Tag Archives: crafternoon

Tuesday Crafternoon: Cosmic Watercolors

Posted on May 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

crafternoon sign

Today at Crafternoon we made Cosmic Watercolors. It’s easy and really fun, and all you need are some basic household materials:

Liquid watercolor (or watered-down acrylic paints) in six or seven colors
Rubbing alcohol
Big paintbrushes
Pipettes or medicine droppers
Watercolor or paint paper
Little cups
Metallic paint
Q-tips

Completed cosmic watercolors

Completed cosmic watercolors

First, put three colors of liquid watercolor into separate cups. We used blue, blue-green and purple. These will be your background colors. In additional separate cups, mix a few tablespoons of rubbing alcohol with a squirt or two of paint to tint it. We found that some of the paint colors acted sort of weird in the alcohol (the pink ended up with a brownish layer on top) but it didn’t cause any problems. We made pink, yellow, orange and green alcohol.

liquid watercolor background colors

Liquid watercolor background colors

tinted rubbing alcohol

Rubbing alcohol tinted with liquid watercolor

Brush-paint your paper with the watercolor or watery acrylic. Cover the whole paper or close to it, and get it nice and wet. We used half-sheets of Strathmore paint-pad paper, because it’s nice and sturdy but less expensive then watercolor paper.

cover your whole paper with paint

Cover your whole paper with paint. Get it nice and painty!

Once your paper is colored with watercolor, load up your pipettes or medicine droppers with colored alcohol and drip-drop it all over your paper. The alcohol reacts with the water on the paper, pushing it around and creating “cosmic” effects. The wetter your paper, the more the paint will move around. A lot of the kids who did this activity went really wild with the rubbing alcohol. After they finished dripping it, we used paper towels to soak up the excess and reveal their cosmic creations. They were beautiful.

Drip your tinted rubbing alcohol over your paper using a pipette.

Drip your tinted rubbing alcohol over your paper using a pipette.

A drippy specimen

An especially drippy specimen

Blot up the excess paint and rubbing alcohol with a paper towel.

Blot up the excess paint and rubbing alcohol with a paper towel to reveal your cosmic watercolor creation!

After we mopped up the excess paint, the children added “stars” to their paintings by dipping Q-tips in silver paint and stamping them on their artwork.

Completed cosmic watercolors

Completed cosmic watercolors

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Tuesday Crafternoon: Watercolor Flower Gardens

Posted on May 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

Watercolor Flower Garden

This week at Crafternoon, we made flower gardens using watercolor crayons and watercolor pencils. Even the littlest ones enjoyed putting color on paper and watching it move when they brushed on some water … and, of course, blowing with a straw.

Here’s what you’ll need:

  • Watercolor paper or “paint” paper (we like Strathmore’s kids’ paint pad — it’s less expensive than watercolor paper but nearly as sturdy)
  • Watercolor crayons
  • Watercolor pencils (optional)
  • Water in a little cup
  • Brushes (a larger one for watering your grass, a finer one for adding details to the flowers)

Step one: Prepare your paper. We used Strathmore watercolor paper cut in half.

Step two: Plant your grass. Scribble hard all along the bottom inch of your paper with whatever colors of watercolor crayon that you’d like your grass to be. Use a lot of color! Most children chose green, but we had plenty of blue grass, yellow grass, brown grass and red grass, too.

Our favorite watercolor crayons, from Staedtler

Our favorite watercolor crayons, from Staedtler

Planting the grass

Plant the grass

Step three: Water your grass. Use a brush to apply big pools of water all over the areas you’ve colored in.

Watering the grass

Water the grass

Step four: Make your grass grow. With a straw held close to the surface of the paper, blow hard to move the water up the paper and create your grass and flower stems.

Make the grass grow!

Make the grass grow!

