butterfly magnets

Another cold and gloomy day here!   It seems odd to be doing Spring crafts, and then bundling up with hats and mitts and winter coats for play, but that’s what we did today.

This is a simple little craft.  I got my inspiration here, and we put our own little spin on it.

I set out four dishes with water that I tinted with food colouring.  Each Hooligan got a piece of paper-towel and a paintbrush, and went to town tapping and dabbing until the paper towel was coloured.

It’s a neat activity as they learn about water absorption and colour mixing.

Then they each painted a clothes peg (clipping it to a piece of cardboard makes it easier for little fingers to paint).

We set our stuff by the fire to dry while we had snack, but you could speed up the process with a blow-dryer.

Once dry, cinch the paper towel in the middle, clip it with the clothes-peg, and glue on a couple of googly eyes.

I cut a fridge magnet into strips, and we glued a strip onto the back of each clothes-peg.

That’s it!  Easy-peasy, and super-cute.

 

rockin’ robin

Just a quick little craft here.

If you follow us on facebook, you’ve likely heard our exciting news!  Mama robin has nested on our deck, and her babies hatched yesterday!  Two of them hatched in the morning, and I was absolutely blessed with perfect timing last evening when I went out to check on them.  I climbed up on the bench, held the camera high over my head, aiming it into the nest and snapped a picture.  I never know what I’m going to get because the nest is so high.  I can’t see into it.  I just hold the camera up and shoot.  I was absolutely over the moon when I hopped down and looked at the picture and discovered that I’d captured this shot: Baby #3 emerging from it’s egg!

If you haven’t seen the other pictures yet, please pop over to my Happy Hooligans facebook page, and check out the album titled “our baby robins”.  I will update the album daily as we watch the babies grow and develop.

This afternoon, we had a few extra minutes before home-time so we made the following little craft in honour of our babies.

Cut a circle out of brown cardstock or a cereal box.  Fold your circle in half and press along the crease.

Glue crumpled pieces of red or orange tissue paper on to the robin’s tummy.  Add an eye, and a yellow triangle beak.

Cut a few tail feathers, and you’re done!  

Now, when you set your robin on a flat surface, and give it a little tap, it will “rock”.

If we’d had more time, we would have made some smaller robins to go along with this Mama.  Maybe tomorrow.

coloured pasta

We dyed pasta today!  Have you ever done this?  It’s so cool!!

It’s cold and rainy here today so it was the perfect day for an activity like this.  We used the same method to colour the pasta as I did to colour our rainbow rice a few weeks ago.

Here’s what you’re going to need:

• white vinegar
• food colouring (I used icing gels)
• pasta (we used Rigatoni because it’s hollow, and I wanted the Hooligans to make necklaces with the coloured pasta)
• a container with lid for colouring your pasta in (you could use a ziplock bag as well)
• small dish to mix the vinegar/food colouring

We divided our pasta in to 5 piles, and the Hooligans picked out the colours that they wanted: purple, green, blue, pink and orange.

For each colour, we mixed a generous blob of colouring with about a tsp of vinegar.  Ok, see the picture below?  See what we mixed our vinegar/colouring in?  I have to confess that I swipe a few of those little ketchup cups every time I’m at McDonald’s.  They’re handy when it comes to stuff like this.  Anyway, mix your vinegar and food colouring until the gel has dissolved, and make sure you’ve used enough colouring.  You want it to be DARK.  Our first batch of purple pasta turned out way too light, and we had to dye it a second time.  No biggie, just sayin’.

Pour your vinegar/colour over your pasta.  Pop the lid on your container, and shake the heck out of it.

Dump your pasta out onto a plate or something (we used sytrofoam meat trays) and let it dry.  I placed ours in front of the fire, and they were completely dry in about a half an hour.

Now, you have this brilliantly coloured pasta for crafting with!  You could make art with it, or use it for a sorting activity, but we made necklaces with ours.  While I was getting the “needles” and wool ready, the Hooligans were busy exploring the pasta, and within seconds, had their fingers adorned with it.

For the necklaces, I tied a foam letter to the end of the wool so the pasta wouldn’t slide right off, and we used our homemade sewing needles again.

Remember these?

Take a straw (I’m using some rubbermaid straws which will last forever), and make a slit in one end.  Thread your yarn through the straw, secure one end in the slit, and you’re good to go!   Making necklaces is a super exercise in fine motor control.  It quite challenged our youngest crafters.  Just look at the concentration.

And there you have it!  Easy, fun and colourful!  Have fun!!

grass skirt-turned-pom-pom

Just a quick little post today.  We’ve been spending lots of time outside, playing in the yard and exploring in the ravine, so we haven’t been doing much crafting lately.

I whipped us up a little something today though just for fun.

My mom gave me a garbage bag full of Hawaiian “grass” (read: plastic) skirts last year (far more than we could ever possibly need) so I put a few of them to good use today.  Now, I realize you probably don’t have a bag of grass skirts just kicking around, so I found this little tutorial for you.  It calls for plastic bags.

