paint cut paste

mosaics have been near and dear to my heart since my first semester of graduate school when i created a lifesize one as part of a semester-long self-exploratory “container project.” we created a small one for my daughter’s bathroom in the early days of this blog, but thought my little treasure-lover would enjoy making one for the backyard.

summer’s here and we’re in outside a lot, so we’ve been sprucing it up with handmade art and splashes of color. recently we created a garden mosaic stepping stone together, and i wrote a guest blog about it for the good hands community. click over to check out our step by step process of how and why we created this piece.

the theme of our mosaic was around this quote my mom has shared with me: “there are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots, the other is wings.”

can you tell N had a hand in creating this according to good ol’ ROY G BIV? i adore my little rainbow lover – a girl after my own heart.

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 N 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 N 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 N 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 N 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?

our family is about to make a big move across the country this month, from virginia to california… and in big moves there are so many little details. N and i have been having fun planning for her new bedroom and her very own bathroom in the new house. (we share a bathroom now in virginia, so i’m psyched that she gets her own in the next place!)

N wants a purple bedroom, so today we took a field trip to home depot to look at all of the color swatches of paint from lovely lavender to weeping wisteria. trying to strike a balance between a child-like, fun purple and a contemporary, muted, hip purple. not simple. (any suggestions?)

purples

in planning for N’s new bathroom, we decided to make a mosaic for the wall. N’s aunt bought her all of these adorable ceramic rice bowls when she was a baby, and inevitably half of them broke. being the crafty momma that i am, i save broken shards of cuteness in a jar in my art studio for times like these.

repurposed treasures

we chose some pieces of the dishes, some shiny purple marbles, and N wanted to add the purple shells she found in nags head last summer. we had a purple hand print made on a tile at a festival earlier in the year, so we incorporated that, too.

we bought a stepping stone kit at the craft store to press our treasures into the wet cement. (i opted for this over the glue and grout method i have done before, and i have to say that the pressing into wet cement method is much easier.) we didn’t use the tiles that came with our kit this time around… we wanted to personalize N’s mosaic. so if you have broken dishes or special shells, rocks, marbles, tiles lying around your house, this is an inexpensive and fun thing to do with them. i left two holes at the top through which i will string wire (and maybe some ribbon – we’ll see) to hang the mosaic on her wall.

excited to display this in N's new bathroom (name blurred out)