Making the Fairy Houses

I loved doing this project with the kids.  We filled up a box with shiny things, and now the girls know just what I mean when I say "Please get the paint box, your smocks, and the fancy box."

Actually, we've done a lot of projects this week.  It's been nice to have our supplies organized and accessible again, with our new cubby system in the school room.  The kids and I made a new wreath for Fall, and Mimi adores it.  She loves anything fancy, and she loves building things.  Making jewel-encrusted fairy houses might be the absolutely perfect project for our pixie princess.

I should explain- we have decided that Mimi is our spring pixie princess.  She's flowery and warm and sweet, and sometimes she just showers and rages, and then everything is sweetness and dancing again.  Our spring pixie princess.  She prefers to be barefoot, and to eat nothing but sugar- if that doesn't say flower fairy, I don't know what does.  Bread and jam for her, outside, please!

Ernie is our water sprite.  When she's hot inside, she boils and steams and shouts.  When she's cold inside, she's sluggish and impossible to get moving.  But, when the weather is gentle she can be chirpy like a little brook and bring joy and life to everyone around her.  She can be impenetrable as fog.  She's deep like an ocean in her thoughts, and can be as still as a mountain lake.

Cocoa is our earth man.  Our dwarf.  Small, strong, agile, with a simple-minded focus on the world and what he wants; he's happiest when he's shoving heavy things around.  He's hard to divert from his path, and knows his own way.  He loves and accepts everyone he sees.

Daddy is the wind- he blows change and blessings and seasons through our lives.  He's the wind in our sails.  He brings the storms from outside our little home, and then blows them away again.

That leaves me- fire.  I come through and destroy and break down what I see that isn't what it could be, and I build and teach and nurture into something better nourished.

It's a silly little thing, but it's calmed the kids down and help them reflect on their own personalities, and helped them appreciate the personalities of other members of our family as we talk and giggle about our own strengths and weakness described this way.  Fairy time won't last long in our home, but for now it's a sweet way to look at and understand a big world.

Kids Made This: Fairy Village

Fairy fixation this week culminated in a late night run to the craft store for some bits and bobs for a fairy village.  We all painted our houses (and decorated) last night, and gave them a final coat of spray varnish this morning before setting up our village.

Going to the backyard, Mimi thoughtfully said "I don't know if fairies are real, but I HOPE they live in our houses!"

Mimi, modeling her fairy house.  Guess who's going to be trouble in a few years?  The girls coated their houses in flat-back plastic jewels left over from Mimi's birthday party.  We stuck them on with glue dots.

Those shorts go in the give-away box tonight.  Yikes.

Cocoa declined modeling his house: he chose to display his "logurt"

Setting up the village

Daddy's house in front, Cocoa's in back, hung on some branch snags above the village for those fairies that prefer to sleep off the ground.


Ernie's red-roofed house, and my leaf-covered house.  Notice the jars of "fairy dust" to help entice the fairies to come and stay, and replenish their stores.  Inside Ernie's house, you can just barely see a little wooden spool for the fairy to sit on.

Most of these supplies were already on hand- we spent about $10 at the craft store for the wooden supplies and varnish.

I look forward to adding to this village- already the girls have made a dance floor of leaves around Mimi's purple-roofed house.

Supplies:

Houses:

4" bird houses ($1 each)

craft paint

plastic jewels

glue dots

silk leaves

spray on varnish

wooden spools

Flower Pots

1" wooden  flower pots

silk flowers

Fairy Dust Jars

small jam jars

glitter

Paths

flat marbles

Fencing

doll house fencing

Tissue Paper Rainbows for St. Patrick's Day

My daughters have never heard of leprechauns.  Is that terrible?  I told them stories about leprechauns today, to get ready for this art activity.  They're little people, they're sneaky and tricky.  If you catch one, he has to tell you where his pot of gold is, or grant one wish.  (I might be embellishing a bit.  Isn't that how fairy tales go?)  You can find leprechauns at the end of a rainbow, if you're quick.