Step five: Add your flowers, and whatever else you’d like (birds, butterflies, sky, sun, etc). We used watercolor crayons and pencils for this as well, and encouraged the children to try different techniques. You can color on the dry areas of the paper then add water with a brush, dip your pencil or crayon in water first and then draw, or paint an area with clear water and then color on top of it. It’s all fun.

Add flowers to your garden

Add flowers to your garden

A finished flower garden

A finished flower garden

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Tuesday Crafternoon: Play Dough Color Factory

Posted on April 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

Today we made beautiful, colorful play dough at Crafternoon! Miss Susan mixed  it up at home using a recipe from My Montessori Journey, and added a light base color. Then the children added more color using Watercolor Magic paints, mixed in a little glitter, gave their color creations names, and took them home in cute little tubs.

A lot of the grownups asked for our play dough recipe, so here it is (courtesy of My Montessori Journey).

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1 tablespoon cooking oil

1 tablespoon cream of tartar

1 cup water

Food coloring of your choice (we used Kool-Aid to get our base color — one packet of Kool-Aid per 2 cups of flour)

Add-ins of your choice (i.e. spices, extracts, glitter, etc.)

Stir ingredients together well.  Just measure them into the saucepan you will be using to cook the dough, but mix them well before heating up the pan.  Over medium heat cook the dough, stirring constantly until it forms a ball.  (NOTE:  When it starts to pull away from the sides somewhat and clump together and most of the “wet-looking” parts look dry, it’s ready to remove from the pan.)  Turn dough onto a board (or the countertop) and knead until very smooth.  (NOTE:  It will be pretty warm to the touch, but try to knead it until it becomes a nice, smooth ball.  If it feels sticky, you can work a little more flour into it and it will be fine.)  Cool.  Store in a covered plastic container OR in a sealed ziploc bag. 

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Tuesday Crafternoon: River Rock Melties

Posted on April 3, 2012 | Leave a comment
Melted crayon on hot river rocks

River Rock Melties

Crafternoon: River Rock Melts

Today at Crafternoon we made River Rock Melties. We were inspired by this post at 5 Orange Potatoes.

This is a super-simple project, and we did it with about 18 children ranging in age from 3 to 1o+ over the course of two hours. They all loved it!

Here’s what you need:

  • Smooth rocks, fist-sized or larger. You might find these in your yard, or at a river, or even at a local independent garden center (that’s where I got ours, since we needed a bunch).
  • Crayons with paper removed. Tip: Crayola glitter crayons are awesome for this project!
  • An oven

Heat up your rocks until they’re nice and hot but not blistering (scary!). We heated them at 250 degrees for around 15 minutes, and they were perfect. Place them on a heat-proof surface (we spread paper towels underneath the rocks to keep the wax off our table) and draw with your crayons. Draw slooowly. Get it all melty. The slower you go, the meltier it will get. Aaaaah. Relaxing.

Crayon melted on hot rock

Melllllty

Crayon melted on a hot rock

If you hold your crayon still, it will melt and drip down the sides of the rock!

melting crayons on hot rocks

Melted crayon artwork

Miss Candace showed us how it's really done!

River rock melties behind the counter

Some of our River Rock Melties cooling behind the counter

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Tuesday Crafternoon: DIY “Lava Lamps”

Posted on March 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Today at Crafternoon we made our own “lava lamps!” We were inspired by this post at Come Together Kids, and by this how-to at Steve Spangler Science.

DIY lava lamp at Pufferbellies Toys and Books

bubble, bubble, bubble ...

This is an incredibly simple project, but really fascinating and fun to do. Here’s what you need:

  • Vegetable oil
  • Water
  • Food coloring (we tried liquid watercolor and it didn’t really work that well)
  • An empty water or soda bottle (16 or 20oz)
  • Alka Seltzer tablets

Simply fill your bottle about 3/4 full of oil. Mix water and food coloring together, then add this mixture to the oil in the bottle until it’s almost full — leave about an inch at the top. Watch the colored water make its way to the bottom. Then, break up a tablet of Alka Seltzer and drop it bit by bit into the bottle. Magic! We experimented with breaking the tablets into bitty little pieces and into bigger pieces to see which would make more bubbles.

