paint cut paste

this weekend we took a long drive down highway 1 along the pacific coast, stopping at various beaches along the way. days like that remind me of how lucky i am to live here in northern california, and on this beautiful earth in general. nature offers some of the most amazing art inspiration!

one of the beaches we visited had amazingly colorful stones all over it. we spent hours wandering this beach, enjoying running from the chilly waves and collecting stones.

when we layed out our bounty at home, it was a rainbow of gorgeous rocks.

i can’t wait to ink some of these rocks – and i also want to learn to crochet around them like i have oogled over on one of my favorite blogs, resurrection fern. but today we opted for a simple rock craft – picture holders. easy peasy. all you need is floral wire (or any other type of wire, but i prefer this wrapped kind in dark brown) and a pair of pliers.

wrap the rock with the wire, then point the wire upwards.

now make a curlycue at the tip with the pliers – you can make a fancy spiral or just a little curl like i did.

wedge a photograph or a little piece of art in between the top spiral, and there you have a rock picture holder.

it’s sort of addictive once you start making these…

i think a collection of old fashioned hipstamatic/instagram/pictureshow images would look fabulous displayed in these. (yes, i’m obsessed with iphone photo apps.) but N’s tiny watercolor paintings make for an awesome exhibit.

this quick craft was born out of our need for more magnets to hold up the art on our fridge! bonus: a set of these makes for a lovely, personalized mother’s day, father’s day, or teacher appreciation gift!

N found some lovely, flat, lightweight rocks (sandstone) at the beach a few weeks ago which seemed like the perfect natural material for lovely magnets.

we got out our ink pads and N made some colorful thumbprints on the rocks.

i doodled a few different critters on the thumbprint with a sharpie after N ran off to play elsewhere, though in retrospect (yikes!) i really should have let her capable hands do this! momma couldn’t resist – i love fingerprint art.

(psst - my amazingly talented fiber artist friend, kenden, wove this cloth for me on her loom)

we used elmer’s household cement to secure a little magnet to the backs of the rocks.

now our fridge is all kinds of fingerprint fancy!

oh, are you wondering about what the frog magnet says? it’s to remind us of thich nhat hanh’s concept of froglessness.

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!

today N and i finally did something i’ve wanted to do with her for a long time – we painted pet rocks! this was a favorite activity of mine when i was little.

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first, we found a bunch of smooth rocks outside and also in a collection i had in a jar from various rivers and travels.

river-made

then N used our acrylic paints to apply solid colors on each rock as backgrounds for the animals-to-be. sometimes she glopped too much paint on, so i smoothed some of the rocks out so they’d dry sometime this year. (i also had to take a hairdryer to each so that we’d be able to put the details on them today.) after the backgrounds were dry, N decided which animals she wanted them to be.

i helped with the details of the shape, and she did polka dots, scales, eyes, and mouths on each. (while N can draw some great human faces, she’s not really that adept at drawing different animals just yet.) we had fun doing this together.

the turtle comes to life

now she has a whole pet rock family to play with. i’m thinking we’ll make a habitat for them next.

these pets are solid

and while N worked on her new pets, i couldn’t help myself to make pet rocks inspired by our own pet cats…

pony & bean