Ernie's only response, much later, was "Mom?  Are leopards yellow?"  Yes...with brown spots.  "OK, so the yellow in the leprechaun rainbow is going to remind me of leopards.  Because their word roots are the same- they both start with "lep!"  My child...is obsessed with learning about animals right now.  I also just introduced her to the concept of word roots, and heaven help us all, I'm going to dig out my latin word root cards tomorrow and show her a few.  Oh, and Mimi said she would NEVER wish for all the candy in the world- she'd get sick.  OK, then!

ANYWAY!!  I love these rainbows- I remember making an enormous poster this way for my 3rd grade teacher as a girl.  I begged and begged the teacher to let me stay in from recesses to help finish it for her.  The girls took to this just as much, Ernie was actually giggling over her project.  I was awarded "Best Mom Ever!" status for the afternoon- I love that status.  I certainly didn't have that status at the grocery store today...

So, here's the supplies:

• tissue or crepe paper in rainbow colors, cut into squares- we used crepe streamers
• white school glue
• a pencil with an eraser
• construction paper

I showed the girls how to sketch a rainbow onto their construction paper, and start filling it in.  You take one square of paper, and swizzle it around the eraser end of a pencil.  Lightly tap it in the glue, then press it onto your paper; gently pull the pencil out while holding the tissue paper down.  They got the hang of it really quick, and this was a ZERO mess project.  The best kind.

An Art Day

Wonder Daddy pointed out last week that if I taught school five days a week, steady, from here on...we'd finish our curriculum in February.  I took that as a sign that we should cancel all lessons the next day and have an art and dance party day!

What?  I love homeschooling.

We got our groove on to the Tangled soundtrack on Spotify (love Spotify!  The girls will be sad when our "free" account ratchets down from unlimited to 10 hours a month.)

We made q-tip skeletons, to kick start our homemade Halloween decorations.  Mimi's seems to have met with a terribly tragic, and gruesome, accident.  I like all the heads and legs she drew, though!

The neighbor girl was busy putting up her own outdoor decorations on Saturday afternoon- big pumpkin lanterns, streamer ghosts, etc., before the girls called her over to play.  "Why don't YOU have any Halloween decorations up?" she wanted to know.

"We do!" came Ernie's earnest reply, then she marched that girl into the house to show her the ceramic jack-o-lantern, and the stuffed scarecrow that sits on the mantel.  Oh, and the cling stickers on the back deck door.  (Do you decorate for Halloween?  Am I a total scrooge?  I also don't really buy costumes for the kids, I strongly encourage them to come up with an idea, then find things to wear...maybe make a request for an accessory item they're missing.  Mean mom?)  At any rate, as my dad pointed out, construction paper projects can make up for any lack of plastic pumpkins AND they can be recycled in November!  Score!

This was our inspiration Pin:

Source: busybeekidscrafts.com via Myrnie on Pinterest

Our BIG project for the day was inspired by this pin:

Source: styleunveiled.com via Myrnie on Pinterest

The originall pinner said there was a free template to download and print that nifty tree, but alas: it has since expired.  However, I was able to scratch out some trees for the girls to go to town on!  I decided against using stamp pads- that stuff does NOT wash off fingers (I'm still blue from my test run with a turquoise pad), and WHEN little fingers forget to wash between colors, the color mixing can't be simply washed down the drain.  So, another messy tempura project for us: I love messy tempura projects!

It's a little odd looking at these pictures, knowing that last Fall, Mimi was painting on the walls when I turned my back during art projects.  The days are SO long sometimes, but the years are short!  I think I need to spend more time remembering that.

Art We've Been Doing

Ernie updated our art line- the streamers were my contribution, Ernie's work is on the left, Mimi's is on the right. So nice and orderly, right?



I'm totally in love with these flowers that Ernie started drawing.  Yum.


This, she says, is Peter Rabbit.  He's eating radishes.  And I'm not going to insert ANY other comments here, I'm just glad she's here to translate for me!



