Day 113: Crafting After Dark

Ok, so 7:00 isn't really AFTER dark, but it is a solid 45 minutes after the girls' normal bedtime.  But, tonight was a special night, and it was just us girls home, so I made it a special craft.  To celebrate/commemorate (?) the meteor showers last night and tonight, we made our own constellations!

I came up with this idea because the girls have been FASCINATED with my telescope that we just found buried in the basement, and I decided that it would be cool to let them see stars, since they are always in bed before dark.  I laid out a big piece of polyester batting on the dining room table and gave the girls each a piece of construction paper.  I put an assortment of double pointed knitting needles on the table for them, and told them to poke holes in the paper with the needles.

We spent probably 15 or 20 minutes poking holes in the paper.  I wrote each one of their names and made shapes (even the big dipper!) on my piece of paper.  When we were done, we took our construction paper up to our closet (again, the only place in our house that doesn't have windows lol) and grabbed Mike's MagLite.  I turned off the lights, shut the door, and put the paper over the flashlight.  Instant constellations on the ceiling of our closet.  We spent some time finding the different shapes, their names, moving the paper up and down, back and forth, just to see what changed on the ceiling.  Then we put each of their pictures over the flashlight.  Of course, we couldn't do a craft about stars without singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  Honestly, I think it was probably one of the more special crafts, at least for me, that we have done to date.

I am sure there is a camera out there that could have taken a picture of the "stars" on our ceiling without totally washing everything out, but my camera is not one of them, so you will just have to use your imaginations to think of what our constellations looked like on our closet ceiling :)