paint cut paste

we are delighted to have been invited to be a part of tinkerlab’s creative challenge this month! our tinkerfriend has asked us to upcycle magazines to create a project that is child-directed. given all of the junk mail and catalogs inundating our mail box this season, i was more than happy to accept this challenge so we could upcycle some of this unnecessary paper! (why all the catalogs from stores who have web sites?!)

the other night, while sorting through the stacks of catalogs, i said to my daughter, “i wonder what we could make out of all of these extra magazines…” with christmas undoubtedly on the brain, she immediately responded, “ornaments!” but of course! she said she wanted to rip them up and glue them to balls. sounds like a plan to me — so she got right to work on the ripping that evening (thus the dark photo. my apologies: it’s a casualty of wintertime blogging.)

the next day we took a trip to michaels and scored these brown paper ornament shapes for 60 cents each (which turned out to be even cheaper with a coupon – love it.)

later (and again after a mad-early sunset,) N got to work mod podging her “magazine confetti” (as she termed it) onto the ornaments.

once they were covered (and she was kind of bummed by the white look of wet mod podge initially) she said she wanted them to sparkle more, and asked for glitter. [artsy-mom guilt-producing confession: i so HATE loose glitter.] while i knew glitter would be a lovely and festive addition to something for our tree, i shuddered when N asked for it. then sighed a bit of relief when i realized quickly that we didn’t have to sprinkle it onto the ornament. i suggested stirring the glitter into the mod podge and painting another coat of glittery mod podge onto the ornaments. she was sold - phew!

we hung the ornaments to dry (which only took about an hour actually – not bad in terms of fairly instant gratification.)

and they are super cool, colorful, and sparkly on our christmas tree!

thank you, rachelle, for including us in this challenge!

check out all of the other amazing bloggers below who gave their junk mail a second life:

• tinkerlab (our lovely hostess!)
• kids in the studio
• teach mama
• the imagination tree
• childhood 101
• teach preschool
• hands on as we grow
• the artful parent
• a mom with a lesson plan
• toddler approved
• kiwi crate
• art 4 little hands
• red ted art
• the chocolate muffin tree
• imagination soup
• michelle’s charm world
• messy preschoolers
• mommy labs
• putti prapancha
• sun hats & wellie boots

visit each of their amazing projects on the linky below – so many fun ideas! there’s a second linky at the bottom where you can join in the fun and add your own upcycled magazine ideas, too!

add your own ideas here:

you may remember my gushing about an artist couple N and i met at a local art festival – they’re rick and heather from earnest efforts natural woodworking, and they make the most amaaaazing art out of trees: beautiful boxes and magical spirit shakers that will make you swooooon!

N checking out the earnest efforts booth at the kings mountain arts fair last month

i’ve scored an interview with the artists and they’re giving away a spirit shaker and a rattle to my readers (one winner for each) so read on to learn more about the art of wood and enter for a chance to win a lovely handmade piece!

my interview with heather of earnest efforts

jen: can you tell us a bit about how and when you came to find the gift of your woodworking craft?

Heather: Earnie Efforts (aka Rick) has been selling his woodworking wares at the Eugene, Oregon Saturday Market (the longest-running outdoor, handcrafted marketplace in the US) since the 1980′s. I, Ellie Efforts (aka Heather), joined the Market in 1994 with my fiber arts. In 1998 we got to know one another, fell in love, and married in 1999. Earnie was an apprentice cabinet maker to his grandfather and continued working in wood to supplement his family’s income. I tell people that I not only married him out of love, but the fact that he had a woodshop – I had wanted to work in wood since I was little.

"Earnie & I in our booth at the Saturday Market"

jen: i notice that each of your pieces clearly has resonance with the spirit of the wood from which it was created. how do your natural materials inform your work?

Heather: If you could crawl inside Earnie’s head and see the world through his eyes, you would know that he doesn’t see driftwood on the beach… he sees boxes. Each piece of wood has it’s own personality, story and destiny. We don’t just see wood or trees; we see life on many levels. I think we forget that wood is still living long after it has fallen to the earth and will continue to live on long after that box we made is discarded and goes back to the earth. This is also why it is so important to us that we maintain the integrity of the wood with a natural beeswax finish. We want you to be able to feel the warmth of the wood, not a plastic coating so often used in “preserving” wood and we want the wood to return to the earth clean.

"Earnie cutting up driftwood on the Coquille River - note the top left piece of wood has been chewed by a beaver"

"River Alder Box - chewed by a beaver"

jen: my daugher and i just love making music with the spirit shakers and rattles we’ve purchased from you! can you tell us a bit about how they are created (like, what’s inside?) and why you call them spirit shakers?