We have the requisite-for-any-Pinner melted crayon drawings- these were done a few weeks ago.  Honestly, these weren't a big hit.  The girls didn't have the patience to hold the blow dryer for that long, so I ended up doing that part for them.  My kitchen floor still has bits of crayon wax, because it blew EVERYWHERE.  And the end product...is kind of Rainbow Bright in the Horror Fun House.  But hey, LOTS of other people love doing this project!  (We used cardboard, double sided tape, and a lot of old crayons.)

A Quiet Afternoon

Ernie came to me with a few yards of fabric, and an armful of my most colorful spools of Gutterman thread, asking to "draw with thread."  I wish you could have seen how she lit up when I carefully stretched a piece of fabric into  a hoop, and showed her my boxes of embroidery floss.  She picked out a dozen of her favorite colors, piled them into an old basket, and started "drawing" with her thread, all straight lines, all different colors.  Mimi chose her own colors, and criss-crossed her own hooped fabric with yards of embroidery floss and a sharp needle- this project has kept the girls busy for the better part of two days now, in their spare time.  Every few minutes they come back to me with a needle and a new color of floss, and I string them up.

I've had to bite my tongue to keep from "helping" Ernie.  Does it really matter if she's cutting off the thread, so close to the fabric, without knotting it?  No.  Does it really matter that she doesn't care if the knotted end of the thread is in front or back?  No.  When she says it's finished, I'll help her glue it onto a piece of cardboard to put into a picture frame, so it can't unravel, but I love seeing her create and dream and work so hard.  

Kids Made This: Really Big Canvas Art

When we moved into our current house, it had a LOT of stuff in it. Shelves of cleaners in the laundry room, a shed full of landscaping lights and hot tub chemicals, an enormous area rug, a rolling kitchen cart, a ladder....and these weird "finger painting" art pieces up on the wall. The entire house was painted in muted earth tones, and once we started bringing in our Crayola brand of crazy colors, they had to come down IMMEDIATELY. (Because really, by the time we were done, the room these hung in was yellow, basil green, and lilac.)

I spent a day coating them with lots of primer, and let the kids go to town!

These made fabulous presents for our Wonder Daddy, and we have super-unique art work that's kind of color coordinated for our yellow-basil-lavender room now. Perfect!

Playing with Biodegradable Packing Peanuts

Mimi making a "thing"

Back when I was a teen and in college I used to babysit two really great little kids. One year for Christmas I found them an enormous bag of colored bits of "foam" that would stick together if you got them wet. They were awesome! You could make them into crowns, bracelets, necklaces, robots...and they were simply colorful packing peanuts. You know the biodegradable ones? Yeah, they taste like Cheerios and they are SO sticky when you get them damp. Tons of fun for the kids to play with!

My husband's grandmother sent a Christmas package that was filled with these packing peanuts, so I saved them for a quiet day after the rush of Christmas. The kids loved them! I gave them a little plate of water with a rag on top for them to stamp their peanuts onto before sticking them together. The only thing was I couldn't convince my oldest girl to do it QUICK, so she ended up melting away half her peanuts, and her fingers got sticky, and the other peanuts started sticking to her...and she decided she'd had enough fun for one day. We have a ton left, I'm excited to play more with these!

Halloween 2010

Ernie's annual candy sorting

Is this The Pumpkin? (It wasn't)

Pumpkin Painting

Halloween has come and gone! Music class party Friday morning, church party Friday night, pumpkin patch Saturday morning, trick-or-treating Saturday night.....the girls did good this year!

Ernie was pretty upset when I announced that we'd be cooking their pumpkins this week, until I started listing off everything we could do with them (gnocchi, biscuits, pancakes, pie, muffins, bread, soup, cookies, etc.) She's pretty sure that pumpkin cookies are going to to be a GREAT use for that big 'ol squash :)

(Yes, that's a Sweet Mama squash in the background, kind of like a Sweet Meat. She painted a face on it for me, so I could have a pumpkin on the porch too. With all this rain we're getting, the paint still hasn't dried on these!)

With how "into it" Mimi was getting, you can see why we paint these on the floor. I'm sure we'll carve pumpkins in later years, but for now I love letting the girls do it all by themselves.