How to Make Thrift Store Shirts Super Cute...

Embroidery, of course! Can you tell that I'm on an embroidery kick lately???
Since we are planning on starting EC from the beginning with Little Kicker (as opposed to 10 months old which is when we started with O), I realized that we need more t-shirts to make the process a little easier. I found 3 t-shirts at the thrift store for about 50 cents each. The embroidery patterns are from Wee Wonderfuls.















These t-shirts were SO quick to embroider. I completed 2 of them in the car on our way to our Memorial Weekend destinations :)

Homemade Sidewalk Chalk

It is SO easy to make homemade sidewalk chalk! You need 1 cup of plaster of paris, 1 cup of water, and powdered tempera paint.


 
Mix the ingredients together.



Pour the mixture into a mold. We used our insect molds, the plastic container that Buddy came in, and the flower mold that we used to make chocolate flowers. The molds don't lay flat (I guess I should have realized that), so we spilled a lot of the mixture during this process :)
Let your chalk dry for at least 24 hours, pop it out of the mold, and have fun!!! O loved drawing on her gigantic outdoor chalkboard :)


 

Hard at Work

O has been spending A LOT of time at her art shelf lately. She loves Pottery Barn Kids catalogs because there is a doll in there that looks like her baby doll, Emma. She enjoys cutting the magazines and gluing the pictures on top of each other. She glued about 10 pictures one on top of the other and was SO proud of her creation. She immediately hung it up on the refrigerator!

Magnolia Leaves Crown

When I called to check on O while I was at work on Friday, my mom told me that O was really enjoying playing with Magnolia leaves. I suggested making a Magnolia leaf crown, and they did! O calls it her "marrying hat" because she loves to pretend to get married. (She also gives birth to multiple babies each day!)



To make the crown my mom cut a piece of cardboard to fit around O's head and stapled it into a circle. She then stapled Magnolia leaves all around the cardboard circle. It doesn't get any easier than that!

An After Easter Art Project

I decided after Easter that I would really like to have O paint a wooden egg each year to have as special Easter decorations. She was not interested in using brushes and only wanted to use finger paint. She thoroughly enjoyed painting her egg. She said that the paint was soap and she was giving her egg a bath :)







She really enjoyed the sensory experience of squishing the finger paint in her hands, and I learned that tomato trays make great finger paint trays!

Bendaroos

A reader sent us a pack of Bendaroos to play with and then review a few weeks ago, and we've been playing with them ever since!

The set comes with over 500 pieces of wax coated strings (very similar to wikki stix) that can be used for open ended, creative play. A design booklet comes with the set, but I found the designs in the booklet to be frustrating and difficult to replicate. Obviously, they were impossible for O to replicate (since she's only 33 months old!), and she was not at all interested in even looking at the booklet. She loves to make abstract sculptures and shapes. In this picture, she is making a "flower."




O was THRILLED when I suggested using the bendaroos in conjunction with her sandpaper letters, and she immediately chose the blue pack of bendaroos (blue is her favorite color).




We also decided to make even more letters and shapes with the bendaroos using her pipe cleaner letters. This kept us occupied for a while!




O also LOVED cutting the bendaroos with her scissors. The bendaroos are definitely going to make learning letters, words, and shapes more fun. I also think they are great for making 2d pictures and abstract 3d sculptures. However, we will skip the design booklet ideas :)

Shaving Cream and Food Coloring Art

I've seen this art activity on several blogs and in several different art activity books, and I've wanted to try it with O for a while. We finally had a chance to give it a try on Wednesday, and we had so much fun!

First I sprayed shaving cream on a cookie sheet, and O spread it around with her fingers. Then she chose several different food coloring colors and squeezed the food coloring onto the shaving cream. She swirled it around with her fingers.




She placed a piece of cardstock on the shaving cream and food coloring mixture and pressed down gently.



 We then scraped the shaving cream off of the paper using her scraper from her window washing kit.







Here are our masterpieces!

Contact Paper & Tissue Paper Collage

After the success of O's recent texture collage on contact paper, I decided we'd try a tissue paper collage again( we did this about a year ago and had lots of fun). In order to set this up, I had to move O's texture collage...

I had no idea what I was in for! Just a little advice...if you have a 2 and half year old who is totally immersed in her sensitive period for order, has had 4 days of disrupted naps and bedtimes due to a vacation, and it's 9 o'clock at night, don't move her artwork! O was DEVASTATED that I moved her artwork! I felt bad about it, and she eventually calmed down and we came to a solution that we were both happy with, but wow! If I'd known how devastating this would be, I would have waited until she was asleep to move it (she wouldn't have minded first thing in the morning after a good night's sleep).

Phew! Anyway...I taped 2 sheets of contact paper on the sliding glass door, 1 for O and 1 for my niece. Today while my sister and I were fixing lunch, I gave them a bag full of leftover tissue paper and told them to tear and place the paper to make a collage. They really enjoyed themselves, but O left her artwork before she covered her paper completely, and M took over! She was really into this activity!

Easter Bunny Handprint Cards

O, M, and I made Easter Bunny cards for their grandparents today. We had lots of fun, and the cards turned out really cute. I love handprint art, so we used their handprints to paint the bunnies. I let them each choose a color and a color of construction paper. Then I painted their palms, their pointer fingers, and their ring fingers. We pushed their palms onto the construction paper to make the bunnies.





After the paint dried, the girls glued on googly eyes and beads for a nose.








M drew her whiskers and mouths on her bunnies, and I drew the whiskers and mouths for O. This was fun and easy!