BUST
Well, here are the results from our first art project. Click here and here if you missed the pics from days 1 & 2. To sum it up, this project was a bust.
What was supposed to happen was that we'd end up with ice sun catchers to hang outside. What did happen was that I couldn't get the cups of water (used to make holes for the string to go through) out, and the sun catcher broke apart. See the picture below where Brie and Reese are holding up the pieces in front of the window.
Click here if you want to see how these were supposed to turn out and for the directions on how, in theory, to make these sun catchers :). I saw the idea in Family Fun magazine. There must be some way for this to work as the magazine people and at least 13 other families (according to the feedback section) had successful results.
I may give this another whirl on my own and experiement with different ways of successfully extracting the cup from the frozen catcher. I'm thinking oil around the cup might work or not using water to weigh the cup down, but use some sort of heavy object instead. Grrrr...I so wanted this to work, especially since it took three days to see the results!
The fun part of this project was teaching the kids about color mixing and they seemed to enjoy adding food coloring to the water. This was a little stressful to do with two boys under the age of 5 however, who are eager to get their hands on things. Stressful, because I had to prevent them from squeezing half the bottle of coloring into the water and from wiping their hands on their clothes.
If you do decide to try this, here are a couple additional thoughts: the directions for this project suggested using ice cube trays, but as you could see from the pictures in our other posts, we used mini muffin tins and plastic cups. Also, you'll want to make sure the pan of water you dump the colored cubes into is partially frozen (chop up the ice bits with a fork). Otherwise, the water melt a lot of the colored cubes and the colors run together).
Now onto today's real art project - string art...which resulted in a BOOM of finished art work.
Here are the three ar-tees-ts calmly working on their string art. See how nicely they are painting and how clean their work stations are. Picture perfect, c'est non?
Luke demonstrates how to paint with string...
Lest I leave you with the impression that Dave and I have somehow been blessed with children always follow directions and always keep their paint colors separated and never, ever get their area messy, here's a look at the kitchen after our art lesson. Notice, especially, the pictures on the floor, which were decidely not painted with string, but rather, with fingers, hands and paint brushes.
A pic of one of Brie's masterpieces and one of mine (created by gluing string onto paper and then painting the string).
Reese likes to immerse himself in his art and mix all his colors together:
Luke is more of a minimalist:
All in all, this was a great project for all the kids and washable paints make it a little less stressful for all the paint that gets on the fingers, arms, table, clothes, wall, etc.
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