Month: August 2011

Sunflowers!

Sarah Photography, Summer Fun

So. Not quite apples.  But Jenny posted pictures from a nearby sunflower field, and since I was feeling pretty guilty about not planting sunflowers for the girls this year we decided to take a drive to go find them.

They look like they're whispering secrets.
I love how they're all in different states.

Note that Anna spotted them first, and said “Look, I see the sunflowers!” but Carolyn and I only saw cornfields and dandelions.  Twenty minutes later, after driving all over the area and wondering how on earth we could be missing a giant field of sunflowers, we came back along that stretch of road from the other direction and spotted them.  Right where Anna had said they were.

The girls were impressed with the number of sunflowers!
Carolyn's taking a "sunflower shower"!
Anna and the sunflower.

Next time I’ll listen to the observant preschooler in the backseat!

How big are the sunflowers? So big!

It was a bright, sunny afternoon, which made for challenging lighting conditions – I mostly had to decide whether to underexpose the flowers or overexpose the sky – but I think I got a couple of great shots!

What a perfect day!
This bee was busy!

(At least we bought apples at the farmer’s market this afternoon.  Maybe we’ll try our hand at making apple butter tomorrow while we’re stuck in the house for a 4 hour window waiting for the guy to come clean & inspect the furnace.)

Flowers in the sunflower field!

Apple Cinnamon Ornaments

Sarah Kid's Crafts, Summer Fun

I found a slightly-expired jar of applesauce while I was cleaning out my pantry last weekend.  And then I found a recipe for Apple Cinnamon Dough (scroll down on that page).

If you don't count the glue, this could be delicious!

The kids had fun helping me measure and mix – there was a cloud of cinnamon floating about our heads the entire time.  The kitchen might never smell normal again!

Thick apple cinnamon dough.

We rolled it out and cut it with apple cookie cutters…and other fall shapes.

Roll it...
...and cut it...
...and poke it with a pencil...

The instructions said to leave them someplace to dry for days.  We’re not that patient, so I set the oven to 200F and put the ornaments on parchment paper-lined cookie sheets.  After 10 minutes, I flipped them over and baked them for another 10 minutes.

Oodles of ornaments!

They aren’t quite completely dried out, but they’re pretty close!  And they smell wonderful.  We might paint or otherwise decorate these later this week, but with a pretty ribbon strung through the holes they’d also be lovely and sweet smelling just as they are.

Stained “Glass” Apples

Sarah Kid's Crafts, Summer Fun

This week, in order to get us in the back-to-school spirit for next week, the theme is “apples”!

There are lots of fun projects to do with actual real edible apples, but it was too windy to go apple picking yesterday (we were worried we might wind up with apples falling on our heads, and we already know about gravity, thank you very much.)  So, since the current apple population in the house is rather dismal, we did a paper-y craft project instead today.  (We used the template, and loosely followed some of the directions, from this site.)

tissue paper + glue + wax paper = stained glass?

First we taped our template to the back of a piece of wax paper, then taped that down to the table.

Work surface ready to go!

I had the girls squirt glue all around the inside of the apple shape, then brush the glue around to fill it all in, going over the edges a bit.

Painting. With glue. Love it!

Then they tore up bits of red tissue paper and pressed them into the glue all around the apple.  A few pieces of green for the leaf, and a bit of gold for the stem completed the tissue paper piecing.

Carolyn carefully placed each piece of tissue...
...while Anna went with the quick method!

When they were finished with the tissue paper, I cut out the apple from the template paper, and traced it – right side facing down – on a couple of pieces of black construction paper.

Unless you want your pencil marks to show, flip it over!

The girls had wandered off to play by this point, so I finished cutting the traced apple out of the middle of the paper, then called them back to glue the frames on their apples.

A frame about to be glued on.

They look really pretty taped to a window!

Anna's finished apple.
Carolyn's finished apple.

First Sleepover

Sarah Growing Up, Milestones

Carolyn had a friend overnight last night for her very first sleepover!  The girls had a really fun time, and even let Anna in on their play now and then.  (Poor Anna thought that Simone had come over to visit her…I guess she’s pretty used to playing with much older kids!)

Three silly girls on a swing!

My Planets

Sarah Summer Fun

To wrap up “Out of this World” week, we went to the local planetarium to see “My Planets” this morning.  It was geared towards kids ages 3-5, so it was perfect for Anna and a bit young for Carolyn.  I think they both enjoyed it, though!

It's hard to take pictures inside a dome!
The girls aren't nearly as fascinated with the projector as I am!

After, we played with all the fun weather, laser, color and space-themed hands-on exhibits.

Fun with lasers! (And slow shutter speeds, too!)
Fun with light: yellow, magenta & cyan.
Look! Yellow + cyan = green sister shadows!
Blowing *gigantic* bubbles!

Glitter Playdough!

Sarah Kid's Crafts, Summer Fun ,

Jenny sent me a link to glitter dough several weeks ago, and it occurred to me that this would fit in well with this week’s theme.  Blue playdough + silver glitter = starry, starry night.

Not so blue, this Berry Blue flavor...