Heather: The spirit shakers are very special to us on many levels. Earnie & I scavengers and hoarders (in a good way) – we don’t waste anything. When he cuts the boxes, the heart of a box becomes another box, a rattle, or a spirit shaker – until all that remains is kindling for our house wood stove. I’m going to leave the spirit making a little bit of a mystery for you, but inside are copper BBs. We call them spirit shakers because we have witnessed that the essence of the living tree continues to live in on in the wood and within us as we touch, make music, and meditate with the wood.

(these are our earnest efforts rattles & spirit shaker - isn't that purple one AMAZING?! no dyes or paints - that's the natural color of the wood!)

jen: how can parents and teachers help inspire children to begin working with wood as an art material?

Heather: Taking children to meet artists at art festivals is a wonderful way to introduce children to art in all of it’s forms. When children can touch, smell, feel and see artwork with an artist they can ask questions and process in a way unavailable in books or online. We meet children at every festival who are interested in woodworking and we encourage their parents to seek out woodworking classes at community colleges or art centers since so many schools are closing their woodshops.

"Earnie cutting a box on our 1953 Boice Crane bandsaw"

jen: is there anything else you’d like to add?

Heather: Take care, be good & kind, and don’t forget to laugh.

giveaway

Oregon-Myrtlewood Spirit Shaker & Maple Baby Rattle/Teether

earnest efforts is so kind to offer one spirit shaker (left in photo above) and one rattle (right in photo above to two paintcutpaste.com readers who enter the drawing. the rattles are beeswax coated and completely safe for babies to chew on. heather says, “these are representational photos – they are not the actual rattle & spirit shakers we are giving away, as we will chose beauties with lovely sound for the winners.” oooooh, and they’re all so lovely!

i will use a random number generator to choose TWO winners (one for each) this thursday evening, october 20, at 9PM pacific/12midnight eastern.

how to enter: comment on this blog entry and let us know your favorite type of tree AND the age(s) of your child(ren) — incase you are a winner, the child’s age is how i will know whether you should receive the baby-safe rattle or the spirit shaker. please be sure your correct email address is associated with your entry so that i can contact you if you’re a winner. (comment link is up there on the left, under the date of this post. i’ve gotta move this at some point…)

two winners were chosen! thanks to all who entered!

please do yourself a favor and check out earnest efforts’ awesome etsy shop to view and purchase more of their wares. (think: holiday shopping!) and be sure to “like” earnest efforts on facebook.

good luck, woodchucks!

just writing to share with you about an inspiring trip my family took over to berkeley about a week ago to check out a place called urban ore. it’s one of those amazing salvage yards where any and everything can be upcycled and repurposed. love their motto: “to end the age of waste.” cheers to that!

i could have spent alllllll day there (and then some) drooling over amazing finds and dreaming up new ways to use these treasures, but with the little one in tow, we lasted about an hour. it started to sprinkle when we were there (first raindrops we’ve experienced since may!)

sweet aqua sink (i mean, if it were clean.)

my intention was to purchase a farm house window, and that’s this place’s “bread and butter” as they put it. they have a HUGE stash of windows and doors. the windows that are in condition to be reinstalled start at $20 each for an 18″ window, and they increase in 6″ and $5 increments.

THEN they have the section where some of the windows are broken or not suitable for installing in a home and ALL OF THOSE ARE $5 REGARDLESS OF SIZE. perfect for the artist or decorator. score!

there is a huge indoor warehouse part with odds and ends, furniture, pieces of furniture, books, electronics, housewares, etc.

random stuff stored in distressed drawers. love that.

inside i found a great wooden bowl where i can keep natural art materials, some ball jars, and these lovely photography contrast filters (for the darkroom) that are made from hard plastic. i can’t wait to see what N wants to do with them artistically! (light table trinkets? suncatcher? what would you make?)

now i just need to make a trip over to SCRAP in SF at some point — but i have to say that it’s hard to stick to my purging and simplifying goals when there are so many great raw materials to hoard! stock up on for art’s sake!

what are your favorite treasures to find for upcycled creative pursuits? where do you get them?

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.

a few months ago i inherited a huge box of wine corks from a friend who was moving. because i’m not going to decorate my home with someone else’s wine choices (though there are some great wreaths, corkboards, etc out there,) i’ve been trying to think of kid craft ideas to do with cork. when i saw this gem on jonah lisa land, via the crafty crow, i knew we had to give it a whirl.

