Day 94: Outside Crafting!

OMG!  It is April 4th and FINALLY we had a nice day.  Apparently, Mom was smiling down on the world today, celebrating her 57th birthday.  We spent almost 3 hours outside today, just playing, taking a walk, riding bikes, swinging etc etc etc.  It was so nice, that I decided to do craft outside.  Thanks to my brother-in-law, the wine drinker, we had craft today.

I have been trying to find enough wine corks to do this craft for 4 months now, and until last weekend, I had precisely 1 cork.  But, after last weekend, we were up to 7, enough to make our craft.  Until today, the only thing I had seen made with corks was fall trees.  But, I thought that since it was such a nice day, we would make flowers with them!

I used an old egg carton and filled it with paint, grabbed a few paint brushes and 6 of our wine corks and headed outside with some of our brand new finger paint paper.  Well, ok, acrylic paint isn't finger paint, but it worked well enough!  The girls and I sat down and painted.  Now, Penny, she wasn't so interested, so she put a few strokes of green on the paper and decided to go swing some more, but Iris did stamp for a bit.

Here are today's (and yesterday's) crafts!

Day 93: Watercolors

Can you believe we are 93 days into the new year and this is the FIRST time we've done actual watercolors?  We did ice watercolors early on in the year, but to ever just paint with specific watercolor paints, well, this was a first!  Iris does watercolors every week at school, but they do 1 color at a time, and they do the really fancy wet paper watercolors, so this was a new opportunity for her.  Penny had NEVER watercolored before, so it was new for her too.

I remembered why i hate watercolors as soon as we started.  They NEVER stay clean.  As in, when you deal with little ones and watercolors, they CONSTANTLY mix the colors!... especially in a 24 colored pack :/  it makes me want to twitch a little.

Penny found it much more interesting to color the water than paint on the paper.  Iris wanted to color the entire paper like they do in school.  She got almost all the way done, and then Penny spilled her water cup all over the table, quickly ending our watercolor painting excursion.

Day 92: Whoa, blogger change!

What the heck?  The layout of Blogger changed overnight!!! haha, oh well, same basic set up, just looks really different.

We had such a wonderful day today, I REALLY needed the fun that we had too.  For the last week, my life (and Mike's) has revolved around Coraline.  Making sure that she has meds on time, making sure her fingers are out of her mouth, making sure that she is taking enough fluids, getting enough food, etc etc etc.  Today, Mike's mom called and asked if we wanted to go to Lodi Outlets for lunch and shopping.  Part of me, was hesitant, but the "I need to do something fun" won out.  I loaded the kids up in the car and went down.  I have to say i am SO happy that I did!  Coraline was fine, she even napped while we were on the train.  But, spending the entire day out of the house really ate into craft time.  And, that left me coming home at 5:15, looking through my craft drawers for something to make.
The second drawer I opened i found these little stick things that Mike bought me for Christmas.  Even he told me at the time that he had no idea what we would do with them, but that he thought they were cute.  I figured with some markers, some foam stickers, and a few pom-poms and they could be a really fun craft for the girls.  Very personalized, and individual for them.  Something to really let their imaginations and creativity run free.
We used a TON of glue, but here is what we ended up with!  I think it was a great craft for the girls, it kept their interest and they enjoyed it.

Day 91: Coffee Filter Drawings

So, this craft was supposed to be a Coffee Filter Flower project.  Basically, take a coffee filter, color it with a marker, cut out a flower shape and spritz it with water so all the colors blend nicely.  But as they say, "The Best Laid Plans" We did color coffee filters.  But Iris was sooo meticulous with her drawings that I felt bad cutting it.  So, we just colored them, and then spritzed them with water to let them blend and bleed a little.  Here are some of the drawings we did:

Day 90: Happy Easter!!

