paint cut paste

over the weekend, we went over to N’s classmate’s house for a playdate. N’s friend “s” has a super-creative momma, karen, who planned out a cute halloween craft for the kids to do together. she agreed with my photographing their process and sharing it with you on my blog. so here are our silly spiders!

the night before the playdate, karen covered a few styrofoam balls with orange tissue paper (using glue) and gathered other materials such as orange and black pipe cleaners, googly eyes, puffy balls, feathers, and glitter glue. you could do this with black tissue paper to make black spiders, too, or any other color, of course!

we started by asking the kids how many legs a spider has, and the girls began to stick the metal pipe cleaners (legs) into the ball (body) to create the spider’s form.

dress-up time was right before art time, so N was dressed as tigger here

then the fancy decorating began. they glued on googly eyes and puff ball noses.

while N kept her spider quite minimalistic, “s” decided that her spider would have really colorful feathery hair and lots of sparkly glitter glue, and it turned out so awesome!

both girls were quite proud of their silly spiders! this is such a non-messy, super-easy craft for kids from 2 years old and up. our spider will certainly be a cute addition to our annual halloween decor.

thank you for the playdate, “s” and thank you, momma karen, for this sweet idea!

play-doh is a surefire way to occupy N all on her own for at least two hours, if not three. throw in some googly eyes, and we were doing the monster mash up in here!

the day N was playing with play-doh, i happened to see my blogger friend’s post about her pink and green mama’s halloween craft fun book. at the bottom of the post, there was a cute little piece of play-doh with an eyeball stuck into it. again, with only that one photo, i was inspired by the wonderful mary lea (her books are great – check them out!) anyway, adding the eyeballs to N’s play-doh play was a hit.

she squashed so many different colors together, giving them funny eyeballs and faces, and having a good time making silly monsters.

play-doh is not all that strong when it’s dried, so admittedly model magic or another modeling medium like sculpey would have been better to do this with if planning to keep the final product. but it’s about the process, right? and well, it was a play-doh day for us anyway. so we went for it regardless.

we decided to see what the product would be like if we kept N’s cute creatures, so we let them dry for a few days. sure, they’re a bit crackly in spots, and sure a few eyeballs fell out and needed to be elmer’s glued back on, but still so adorable.

so much so that i decided to use household cement to attach magnets to the back of each monster face.

right now they’re gracing our fridge and getting cozy with some of N’s other art work, though i anticipate that each unique  monster will be given a new refrigerator home come halloween week…

ah, the luck of the irish! my daughter is 1/8th irish, as my husband is 1/4th… (no irish in me, but i did enjoy a brief trek through ireland back in college.) i figured that we should celebrate st. patrick’s day with some sort of craft, in honor of N’s bloodline…

who couldn’t use more luck? thus, blarney stones! in ireland, the famous blarney stone resides at the top of blarney castle in the southwest part of the country, where tourists climb winding stairs just to kiss the stone. this is said to give them “blarney” which means luck, but more specifically eloquence. (um, the gift to gab isn’t really something my daughter needs more luck with!) in the craft world, it seems that blarney stones are traditionally rocks painted green, with little faces on them (kissing faces usually) or they could have shamrocks on them, instead.

we figured it’d be fun to make our own blarney stones for our seasonal altar at home. we collected a few smooth stones with a flat bottom from our backyard flowerbed and washed them. then we gathered up our crafty materials and green acrylic paint (well, we mixed our dark green with some yellow to make more of a kelly green color.)

we painted each of them (except one*) green and let them dry. to speed that along, i used a hairdryer on low heat.

after they were dry, we glued on googly eyes, felt mouths, embroidery floss hair, and even a hat made of felt and a flower sequins adornment.

after making three blarneys to kiss all month long, N had enough, so i painted a shamrock onto the fourth stone with glitter glue (which might make a cute good luck charm to give to someone someday?)

* N was adamant about “keeping the last stone natural!!!” so we did, and she gave it to her “good luck care bear” as his st. patrick’s day gift.

this is an easy and seasonal variation on pet rocks…  it can be fun any time of year to make a face on a rock, but if you want the luck of the irish on your side, be sure to kiss these green cuties every day!