We had about 20 children do the project over the course of 90 minutes. The youngest was about three, the oldest about 12, and they all really loved it. Since we were here in the store, I lined our table with paper towels and had the children work in aluminum roasting pans — just in case of a spill.

 

Tuesday Crafternoon at Pufferbellies - lava lamps

ingredients for DIY lava lamps

Ingredients: water, vegetable oil, food coloring and Alka Seltzer tablets

Dropping in the Alka Seltzer

Dropping in the Alka Seltzer

DIY lava lamps

bubble bubble, fizz fizz

Fun!

Fun!

 

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Announcing Crafter After Hours!

Posted on March 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

We’re pleased to introduce Crafter After Hours, our first-ever adults-only art event at Pufferbellies! You read that right; no kids allowed.

The idea for Crafter After Hours came when we noticed that the grownups who brought children to our weekly Crafternoon event were as interested (if not more so) than their children in the activities we were offering. We thought, why not do something for grownups only, so they can really focus on the project. And Crafter After Hours was born!

Our first Crafter After Hours is happening on Friday, April 13th at 7PM. For all the details and to register for the event, please visit our website. We’ll be making gorgeous art on ceramic tiles using alcohol inks. Create a set of tiles to use as coasters, magnets, or whatever you can imagine.

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Crafternoon: Watercolor Spray Paints

Posted on March 13, 2012 | 3 Comments

Today at Crafternoon, we made watercolor spray paint art. We were inspired by this post at Artful Adventures.

We started with watercolors in tubes (found at our local art-supply store), which we diluted with water in little spray bottles (found in the travel cosmetics section of a local superstore). Then, we used a variety of objects to mask areas of our heavy watercolor paper — string, crocheted lace doilies, metal washers, coins, plastic stencils, s-hooks, foam letters and shapes, etc. We sprayed and spritzed. When we got pools of paint, we picked up the paper to let the colors run, or blotted the pools with paper towels. Then we sprayed and spritzed some more.

The spray bottles were challenging for some of our younger artists (kindergarten age) to manipulate. Next time, we might try putting the paper on an easel so that the children can hold the bottles upright rather than pointing them down at the table. We’ll have to change the way we use our masks and stencils, but that’s OK.

Here’s a look at some of our masterpieces!

Watercolor diluted with water in travel-size spray bottles.

Supplies: stencils, coins, s-hooks, washers, wrapping paper, foam letters, etc.

We hung our artwork on the line outside to dry. Yay, 70-degree days in March!

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Microwave Puffy Paint at Crafternoon

Posted on March 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

Today we did a fabulous art project at Crafternoon — Microwave Puffy Paint! We were inspired by this post at Tinkerlab.

First we mixed up the paint: one cup of all-purpose flour, 3 teaspoons of baking powder, a teaspoon or so of salt, and water (about one cup of water for each cup of flour). We divided up the batter and stirred in color — some tubs got food coloring, some got Kool-Aid, and some got a mixture of both.

We poured the paint into squeezy bottles and squeeeeezed it out onto heavy-duty paper plates. When our designs were finished, we popped them into the microwave for 30-60 seconds, depending on the amount of paint on the plate. They puffed up beautifully and got a great texture. The ones with Kool-Aid sort of smelled like Pop Tarts! The ones with food coloring smelled sort of like pancakes (even better).

Here are some pictures.

Our puffy-paint ingredients

We mixed in food coloring and Kool-Aid!

After a couple of "explosions," we decided to duct tape the squeezy bottles closed.

We squeeeeezed the paint onto heavy paper plates. Even our littlest crafters (less than two years old) loved squeezing!

We microwaved for 30-60 seconds, and our paint puffed and got dry and beautiful.

Five-year-old Andrew's puffy paint masterpiece.

 

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