Day 108: Sidewalk Paint

1 part corn starch
1 part water
food coloring (neon works really really well!)

Easy, I love easy crafts.  I especially love crafts that the "mess" is outside!  We mixed this inside, the girls mixed the food coloring into the muffin pan and we headed outside with a plethora of paint brushes (and our homemade chalk).

It was a little infuriating to color with chalk paint.  It takes a really long time, but when it dries, it looks AMAZING.  I am wondering if it will ever come off our driveway though.  I am thinking it may take an act of nature to dump enough rain on our driveway to clean it.  It looks like someone painted our driveway.  In the future, I will make these in small cups with lids so that we can save them and not wash it down the drain when we're done.  They are pretty, and I wish that my kids had more patience, because I could have sat and colored the entire driveway with them!

I was really happy with how well our homemade chalk colored as well.  I took a picture of the different yellows side by side.  The one that we did with actual acrylic paint was much darker, and I feel, colored nicer.  However, it would have been totally unreasonable to do ALL of our chalks with acrylic because it had to be SO wet, and it did dry funky too.  But, it has a really nice look to it.

BTW, with the chalk paint, you can use sponge brushes, i think that it may go on easier, but the sidewalk rips the sponges to pieces, so have a lot on hand.

Day 107: Modeling Foam

You know, there are crafts that we have done that I really thought that they would be awesome crafts for the kids and they end up totally uninterested.  Today, I grabbed a few bags of Model Magic out of the craft drawer.  I have absolutely no idea where this stuff came from, it showed up in a drawer at the beginning of the year, and I never remember buying it.  I honestly had NO expectations of this being a successful craft, but I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised!

I really didn't know what to expect from Model Magic either, I halfway expected it to crumble, be a mess, be dry, etc etc etc.  It wasn't very much when I opened the packages, VERY small packages, and weighed next to nothing.  I very apprehensively split each of the 4 bags into 3 pieces and gave each of us a piece.  Once we started working and playing with everything, I was very surprised to find just how far each little piece of this stuff went!

The girls rolled it out into patties, they rolled it into snakes, the smashed it together, cut out snow men and stars, they smashed it with different things to see how it squished.  Penny figured out how to make it look like poop... the things that come out of her mouth at times cracks me up!

At the very end- the girls smashed all their pieces on top of each other and stuck a "flag" in it :-p

And I made beads (given that they dry?) for a future craft...

Day 106: Chalk

It was a dark and dreary day today and I knew there was no hope in getting the girls outside to play, so I decided that today would be an exceptionally nice day to make sidewalk chalk.  I had a few reservations, mainly that I didn't have powdered tempura paint, but I found a blog that said you could use acrylic paint (more on that later) or food coloring.  So, I finally decided to bite the bullet and sit down with the girls to make chalk.

There is prep work and forethought that must go into this.  You need silicon molds (silicon cupcake holders work well) or toilet paper/paper towel tubes.  If you use cardboard tubes, you have to seal the bottom so that chalk doesn't leak out while it is still runny.  Well, I was being lazy the first time and didn't want to go find the duct tape, so I grabbed packaging tape from beside me and sealed the bottoms.  BIG mistake, it POURED out of the the packaging tape like a breached levy!  So, i stopped immediately, and replaced all the tape with duct tape.. until I ran out of duct tape, and covered the remaining tubes with large pieces of masking tape.  Lesson learned: (which surprised me honestly) masking tape is the way to go!

First and foremost- not for the faint of heart.  Chalk making is MESSY.  There was plaster of paris everywhere in the dining room!  It is just a powder, so as you're pouring it, dust is flying everywhere, ugh, what a mess.  But, I mixed it: 1 cup PoP and 3/4 cup water, and then split it between the girls in small Glad plastic bowls.  I gave them each a wooden Popsicle stick to let them mix their colors with.  We started with using acrylic paint for the dye, but there are 2 problems with that.  First, if it isn't super runny, it just clumps up in the PoP mixture and doesn't actually dye anything.. Second, you have to use a LOT of even the runny kind to dye the PoP, and it turned gloopy really fast and is taking a much longer time than the others to dry.  I will say this though, it is the prettiest, brightest chalk we have!  We used food coloring for the rest, and they turned out really nice, especially the Neon colors.

The blog I got the recipe out of said that hers took THREE days to dry enough to use, so I thought "ok, it is going to take about 3 days before it is nice enough to go out and play with the weather predictions right now."  Well, as you can CLEARLY see, it did not take three days to dry, it didn't even take three hours.  I think they were ready to come out of the molds within an hour.  Then, i let them dry a few more hours and rubbed the remnants of the cardboard tubes off the things of chalk.  Now I am just waiting to have a nice day to take the girls out to use their chalks.

