Project: Paper beads

I came across two in-depth how-to's today for creating beads out of paper. The author of both tutorials, going by the name Crimefish on Deviantart, is an extremely talented artist. Her highly detailed pencil drawings are amazing to behold.

I would suggest this project for older kids, as it requires fine motor skills, lots of scissor usage and using nail polish as a varnish. My sisters and I greatly enjoyed making paper beads when we were kids. The way we made them was with one long triangle shape of paper. We just used glue and no varnish, which is why our beads probably fell apart so easily.

In the first, Paper Picture Bead Tutorial, you cut out colored paper to decorate beads made from printer paper.
The second, Paper Bead Bracelet Tutorial, shows you how to make colorful charms from magazine pages, and how to make a bracelet with the beads.

If your kids love making these, there are innumerable variations out there, just Google "Paper beads." You can also have a stockpile of beads to pull out when your kids are bored or want to do a fun activity with friends. We just kept our extras in an old plastic ice cream bucket. 

Project: Pasta Sculptures

You can do so much more with pasta than just gluing macaroni to construction paper. This project is a good example of a little prep work that yields some creative fun.

The Chocolate Muffin Tree (love the name!) has a lot of fun ideas (not just about art) from a creative mom of a preschooler. 

Happy Valentine's Day

To you, my readers! Thank you for spurring me on to keep being creative!

I made this with a class of kindergartners today. 

What a great way to celebrate Valentine's Day! 

If you're wondering, it's crayons and watercolor paints on cardstock paper. The holes, made with a paper punch, were for threading yarn through (which I didn't have time to do as I was helping smaller hands figure that out). The cool thing about crayons, they're what's known as a "resist." Watercolor paints won't stick to them. So you draw with the crayons first, then paint over the picture and the paint stays off your drawing. You can make some pretty cool effects with that. I was just playing around and showing the kids different things to try.
The drips on the upper left are also fun to create. You glob some very wet paint down and then blow really hard to get it to spread out.
There's nothing better than handmade Valentines.

Resources: Dough recipes

MaryAnn Kohl posted some recipes for various kinds of modeling dough (some edible!) from her book, Mudworks. Here's the link to four recipes you can try out, from Goop to Play Clay to Bakers Clay to Pretzel Dough. I'm a big fan of art you can eat, so I want to try my hand at the Pretzel Dough - it sounds tasty! :)

Video: Crochet Coral Reef

The "Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef" started out as a math experiment and has become a world wide art project. How cool is that? I first heard about the project from an article in American Craft Magazine.

What a creative way to get people thinking about the garbage that winds up in the oceans too. It's one thing to say, "There's a lot of plastic junk that gets dumped in the ocean, and that's not a good thing for the environment." People are going to think about that a lot more when faced with beautiful art made out of that same trash.