After playing a little game of “where’s the baby”,

(hello, baby)

I grabbed a hefty handful of  the “grass” and chopped it off, folded it in half lengthwise, and taped it as tightly as possible to a small stick.

Instant pompoms!

These were really easy to make, and the Hooligans loved them!  Check it out.  They went everywhere with us this morning!Go Team!!

Earth Day smoosh painting

There are some neat Earth Day crafts and activities floating around out there this week so I decided we’d do something earthy today too.

If you’ve never done any smoosh painting, it’s time to try it.  It’s easy, and the results are really beautiful.  We used this technique when we made our fall collages, and they were gorgeous.

I made one small change today, which made the process even easier, less messy and made clean up a snap: instead of using a piece of plastic wrap or waxed paper for the smooshing, we used a plastic bag.  You’ll see how well it worked.

I cut circles for this project, and we squirted a couple of shades each of blue and green on our circles.

Pop the circles in a plastic bag, press down to release any air in the bag, and start smooshing until your piece is covered.

When removing your piece from the bag, try not to slide it out, or your paint colours will just slide and smudge together.

Voila!  Don’t they look great?

Happy Earth Day!

homemade puffy paint!

Oh, we had fun with this today!  I’ve seen lots of recipes for this online, and I’ve wanted to try it for a while.  I picked up a small bag of self-rising flour at our bulk/health food store a while back so we’d be able to give it a whirl. This recipe is super-easy to whip up, and the results were really cool. **editing to say that this is a terrific activity for your little ones.  It provides an opportunity to explore art and science with your children, but your this paint is not meant to hold up over time.  After 24 hours, our paintings have become brittle and are starting to break down.

For each colour you’ll need:

• 1 tbsp self-rising flour
• a couple drops of food colouring (I used Wilton icing gels)
• 1 tbsp salt
• little bit of water (start with 1/4 tsp)

Combine your flour and salt in a small bowl.  Add a little bit of water and stir until you get a smooth, thin paste (about the same consistency of stirred yogurt).  Add your food colouring, and mix well.

Ours sat for a bit while we walked to the school bus, and it thickened up again, so I just added a few drops of water to thin it back to the yogurt consistency.

Get some sturdy cardstock or thin cardboard, and some paintbrushes or q-tips, and get creating!

When you’re happy with your masterpiece, pop it into the microwave for 30 seconds and watch it rise!  It’s warm when you take it out, but it’s completely set.

Ta daaa…

styro-framed art

As you probably know, I love crafting, and even more, I love crafting with re-purposed items.  Creating beautiful art with your kiddos doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

Check out some of the beautiful creations we’ve made with things that were headed to the trash – cardboard, toilet roll tubes, crumpled tissue paper, fabric scraps etc.  Today we discovered that styrofoam meat trays make a great “canvas” for creating a piece of art.  The edge of the tray kind of serves as a built-in frame.

I always have a stack of these trays on hand.  I run them through the dishwasher first to make sure they’ve been sterilized, and we use them for all kinds of things.  They make handy trays for holding supplies while you’re crafting, they’re fun to “draw” on with a craft stick or the end of a paint brush, and kids love to cut them and snap them into pieces.

Today I set out some green, yellow and blue paint, and told the Hooligans we were making Spring paintings.  I suggested that they paint the bottom half of their meat tray green, the top half blue, and to use the yellow to add a sun if they wished.

This led to some exciting discoveries when their colours mixed on the trays: “Hey, blue and yellow make green!”

Then we let the trays dry while we had our snack.  I have to share one of my newest finds with you.  I came across this item at the thrift shop.  

I paid a dollar for it.  I wasn’t sure what it was (turns out it’s a dvd holder), but I knew what I was going to use it for!  

Hello, awesome, space-saving drying rack!!

When the paint was dry, the Hooligans glued foam flowers, bugs and animals (I lucked out and found those at the thrift shop as well) onto their paintings. Here’s a little tip that makes gluing easy for little fingers.  Grab a few plastic coffee stir-sticks when you’re at a coffee shop!  I set some out with a little bowl or pot of glue, and have the kids apply the glue that way.  It’s perfect for adding small amounts of glue to a project, and  the stir-sticks wipe up easily so we can use them again.  This is simpler and less frustrating for little ones to squeeze  a glue bottle, and they don’t end up with way too much glue on their project, which tends to happen when they squeeze from the bottle.  I do realize that is a learning process in itself, and there’s great motor development in the squeezing process.  Most times we do our gluing that way, but sometimes it’s nice to take the easy route.

Did these paintings turn out beautifully? Happy Spring!

Easter egg garland (painting with golf balls)

We did another golf-ball painting project last week.  We love this activity.  It’s super-simple, and it never fails to impress!

