside to dry overnight… and it actually took about a day and a half. once it was dry, i attempted to cut it into cute flower shapes; however, as i suspected, it was crumbly and very little of it was able to be cut. i tried and struggled a bit to get a few good pieces that look like flowers. you could also make hearts, butterflies, or whatever you wish… or whatever you can manage to cut. i get the sense that using cookie cutters when the pulp is almost dry would work better. or even using a stencil after to make a nice, clean shape. i think that next time we do it, we will try for a finer pulp so that it can be spread more thin on the felt, and hopefully stick together enough to make a sheet.

then we chose some colors to make a few cards, and glued the seed paper flowers onto the cards, using buttons for flower centers.

we will write a note inside with the planting instructions for the pastel zinnias in hopes that the recipients will watch these paper flowers bloom into real blossoms… sweet spring, easter, or mother’s day cards.

it’s march and we have pink, white, and yellow blooms all over our neighborhood here – signs of spring!

tree in our front yard

one of my favorite spring blooms are cherry blossoms. i adore their soft pink petals. with spring in our hearts, we went to a friend’s house yesterday for a playdate. novi and i brought along some simple art materials: paper, sharpies, and a pink stamp pad. because the kids were going to make fingerprints, i got the water-based, washable, kid-safe stamp pad, as opposed to the dye-based kind. i have to say that it’s not very washable anyway, and i’m disappointed that the pink my store had was more hot pink than the beautiful pale color of a cherry blossom. oh well, next time.

regardless, the girls went to town making lots of fingerprints on small rectangles of white paper.

we noticed they preferred to use just one pointer finger, so we encouraged them to use several fingers at a time to cluster the pink dots, much like the tree would have clusters of flowers. (they didn’t really care about that though.)

the more random the pink splotches, the more full and fluffy the trees turn out to look. after we had several little sheets of fingerprints, the kids were ready to play and dance, so we mommas sat down with our sharpies. we made branches connecting the little pink poufs on the page to create the cherry blossom trees.

must clarify that my tshirt was a happy matching accident - must have really had cherry blossoms on the brain!

after the playdate (and lunchtime and naptime) we gathered up some materials to glue the little tree pictures to cards, and embellish them with rhinestones, sequins, and glitter glue.

the finished cards would make sweet “happy spring!” cards or even nice mother’s day cards.

an alternative to using fingerprints would be to use a paintbrush and some (pale) pink watercolors, but i figured that when making these into cards for family, they always cherish little paw prints.

last year, novi loved washington, d.c.’s cherry blossom festival. because we’re on the opposite coast this year, we won’t be able to go again, but we have these sweet images, memories, and art-making.

1 year ago at the cherry blossom festival, d.c.

happy almost spring!