Presents: Snowball Soap

The girls made two presents for their family this year. First we made Snowball Soap. This was a big hit. The girls absolutely loved making the snowballs. I guess the dough felt wonderful in their hands. Although the ingredients were only soap and water, Brian complained it was hard to get the soap out of the food processor. However the girls were easy to clean up.

Directions.

1. Grate up 3 bars of Ivory soap. (using the food processor)

2. Empty out and a a tablespoon of water.

3. Form into snowballs and snowmen and let dry.

The soap was a big hit with all the Grandparents and smelled great. Even Mabel wanted to eat it.

New from the Old

I have been reading lots of ideas about decorating stained clothing and I finally tackled one of Edith's shirts. I like how it turned out. I just stamped with acrylic paint and let dry. It was amazing how easy it is. I have another shirt in mind of Addie's that I think will get a different treatment.

Making Adelaides

Yesterday Addie informed me of her plan for the day. It included making cookies. She wanted to make chocolate chip of course. As I looked for the recipe I noticed one for Adelaides. I thought that would be fun to make Adelaide cookies, so we just substituted the chocolate chips for the dates and walnuts. They are delicious.

Fall Mosaics

Since we are in the process of moving I have been keeping messy art projects to a minimum. I decided that making mosaics would not drive me too crazy with mess. I drew a leaf and showed the girls how to glue down tiny pieces of cardstock inside the shape. I drew a leaf for Edith and then as requested a garbage can for Addie. We busily worked on our mosaics. Addie ended up requesting a second leaf one to "do right" because she basically just dumped the pieces onto her garbage can instead of placing them down. All in all a good project for all three of us. Edith really enjoys art projects and is pretty good at following instructions for them considering she is just shy of two. It is nice that she can participate in the same project as Addie.

Paper Bag Pumpkin

We got an art book out of the library. Addie chose to make a paper bag pumpkin. We stuffed some old newspapers inside a grocery bag and then let the girls paint. After it dried I drew some shapes on black paper and Addie cut them out and pasted them on to her pumpkin. I think it came out pretty well.

glue, paint, and yarn

I gave each of the girls some glue colored with watercolors. Then we painted and added yarn. Addie was skeptical but Edith thought it was fabulous. The top one is Edith's and the bottom, Addie's.

A Huge Mess avoided....Paste Painting

I found a neat idea for paste painting in Family Fun magazine. I managed to avoid any disasters even though this involved acrylic paint (not washable) and I did not let Edith do this project. Edith did her own painting project at the same time. Supervising two different painting projects did nearly drive me insane, but we got some good results. I also did this project in a cardboard box lid on a old table cloth.

Step 1: Boil 3.75 cups of water with 0.5 cups of flour and then simmer for 8 minutes. Let cool.

Step 2: Pour paste into several bowls (that you don't care about) and add dollops of acrylic paint. I found a little went a long way. We had tons of paste left over at the end. This could make at least 20 projects.

Step 3: Using a foam brush spread a thick layer of paste over the entire piece of paper. It is important to use heavy paper. I used some scrapbooking cardstock and a cut up cheerio box.

Step 4: Scrap the paste off with various scrapers. I used the sides and top of the cheerio box and made notches in them for the scrapers. The magazine also recommended using old credit cards with notches cut.

Step 5: Wait forever for projects to dry.

Gold on purple on green paper.

Addie did really well, but had to be encouraged to keep working spreading the paste. I had to teach her to use a light touch. On her final piece she suggested using two colors. It was hard getting the second color on top of the first so she said, "I will just glop it on." That method worked well. I also would grab the project out of the box to dry before she had a chance to completely scrape off all the paste. Addie loves to get her fingers dirty so on the last project she could not resist the urge to just smear the paste all over.

I think this would be fun on a really big piece of poster board. That way more experimentation could be done with the scraping.

This one is mine. I quickly made one before cleaning up. This is red and orange on white paper. Lots of fun.