Thankfully, clean up was not difficult with this and most everything ended up being trash.... which could be a problem since our trash men are on strike :/

Day 105: Chalk play

Today, I decided that because it was such a nice day, I wanted to get the kids outside for some play.  I thought that doing a project craft might be fun.  I have found a lot of recipes to make different kids of chalk and i've been planning on making chalk for awhile now.  With that, I thought that it would be kind of fun to give the kids (and us) a baseline as to what store bought chalk looks like.  So, this evening, I set the kids loose with the chalk bucket and here are their creations.  It will be interesting to see the difference in the next few days/weeks that we make our own types of chalk.

On a personal note, my heart goes out to Boston.  I live in an idealistic lala lands where I like to believe that these senseless acts of extreme violence are behind us, but it seems that every time I turn on the TV or the computer there is something else smacking us in the face that senseless violence is very much so a part of the world we live in.  While I know that there are many injured, and a few who have died from this, I feel that this could have been so so much worse.

Day 104: Birthday "Bonies"

Well, first and foremost, Happy 29th Birthday to my amazing husband!  We had an amazingly relaxing, laid back, fun day.  The first shower that took place in the house today was after 1 this afternoon.  We played outside some, the girls got to go to the park with Mike while I made dinner.  Now we are settling down for the night to play Xbox before bed :)

For Mike's birthday, the kids wanted to make him a cake, but at the last minute we decided to make him brownies.  We bought these amazing Ghiradeli (sp?) double fudge brownies with this amazing icing.  Iris asked if we could make those for craft today, so I was fine with that.  I have decided that "craft" in my mind is anything getting the kids doing something new/different and engaging them in something that is outside of their norm, and baking is something that I am always happy to embrace as the kids are interested.  

I love baking with boxed mixes with the girls.  Mainly because it is typically 3-4 ingredients, including the mix, it doesn't matter which way the are added, and I can easily pre-measure everything before we get started.  In today's case, i was able to let Penny add the mix and the egg and Iris got to add the messier stuff, water and oil, to the bowl.  They were each able to get a turn mixing, and were able to help me pour the batter, and possibly most importantly to them, lick the spoon in the end :)

Once the brownies came out of the oven, Penny was able to help me pour the icing on them, and Iris helped spread it out.  Then, they got to "decorate"  I guess they don't understand dispersing the toppings, because I gave them each 5 cups of "toppings" and they just took turns dumping all of the toppings into one spot on the brownies.  By the time they were done, we had a huge pile of sprinkles in the center of the brownies and and I had to spread out a bit before we could eat them.

But, they were so excited to make the brownies and Penny was absolutely ecstatic about getting to eat the "bonies"  She wanted them for dinner too :-p

Day 103: Homemade bubbles

So, this really isn't a "craft" but it is an engaging activity that both girls got a chance to do their own.  I really wanted to make sidewalk chalk, and i thought i had all the necessary "ingredients" but when it came time to make it, I realized that my recipe was for sidewalk paint, not chalk.  And since it was 43* and cloudy/rainy all day today, i didn't think that sidewalk paint would be fair to anyone.  So, I changed it at the last minute and we made our own bubbles.

It is a very easy process, 1/2 cup dawn, 2 cups water, 2 tsp sugar.  Now, i can't figure out what the sugar does, and I am wondering if i could have replaced it with corn starch to make the bubbles a little "stronger" like the Gymboree bubbles.  But, we did sugar in ours, and they worked well.  All you do is mix everything up, whisk it, and blow bubbles!

the kids had a BLAST.  We gave them straws to dip into the bubbles and blow bubbles with, they just stuck it into the mix and blew the biggest bubbles ever.  Our table was a soapy mess!  However, i think it is cleaner now than it has ever been :)

Mike took a few pictures, but he hasn't sent them to me, and I don't have the heart to ask him right now because he is fighting with his airplane.

Day 102: Finger Painting

Can you believe we are over 100 days into this craft thing, and I just now got brave enough to finger paint with the girls.  I mean, it is MESSY... and Penny..... and paint... and well, if you've read this blog in that past, that is enough said :-p  But today, apparently I was bitten by the Finger Paint Paper bug or something, and I broke down and bought finger paints!  I only bought 4 colors, but hey, that got us started.

So, we started with giving each of the girls 1 piece of paper, and 1 squirt of paint at a time.  At first it was kind of funny.  I squeezed the paint onto the paper and said "go ahead" and they both looked at me like I was crazy.  I could actually see the wheels turning in Penny's head: "do I dare touch this with my hands?!?!?" hehe.  But, once they got started, they both had a lot of fun, though they did insist on wiping their hands off each time we finished painting with a color.

The second paper we did was actually collaborative with the girls.  I set them across from each other, and we talked about colors.  I explained to them what primary colors were, and then I explained that when we mix primary colors, we get new colors.  So, we mixed red and blue first, and they were both so excited to see it turn purple.  Then we mixed yellow and red, then blue and yellow.  Then, they decided they wanted to paint the ENTIRE paper.  So this is what we ended up with... with no fighting!