Yesterday morning was rainy and crummy. My daughter wanted to do a project, “I’ll go in my room and when you think of a project for me say ding-a-ling-a-ling.” so I came up with this (rain on a rainy day: my creativity knows no bounds). I cut out a raindrop shape for her to trace and my son was in charge of the tape. She wanted to make a rainbow, because where there is rain there are rainbows, and my son made a sort of deconstructed rainbow (up there on the right). He also wanted to know where the umbrella was, so we made one of those too.  Now that it’s sunny, my daughter wants to know when we are going to make the sun.

If you have kids and don’t know about kids craft weekly, well you should.  I’ve subscribed to their newsletter for quite some time, but I’m embarrassed to say this is the first project we’ve ever done from it.  When we do art my kids are pretty happy with the process and not too interested in the result, but recently that’s changed.  These two projects are both from the 5 minute craft issue. And really with a 2.5 and 4 year old all crafts should be 5 minute crafts. The owls were a great for learning to cut more precisely (for the 4 year old) and to work on getting better with the scissors (for the 2.5 year old). The bean project was awesome (draw something with glue and have the kids put beans on the glue–easy peasy) and my daughter has requested we do it everyday since. They started off just doing letters, but wanted to pictures as well: pumpkins and beans (ha!) and smile faces (as they call them).

I think that is actually my owl. If you want to see the boy’s owl (grandma) it’s here.

Today is Monday, so my daughter and I had a little crafty time together.  I wanted to try making a collage with contact paper for a while now.  She’s only just 2 and she hasn’t quite mastered the glue stick yet. We gathered our supplies: contact paper, tissue paper, leaves and twigs we picked up on a walk, and fabric scraps.  We slapped everything down –well, I arranged mine–on the sticky side and then put another piece of contact paper (sticky side down) on top of it all. It looked like this:

Then I cut out leaves and taped them to the window.  I think this is a good craft for the toddler set.  Tearing paper and sticky things are pretty exciting to my daughter so this project actually held her interest for a while.  Contact paper isn’t all that sticky, so the tissue paper worked best.  But if you are crazy like me and save the tiniest scrap, well they work too and I think thread would look nice.  Leaves work if they’re pressed (ours weren’t) and you get leaves in leaves at the end, which is exciting only to me.  You could, of course, cut any shape out: turkeys, christmas trees, vacuum cleaners, whatever.  When it came time for cutting, my daughter was already on to other things, but 10 quiet minutes is pretty huge.

Inspired by good + happy day’s week of organized activities, I declared Monday “making day.” I’m afraid it stops there though–I just don’t have the follow through for everyday to have a planned activity. But I always wanted to be that mom that lets her kids go crazy with art, screw the mess. But then I became a mom. And it involves a lot of mess: dirty dishes, dirty laundry, dirty diapers, dirty hands, dirty faces. So much of everyday is cleaning babies and things that it’s hard to start something that you know will make yet another mess. My daughter just turned 2 and she needs some more art making in her life and I need to say screw the mess a little more. So this morning we made potato prints: she watched as I cut the shapes out of the potatoes (“star! star!”), dipped them in the paints, and kind of got the hang of stamping, but somehow painting the potatoes was more fun, as was painting her arm and her hands and her belly, but really it wasn’t more than soap and water couldn’t handle. And there you go. Art.

If you’d like to join in Making Mondays (or any day really) do! Comment and tell me what you and your littles make together. Or make a date for next Monday.