Day 111: Nature Rubbings

I remember in 3rd grade, we did a local history unit and went to the Old Worthington Cemetery and did gravestone rubbings with crayons.  It was a little creepy to me, even at 9 years old, that we were making impressions of tombstones in crayons.... but, it was a fun activity.  A few days ago, when we were outside coloring the driveway, I thought about how fun it would be to go outside and make rubbings of different objects with crayons.  Well, today, I thought it was warmer than it really was and the kids really wanted to go out, so I threw so coats on us and we went outside with paper and crayons.

First, it was sunny, and the wind was calm, so we started at the driveway and used our crayons to make an impression on the paper, then we went to the neighbors fence (hope she doesn't mind that it is a little browner now than before we started this project :-p), then went to the brick below our porch, then the house, then the neighbors tree since it is the only tree around us now!

Iris really got into it, she had a lot of fun and got the point.  I wanted to use some stepping stones, and kind of a take a walk and find more things to make impressions with, but Penny started to complain that she was cold, the wind was ripping, and Coraline's feet were just about frozen, and I was cold.... so, we came inside.  Here is what we ended up with:

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.