N and i selected 15 corks from the stash to make 5 cork boats. my fox-lover was smitten with one that said “foxhollow” on it and claimed it immediately. we selected some colorful paper to use for sails, and got out my glue gun, craft sticks (toothpicks work too,) twine, eye-hooks, and driftwood/sticks. ready to create!

N got busy folding paper in half and cutting doubled triangles out for sails…

…while i hot glued corks together. (i suppose you could use other waterproof glues that are more kid-friendly, but this is what we had on hand.)

using a dollop of hot glue, i erected the craft sticks in between corks and let them dry.

then we folded the sails around the craft stick and glued them in place. (note: if you use paper like we did, it will get soggy when capsized. if that matters to you, you might want to laminate it with packaging tape or contact paper, use craft foam for sails, or use something plastic like an old plastic folder perhaps.)

we screwed teeny eye-hooks into the front of each ship and tied twine to the hook on one end and to the center of a piece of driftwood on the other end. N had fun rolling up each twine around the driftwood (a natural buoy!) that way our ships wouldn’t sail away from us — we could always hang onto them.

with our boats in a basket…

we set out with some friends to a favorite park with a great creek, perfect for wading and sailing… yet, it was all dried out! so the following day, we ventured to another park with a manmade lake with, uh, turquoise dye in it [willies] to try out our ships.

it was so quaint, simple, and fun — N was psyched that they actually floated! nevermind that the mid-lake fountain kept pushing our boats back to the shore line. no bother for these mighty cap’ns.

wishing you smooth sailing through the rest of summer!

so, what should we make with the rest of our corks?

in our home, we like to have some time of day, at least once, where we light a candle together. usually this is a ritual around dinner time and sometimes as a special treat at N’s bedtime when we tell stories by candlelight in her bedroom. when i recently spotted this cool glass paint, i had to pick some up so we could personalize our candles even more by upcycling some clear jars.

we set up shop out on the picnic table in the backyard with our supplies and some mason jars and baby food jars. (yes, we bought baby food specifically for the jars. N didn’t touch the stuff as a baby, as i made her food, but i figured we could use the bananas in some banana pancakes, right?)

N had such a good time painting on the glass…

after they were all painted, we set them out to dry for 48 hours (per instructions on the paint.)

(still haven't made anything from our holey shells from vacay)

then we baked them in the oven (also per paint instructions) on 325 for 30 minutes, allowing them to heat up and cool down with the oven on either side of that baking time. this allows the paint to adhere to the glass – love the alchemy!

after they had cooled, the jars were all shiny and ready for tealights and votive candles. love these little ones for our back patio!

N chose to put the large mason jar she painted on her nightstand for story time at night. magical!

she chose to put the “sunrise-sunset jar” on which we collaborated on her bedroom shelf.

we are so excited to be participating in mommy lab‘s forest fiesta, along with 22 other fabulous bloggers, in celebration of world environment day! with the theme being forests this year, it seemed like a wonderful time to explore the magical woods around us in northern california — the redwoods!

our family took a little drive up to visit muir woods national state park. we told N that we were going to a place where she could hunt for fairies, so she brought along her magnifying glass… of course, when we got there, yetis seemed to dominate her mythical creature search, true to form for our daughter.

we even spent time playing our native american flutes in the forest together while in muir woods… it is such a beautiful experience to play the flute for the trees, and in that sort of earth space. forest fiesta, indeed!

to think about the interconnectedness of the redwood root mass beneath our feet while walking through the forest inspires a sense of awe and reverence for mother nature. to sit upon a redwood’s tree seat and feel your own rootedness, groundedness, and sense of belonging to the earth is a gift. i couldn’t help but think of starhawk’s teachings while we were in the forest, and vowed (again, to myself) to read the spiral dance, as its been sitting on my bookshelf forever.

N was inspired to create her own forest. since we had recently purchased some plaster of paris, i decided that it might serve as a nice forest floor for her project. we mixed up a batch, tinted it with a bit of green acrylic paint (per N’s request) and poured it into a cream carton.

after gathering all sorts of twigs, sticks, and stalks of lavender in the yard, N stuck them down into the plaster of paris.

she sprinkled some small pebbles she found at a local beach on top. we let this sit to harden for about a day and a half, and then N ripped the carton off of the plaster…

to reveal a lovely forest model!

N immediately introduced it to her toy animals, so they could rightfully inhabit the forest.

how many animals can you spy?

we hot glued some felt to the bottom of the forest model so the plaster wouldn’t damage our furniture when N brought it inside to play, and also to use it as a paperweight when the animals finish frolicking about the forest.

happy world environment day to all… and in the spirit of forests (and the wisdom of starhawk) — let’s seedbomb the earth!