Hope the Easter Bunny was good to everyone!  He sure was good to our family, in two houses even.  The girls were so excited.  I have really gotten into the holiday spirit this year, making multi-colored pancakes for every holiday imaginable!  Today was no different.  We started the morning with neon green, blue, pink and purple pancakes.  We spent the afternoon/early evening in Thompson with Grandma Lustig, Mike's parents and his sister and brother in law.  With dinner, we had a fruit salad with edible flowers, with which, craft was born.

Last weekend, we were going through boxes and boxes of stuff and I found frosty "laminate" paper that I thought "ohhh, that would be cool to make bookmarks with this fall.  Well, today, as we were leaving Grandma's house, I was thinking in overdrive to come up with a craft for tonight.. i am noticing a trend here, i am not planning as well as i used to be!... and as we climbed into the van, I thought "omg, flowers!" so I went running back to grab the edible flowers.

When we got home, I pulled the laminate sheets, a 12x12 white cardstock, and markers out.  I cut the cardstock into 2x7inch pieces with  my handy paper cutter from Christmas (thanks, Mike, again!) and let the girls at them with markers.  When they were done, we added flowers to them, and laminated them together.  After they went to bed, I added floss tassels.  Now i am wondering if the flowers are going to mold/dissolve, etc.  Time will tell, I guess!

oh, btw, the shaving cream flop eggs- here is a picture of them after i cracked them hahaha.  I guess it worked, just not on the shell! :-p

Day 89: Ama to the rescue!

So, we decided to go up to Great Grandma's house today, and I was thinking "ok, what kind of craft shall we do?" the entire time we were packing up, well, I never got around to gathering craft, and I knew I was going to be kicking myself for that.  But, then, as we were driving up, I remember my mother-in-law mentioning something about having a craft to do with Great Grandma.  So, I said a silent prayer to the craft god and made the 1 hour trek up to Thompson- the first of two Thompson trips this weekend.... i hope gas stations are open tomorrow, because my light has been on for at least 30 miles!

Well, conveniently, Ama did have a craft for today!  She had pretty purple, pink, and red beads as well as alphabet beads for the girls to string.  Each of the girls got a bit of cording, beads, and letters to spell their names and we let them go, stringing them as they saw fit.  Obviously Coraline didn't get to string beads, but Aunt Kathy made her a necklace.  Iris chose to make a bracelet with pink beads and managed to get IRIS in the right order but the R and S are backward :-p  Penny did really well making a purple necklace and managed to only string the E backward.

I THINK the crafts are in the van, but it is 10:02, I am exhausted to go get them and take pictures, and the Easter Bunny just showed up, so I think that is my cue to go to bed.  Hope everyone has a hoppy Easter tomorrow!

Day 88: Egg Dying SUCCESS!

So, after the major flop last night, I decided to give us a pretty sure fire success, and I bought WHITE eggs. I never buy white eggs any more, and because for some reason, only brown eggs are organic/free range/hand gathered/cage free/pasture raised, etc.  But, i sucked it up and bought a carton of white eggs today and I am SO glad I did!

We decided to make Kool-Aid eggs tonight, and they are GORGEOUS!  They are the prettiest, brightest eggs i have ever made!  We used lemonade, Cherry, Strawberry, Grape, Blue something or other, Lime and Orange Kool-Aide. So easy, so quick, and so fun!

We plowed through the first dozen eggs, so i grabbed the brown eggs, and we tried those, even they turned out pretty!

I loved the brown eggs because they looked so earthy, they almost had a wooden appearance to them.  They are absolutely beautiful!  Can you pick out the brown vs white eggs?

Also, the heart egg was Cs first ever easter egg, Mike held her and let her hold the egg (uncooked, btw!) and color on it a little with the white crayon, then he drew a heart on it and let C put it in the water.  omg, stressful!  But she did great, and she has a beautiful first easter egg :)

I guess here are the required things:

Solo cups
Kool-Aide
1 cup of warm water/color of Kool-Aide

Dissolve the powder in the water then dunk the eggs in.  the longer they sit, the darker they get.  That easy, and let me tell you what, the house smelled amazing!  Like a fruit salad exploded in our dinning room/kitchen :)