paint cut paste

over spring break in april, it was time for me to plant some potted herbs for the season. with all of the fairy house excitement as of late, N wanted to make them into “fairy herb gardens,” naturally.

even without her own pinterest account, this trend seemed to seep into the consciousness of my 5-year-old. go figure. first we potted the herbs into two large pots. N said that she would decorate the basil and rosemary pot, and the other (sage, cilantro, and parsley) was for me to adorn. i felt honored to get to do one, as i assumed she’d do both. yay!

she decided we needed our shrinky dink herb tags here, but the ones we made a couple years ago weren’t the same types of herbs, so we spent an afternoon making new shrinky dink tags. (easy steps: scribble with colored pencil on rough side, cut shape, write herb name with sharpie on smooth side, heat shrink, stick in soil.)

then it was time for the houses. i gave her a choice of using natural materials (like she does in the yard) or painting some wooden birdhouses we have ($1 bin at michael’s.) she chose the painted route, and we got to work on our fairy houses.

next we gathered up some items for landscaping… like colorful marbles, stones, shells, sea glass, and even a few of the lovely painted sticks we made a couple years ago. N excitedly designed her fairy herb pot.

she spent a lot of time getting everything just right for the fairies. what a hostess!

the herb pots are so darn sweet… and we’ve spent some time over the past month (has it been that long!!!??!) clipping sprigs of herbs for our dinners and sprucing up the fairy neighborhoods.

my little fairy-lover has been making fairy houses out of natural materials for months. she loves to create them, and then check back in on them the following day to see if she sees signs of fairy activity. (sometimes the “fairies” leave colorful marbles or sparkly treasures for her overnight. *wink*) i just love these spontaneous nature creations that can happen without purchasing any materials or having any agenda. open-ended, outdoor art supreme!

on a recent family picnic in the park sort of sunday, she worked hard to create a fairy house at the base of a redwood tree.

she also loves making them in our backyard…

and adding to this one in her school yard during outside playtime…

do your little ones like to create little homes in nature? i’d love to hear about what you’re making. for some really sweet inspiration, we love this book on fairy houses. it’s one of our go-to bedtime reads at the moment. stay tuned for our fairy herb garden, coming up on the blog in a coupla days…

this rainbow carnation experiment is one i remember from my own childhood. not only is it a visually appealing activity, it’s also a great way for kids to learn the science behind water is absorbed by plants and how it travels through the different part of a flower.

the inspiration for this post was an old spice rack i had sitting in the garage. what wonderful little vials these are for this experiment! we grabbed some food coloring and white carnations (we had some in the bouquet we bought for our butterfly habitat – all of this happened a few weeks ago, i’m just late bringing it to the blogging world.)

N had fun dropping food coloring into the water, and creating her favorite color, since it was not in the cheapo food coloring pack we had – purple!

she placed a white carnation into each tiny vase, and we put them out of the way of our flower-chomping cat…

and waited. i asked N, “what do you think will happen next?” she said that maybe the flowers would grow, and that they might drink the colored water. let’s see if her hypothesis is correct…

even within a day and a half, we saw the petals taking on the colors of the water they were drinking.

ten days later, the colors were distributed throughout the different parts of the flower. we noticed that the purple color was not as saturated in the carnation as the other colors, and the darker colored waters in general seemed to be more full in the end.

there are some explanations of this experiment online that we checked out, like this one from ehow. i didn’t find any scientific reason the darker waters would not be absorbed as much. in fact, most of the write-ups i saw recommend using darker colors for more dramatic results. all in all, we had a rainbowy flowery good time with this one!

have you tried making rainbow carnations? if so, what did you notice?

“Did you hear that winter’s over?
The basil and the carnations cannot control their laughter.”

-Rumi

hooray for spring!

autumn just might be my favorite season for nature-inspired art-making! i’ve been wanting to make teeny acorn cap candles for a long while, and it’s so easy i’m not sure why we’ve not gotten around to them before now.

as for supplies: we scored a little bag of 10 short candle wicks from N’s waldorf school store (my new favorite art supply and toy store!) for just $1. i already had some wax around the house from the last time we made candles, and we’ve got acorn caps stored up over here like nobody’s business. we even added in a few shells from our summer OBX trip, just to mix it up.

N and i picked through the acorn caps to find ones that would lay relatively flat, or ones that would lay flat after we picked off the stem. if you can’t find ones that are flat enough on top (candle bottom) that’s okay — one fun way to display these are as floating candles in a pretty bowl with lovely autumn leaves!

the N put the wicks into each cap and shell…

…while i melted the wax in our double boiler.

good thing i had everything on top of wax paper on my counter because pouring the melted wax into such tiny nature containers was tricky — but made us smile

now we’ve got a sweet collection of tiny candles for our autumn nature table and to gift to friends. (and i’m gonna go grab some more $1 packs of wicks this week at kindergarten pick up time!)

autumn is upon us next week… tis the season of harvesting the fruits of our labor. when we’re lucky, summer “labor” looks like a long walk on the beach. if you’ve got a lot of beach booty laying around, this could be a simple fun one for you and your littles.

our summer vacation to carova, north carolina, left us with plenty of beautiful shells with natural holes in them. perfect for jewelry, garland, and ornaments!

we set a few larger shells and some ribbon scraps aside with the intention of creating keepsakes for 12 of our family members (5 households) who shared this trip together.

first, i wrote “carova 2011″ on the inside of each shell with a sharpie.

then N got to work painting the shells with one of my favorite glimmery paint additives called “make it shimmer.”

this paint gives such a lovely mostly-silver, somewhat-pearly glisten to anything it touches. N applied it directly to our shells, but as a paint additive, it is meant to be mixed into plain paint to heighten it to shimmery loveliness.

once the shells were dry, we added colorful ribbon scraps from our stash.

while this project has roots in summer, it extends through the winter holidays. we are excited to give these to our family to display on their christmas trees or in their homes whenever they’d like.

it’s a fun memento from a sweet summer vacation. (surprise family – these will be coming your way before the holiday season! )

for us, one of the highlights of this time of year in the bay area is the kings mountain arts fair. it is held in woodside, ca, for three days, every labor day weekend, and it is utter and complete MAGIC!

magic in the way that one feels like a tiny wood nymph walking among these giant redwood trees, checking out amazing artisan wares.

the sounds of one artist playing his handmade native american flutes and another playing his drums rings through the woods.

at 2010 fair, playing with flute maker guillermo martinez just before i bought a flute from him

i’m a girl who loves herself some etsy, but this is like a 3D etsy set in the middle of a fairy tale forest… complete with coffee, cookies, and beekeepers with their honey.

a magical land where there is inspirational art at every turn.

i love this mandala mixed media piece (2010)

a fairy tale where woodland creatures surprise you (when trying on expensive leather masks.)

she is, of course, a fox

a fairy tale where kids can literally climb inside of huge tree stumps and create their own crowns from aluminum foil, ribbons, and flowers…

or hide in the shadows of tee pees…

N and i wandered around this festival on saturday and struck up conversations with amazing woodworkers from earnest efforts who carve these gorgeous boxes and spirit shakers.

N was such a sweet shopper that the artist even gifted her with a spirit shaker made from purpleheart wood — a naturally purple wood. “how did he know this was my favorite color??” see? magic!

i would show you a photo of all of the lovely purchases we made, but we made a dent in our holiday shopping at the festival, so i don’t want to spoil the surprises. let’s just say that they are hand-crafted and heARTful gifts!

if you’re ever in the bay area around labor day, i highly recommend checking this out!

where and when are your favorite art fairs?

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?