paint cut paste

one year ago, when novi was 26 months old, we went to a spring festival where they offered many crafts for the kids. this is an easy and fun one that novi enjoyed making — clothespin butterflies! all you need are a few household items: a pipe-cleaner, a clothespin, and a coffee filter, as well as some markers.

first, let your child’s imagination run wild in coloring all over the coffee filters with the markers. if it is raining when you do this – you know those spring showers can be an artistic blessing – then put the colored (with a water-based marker) filters onto a cookie sheet outside for a minute to let the colors bleed, then dry them out before proceeding. you can see that effect from when we made coffee filter flowers last year. even if it’s not raining, the butterflies can be lovely. just let your child color away until his or her heart is content.

then bend a pipe cleaner (or half of one, actually) into an antenna shape. crinkle your coffee filter in the center and clip that into the clothespin along with the pipe cleaner. and there you have your winged springtime friend…

flutterby - ours got a bit wrinkled, but you get the idea

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!

at first, it seemed that the stars aligned for this activity… novi just got a trio set of scissors for her birthday that she wants to learn to use and valentine’s day is approaching. thus, the obvious project emerges: cutting out hearts. a last ditch effort for a v-day seasonal craft and also one of the more simple and rewarding cutting exercises, right? (well, not in our case.)

while novi napped, i gathered up some scrap papers that could pass as “valentiney”

i folded each sheet in half, drawing halves of various sized hearts on them with sharpie markers.

novi asked to watch the valentine’s day episode of little bear when she awoke from her nap, where little bear cuts out hearts and gives them out to his friends as valentines. perfection, right?

after the episode, she was super-excited to make the valentines. so she tried. wholeheartedly.

now i don’t know if it is her age or if it is that these scissors work extremely well in play-doh but not on paper, but it just wasn’t happening for her. honestly, it didn’t happen for me with her scissors very well either. not with the straight-edged ones, the zig-zag ones, or the wave-edged ones. they sort of bent and shredded the paper.

we sort of gave up and i ended up cutting out heart shapes for her with my grown-up scissors so that she could give them to all of her toys as valentines, and she was psyched nonetheless.

project gone awry? yes, i post these sorts of outcomes, too. i mean the site is called paintCUTpaste and all. eh, better luck next year…

p.s. – can anyone recommend some awesome paper-cutting kid-safe scissors?