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Thursday, October 6, 2011

Easy-peasy paper-marbling


One of my favorite things to do with T is get creative. From day-to-day this takes on different meanings, but today it was a simple water and coconut oil marbling craft.
I've done this before with baby oil but I don't own that anymore so coconut oil is what I used. You will need:
Paint (we used watercolors, which were very light and food coloring which gave darker colors but less variations)


*Oil (again, we used coconut oil which I melted to a liquid)
*a pan you don't mind getting oily (filled a third full of cool water)
*Paper scraps or pretty paper for making cards and tags
*a place to put your finished papers on to dry
*and of course, an energetic and joyful toddler.

To make pretty paper like ours, fill your pan a third full of cool water. Add a few drops of your oil and allow it to spread out and ball up across the water.


Then add about a teaspoon of different paints and shake the pan slightly so the oil separates and begins to roll through the paint across the pan.


Next, dip a piece of paper in the mixture and let it settle beneath the oil so the paint sticks around the spaces where the oil didn't hit, like this:



Then, lift, allow to drip a little, and place on a plate to dry.



VĂ³ila! You've made marbled paper.



Enjoy, and please make sure your whirlychild is wearing art project friendly clothes :)

Friday, September 16, 2011

Play with your food!


I know, it does seem contrary. But we've always allowed little rainbow to make her own food choices, and as an almost three year old, I can tell you it has payed off.
 If she's hungry, she tells us what she wants. If it's mealtime, we serve whatever we are having, and she eats what she wants, (and this girl EATS). So, today while I was cooking her some corn and prepping dinner, she was finger painting, I handed her a piece of corn cobb to play with and this is what she did with it. 

 
I of course then began handing her other veggies and letting her have a blast.

The mushroom was definitely her favorite, and the carrot she used like a pencil or to roll. I love the prints that resulted and would love to do something like a piece of paper pizza, print on tee shirts or cards for friends. They're fun and pretty, too.

It doesn't hurt that it kept her busy for a full thirty minutes while I prepped dinner, either :)




What veggies would your kids enjoy painting with? What other funny things make good art supplies?

*no vegetables were harmed in the making of this blog post. **by harmed I mean we didn't eat them after they were covered in paint.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Carrotfish?



So this is not so much a tutorial as a food post because there's not much to this that you can't figure out without my help. I've been meaning to try this for a while and just finally got around to it this week: using carrots and noodles to make funny food. Here I made jellyfish, but you could make other things too.

First, I softened the cut up carrots by boiling them in a quart of water for 5minutes, then removed them and allowed them to cool so I could poke my noodles through.

 you can force the noodles into uncooked carrots but they fall out when they start boiling, probably because the carrot swells around them. This way they do not fall out while cooking.

After the carrots are cool enough to handle, press equally lengthed noodles into them all the way to *almost* the top- you want them 'secure' but not visible
Then return to the boiling water and boil for about ten minutes, drain and serve with a little butter or plain:
 



Monday, September 12, 2011

Mini bunting tutorial

I made this sweet mini bunting this afternoon with felt scraps, though you could make it with any fabric or even paper. Here's how you do it. It would be sweet as pie on a birthday table, in a playroom, near your child's art, draped across the ceiling, in holiday colors or all the same; really the opportunities are endless.

MATERIALS: sewing machine, scissors, needle& thread, felt, paper& pen.

Mark on a sheet of paper a line one inch wide. Use this as a guide for cutting your material. Cut out all your color combinations to this width.

Cut the pieces of felt out and then proceed to your sewing machine. Fold each one inch wide rectangle in half longways, and stitch down the top leaving a small allowance between your seam and the top of the fabric.


After you have sewn all your one inch rectangles into half inch rectangles, cut triangles out of the material trying to keep the triangles as uniform as possible. 
Next, thread each triangle via the ‘pocket’ at the top with a needle& thread onto a long pretty string or thread.
                                                 Tie loops for hanging and enjoy!





Thursday, September 8, 2011

nature painting

Little Rainbow and I have been collecting feathers whenever we're out on walks, and yesterday she was feeling very...handsy, so I pulled them out and let her play with them a bit. At first it was just feeling them, tickling her palms with them, petting her stuffy Monkey (who is actually a bunny) with them. Then, we moved on to this:





Feather painting. She had a blast! I loved watching her use the feathers as paintbrushes because her style was so different from how she gneerally tackles watercolor painting. She usually grabs a paintbrush and shoves it as hard has she can into the paints, smearing them into one color and making a muddy (but happy!) mess.

with the feathers she had to be gentle. There is no way to make a feather into a sturdy paintbrush, pushing down hard will only break it. As a result her lines were soft& careful, her painting not exactly spectacular but different nonetheless. And she was thrilled at using a new material.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Pride Day in the Queen City

Our city hosted it's annual Pride day/ festival two weekends ago, and somehow Mr.Rainbow and I didn't realize it was happening until about 4 hours before it ended. We went anyway, with Little Rainbow in tow and enjoyed it quite a bit. Ironically, this was my first time at a Pride event as well as Little Rainbow's first- as I was raised in a conservative family as a child. Mr. Rainbow, who was raised in a gay family, went to plenty before this one.
So little rainbow and I went to our first Pride day festival. She was a bit shy but loved all the rainbows and interesting outfits everywhere, and that they played a lot of Lady Gaga, because she happens to think Lady Gaga is Teh Awesome. Which is true, of course, even if you're not three years old.

The other very nice thing for her was seeing parts of our city that we can't usually enjoy so much because the streets were closed down for the festival. Being able to walk in the road and run around in the statues that are typically harder to access with her in tow- (crossing a street full of busy traffic to see a statue is usually more effort than we put into our outings-) but she could freely run to and fro and see the sights for herself without any cars nearly running her over, and that was really fun.

Mr. Rainbow and I have noticed that in our city the LGBTQ community isn't as visible in some other communities we've lived in, and I'm not entirely sure why that is. Part of it, I think, is that this is such a transient city, and people don't really come here to settle so much as they come here for work. There are a few very fun and funky neighborhoods and two stores I can think of that outright celebrate diversity, but it certainly isn't embraced here year round or even spontaneously- the way it is in some other communities.

One sweet potato


Today after we finished up our Saturday morning run to the Farmer's Market, I was unpacking our veggies when T spotted the sweet potatoes. It's almost fall here now, and we're already getting into the root veggies again.
"I want that, mama!" She said. Of course she did- these days she's eating constantly.
So I set her up at the sink washing them and then I peeled the largest& sliced it into circles. Then I quickly cut out heart shapes in the middle. I saw this done somewhere with apples around Valentines day, but I think they used cookie cutters (and mine are currently being employed in the sandbox) so I free formed these with a sharp peeling knife.

 Sprinkle with salt, bake for 20minutes as you usually would with a sweet potato fry- about 375* and hurray! You've got one sweet potato.
 I'm imagining all the other great veggies we can enjoy this way; beets maybe? Tiny banana chips? Cucumbers, regular potatoes, a slice of raw tomato with another veggie filling the hole? What strange things do you use funny shapes on for your whirlychild?