First you’ll want to find a cardboard box that will be deep enough to contain your golf-balls as they zing and bounce around.  Handles are a bonus.

Cut your cardboard or paper to fit the box, and have the kiddos squirt, drizzle, or dab your paint onto their “canvas”.

Pop that into the box, and start shakin’!

Oooooh, and Aaaaaah over your masterpiece.  Isn’t it purdy?

You’re free to turn this into whatever you’d like, but we had Easter garlands in mind, so I cut as many eggs as I could out of the paintings, and punched a couple of holes in the top of each egg.

Then the Hooligans strung them together with wool and a “sewing needle”.

Ok – super excited to share this little trick.  Somehow all of our plastic sewing needles have gone missing, so I improvised with a drinking straw.  Cut your straw to the desired length, and make a little slit in one end.  Feed your wool through the straw, and slide it into the slit to secure.  

How cool is that?!

Happy Easter!

homemade glue

We go through a lot of glue here.  I usually pick up several bottles of it when I find a good sale, but even so, there are a few issues I have with bottled glue.  First of all, it can be really challenging for little people to use it – the bottles are sometimes really hard to squeeze, they accidentally twist the top closed, and get frustrated, it is tricky for the twos to apply the glue exactly where they want to, and with clear glue the 2′s have a tough time seeing where they’ve applied it.  Now I know all of these challenges provide opportunities for learning, and for fine motor development, and that’s great, but when you’re sitting in a circle of four or five 2′s and 3′s, the frustration can put a bit of a damper on things.

Remember those little bottles of clear, amber glue when we were kids?  The ones with the rubber duck-beak kind of nozzle, that we would simply stamp on our paper to apply the glue?  Can you get those any more?  Man, I’d love some of those.

Anyway, for a while now, I’ve been thinking it would be nice to have a good sized pot of glue that they could just dip craft sticks or paint brushes into to make their crafting a little easier.  I tried making glue a while back with flour and water and a couple of other ingredients, and I stored it in the fridge in a dish soap bottle, but it quickly separated, and I wasn’t thrilled with the consistency.

I found the following recipe the other night, and thought it might be better as it calls for cornstarch (corn flour in the UK) instead of flour.

We tried it out yesterday when we made our Easter eggs with coloured rice, and I’m happy to say it worked really well for that project.

Here’s how you make it:

3/4 cup water

2 tablespoons corn syrup
1 teaspoons white vinegar
1/2 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup cold water

Mix water, syrup and vinegar in small saucepan. Bring to a rolling boil. In small bowl, mix cornstarch and cold water. Add this mixture slowly to first mixture. Stir constantly. Let stand overnight before using.

*I will say that I had a moment of fleeting disappointment when I checked my glue after letting it stand over night.  It had kind of solidified into a thick gel.  I just added a tbsp or so of water, and gave it a stir until it was back to the consistency I was happy with.  Maybe I should have put a lid on it when it sat overnight instead of leaving it uncovered?

I added a bit of blue food colouring, so the youngest Hooligans would be able to tell where they’d applied it, and I thought a bit of colour would look fun.  If you’re going to do this, you don’t need much colour.  I probably added too much, as the colour is still noticeable when the glue dries.  Start with a drop and add more if needed – until your glue is just barely tinted.

I’m storing mine in a little tub with a large opening so it’s easy to dip into with a craft stick.  When we used our glue yesterday, to decorate some eggs with our rainbow rice.  It had been about 4 days since I’d made the glue, and the consistency was still great.  I just shook the tub before I opened it.  This glue doesn’t dry as quickly as store bought glue, but we always craft in the morning here, and it was dry by afternoon, so that works for us.

*I’m sorry that I can’t tell you how long this will keep for.  I would recommend keeping it in the fridge to prevent it from going mouldy.  Someone mentioned to me that it should keep 6 months if you refrigerate it, but I don’t know for sure.  I do know that within a week of keeping mine at room temperature, mould developed around the lid, so I’m refrigerating my next batch.

 

Easter eggs with home made glue and coloured rice

You might have read my post on facebook the other night saying that I made some homemade glue.  I’ve been eager to try it out, but we haven’t had an opportunity until today.  I’m happy to say that it worked well!  You can find the recipe here!

This is how we tested our glue this morning.

We decorated “eggs”that I’d cut out of white cardboard.

I added some white latex paint (that I had leftover from when we painted our baseboards) to their paint, so we could mix up some soft pastel colours.

I had three 2 year olds this morning, and I love how each one had their own painting style, and produced an egg that didn’t look anything like anyone else’s.

I’m going to share a handy-tip here, for drying paint or glue in a hurry.  I keep an old blow-dryer in our crafting area!  It’s a super way to speed things up when you don’t want to wait for your project to dry.

When we had the paint fairly dry, the Hooligans used craft sticks to spread and blob the homemade glue all over their eggs.

Then they shook some of our coloured rice (you can find the recipe here), into the glue.

 Tap off any loose rice, and voila!