We started with “Berry Blue” flavored Kool-Aid – I used our usual playdough recipe.  That seemed a little greenish, so we added “Grape”.

Adding Grape doesn't seem to have helped much.

That looked a tiny bit bluer, so I cooked it.

But wait! After cooking it really is a nice blue!

And it turned out to be just about the perfect shade of blue.  I dumped a ton of glitter in it and kneaded it for a bit.

Lots and lots of sparkly glitter.
Oooh, shiny!

The girls had a blast playing with this stuff.  And although most of the glitter stayed put, they’re both a little sparkly.  They don’t mind one bit!

Blue glitter pretzel. Yum!
Galaxy-flavored ice cream, anyone?
A whole birthday party - cookies, ice cream & cake!

Planet Mobile & UFOs

Sarah Kid's Crafts, Summer Fun

We didn’t do our art project yesterday, so we did two today!

Carolyn included for scale.

First up: planets.

As usual, gather the supplies first!
Proto-planets!

My biscuit cutters came in handy tracing circles, and I was inspired by this post to make a couple of ovals for rings.  The crescent moons were mostly to use up as much cardstock as possible.

Well-used watercolors.

Then we broke out the watercolors.  I thought for sure the girls would want to glue bits of tissue paper on the planets, but they were happy to paint.  So we painted!

A red planet.
A green planet.
A plethora of planets, drying.

After the planets were dry, we punched holes in them and strung them up with crochet cotton, cut the fish lines off of our stick, and tied the planets in their place.

I love how this came out!

Now we have an “out of this world” door decoration!

"Mama, why are we using eggs?"

While the planets were drying, we made some UFOs.  I cut up an egg carton for the UFO tops, and then used mini cupcake liners for the bottoms.

It's like the man in the moon, if the moon were made of paper products.
These were green to start out with...
...so watercolors might not have been the best choice!

The girls painted these, and we let them dry with the planets.

UFOs, ready for assembly.

When all the bits were dry, we fashioned landing gear from chenille stems by cutting about 2″ from one end, bending it in half, and twisting it with the bottom inch of the remaining stem.  Then we stuck the stem up through the mini cupcake liner, then up through the egg carton piece.  (I poked a hole in the egg cup first so it wouldn’t tear.)

Landing gear down, ready for invasion!

We wound the remaining stem around bamboo grilling skewers.

Unidentified flying egg cartons...?

And now we have a fleet of UFOs hanging from our kitchen ceiling.  (Doesn’t everybody?)

Lazy pajama day!

Sarah Summer Fun

I’m feeling a bit under the weather (allergies? summer cold? does it even matter?) so the girls have watched a fair bit of TV today.  And now it’s after lunch and they’re still in their pajamas.  And when I tried to motivate them to get dressed and maybe do an art project, they whined about wanting to stay in their pajamas and watch more TV.  I guess one do-nothing day in the whole entire summer isn’t too bad.

At least I’ve been productive today – the house is clean-ish, the laundry is done-ish, and I got some shop newsletter related work done.

So, instead of craft project photos, I have some cute ones I took at the playground yesterday.  Enjoy!

Moon Sand

Sarah Kid's Crafts, Summer Fun

This week’s theme is “Out of this World!”  I had found some moon sand on clearance at Target, and thought it sounded like fun (and would be perfect for this theme) so I picked up a two-pack.

Is the moon really made of magenta and orange sand?

The verdict?

It's nice that there are molds built right into the lids...
We used paper plates to try to contain the mess.
Well, filling the molds was fun, anyway.
If you look at the shapes too hard they fall apart.

Not nearly so much fun as playdough.  The girls were pretty “meh” about this (though they were excited at the idea and the packaging) so after a little bit of trying to figure out what on earth we could do with our moon sand – it didn’t stay molded long enough to really build anything out of it – we gave up and went to the playground instead!  Now we know why it was on clearance…

Fingerprint Corn

Sarah Kid's Crafts, Summer Fun

To wrap up our “On the Farm” week, we made fingerprint corn.

Another craft project with minimal supplies.

This one was pretty simple.  I cut vaguely corn-like shapes out of white paper, something resembling leaves from green paper, and put a dollop of yellow paint on a plate.

A new take on "finger painting"!
Little fingers, little kernels.

The girls had different ideas of how much painting to do, so Carolyn wound up making a solid yellow corn variety while Anna’s turned out bi-colored.

Who says we need to just use pointer fingers??
Not much more room for fingerprints!

We had to wait for the ears of corn to dry, so we went out on the deck and shucked real corn for dinner.

Anna peeled one leaf at a time.
Carolyn was fascinated with the corn silk.
Fresh corn on the cob: the best part of August!

Including the corn, nearly every part of dinner was from the farmer’s market: new potatoes, eggplant, red pepper and green beans.  I love this time of year!

Glue *and* paint in one project? Heaven!
Some paint was still a little wet - but we glued it down anyway.

We had to wait until after dinner, there was so much paint on one of those ears of corn, but then we glued the ears of corn to a sheet of brown paper and glued the leaves on top.  It doesn’t look quiteas delicious as the corn we had for dinner, but it’s pretty cute!

Fingerprint corn, ready for harvest.