Painted Paper Snowflakes How-To

We tried a new family craft together as a celebration of winter. Making paper snowflakes is something my mama taught me when I was little, and we used to add glitter details to make them shimmer. Making paper snowflakes is now something we do as a family but with a couple of watercolor aficionados in the house, we added paint. Here's how to do this easy craft with your kids:

Paint white paper with blue and teal and purple watercolors (you know, all those great icy colors!) in whatever patterns you want:

Once it's dry, fold and cut up snowflakes as per usual:

We like to hang ours from the ceiling or tape them to the windows. Do you like to make paper snowflakes too? What do you do with yours?

Piles and Piles

Around here, we've been arting our buns off like crazy kooks! It seems like that spindly-legged kid of ours has caught our project passion and creating habit, which is good and bad. Good because making things is awesome! Bad because...what a mess! Her project piles gather on our couches, counters, piano benches, desks, fireplace, and floors, especially in high-traffic walkways:

We can't blame her for all the messes, though, because she most likely picked up on the busy project-making buzz surrounding our grownup shenanigans. We've been leaving our own piles of our creations everywhere, too.

While we do enjoy simple and somewhat tidy spaces, we also strive to foster creativity and imagination around these parts.  For us, that usually involves experimentation and not being attached to materials used to carry out our wild schemes. Also, it gives us a lot to think about when it comes to tradeoffs and sacrificing a clean home for the greater good.

What are some ways you embrace imagination and other good things that are messy?

Family Art Classes

That crazy kid and I spend a lot of time in the art studio, and I mean a lot of time every day. We draw and paint while we jam to our favorite records and discuss anything that comes to mind. Lately I've been introducing her to new ways of expressing herself and we've been playing around with different media and techniques. (It usually blows her little mind in the best ways! Love it!) I look forward to our daily art classes together!

Because I've been so busy getting things ready for the Beehive Bazaar, we've been spending even more time together in the studio than usual, and we both have the stacks of artwork to prove it. You can see more of my artwork on my business blog or on my Instagram account, if you'd like.

Arting together is some of my most treasured moments with my daughter, which have been even better than I imagined they could be when I was picturing motherhood before she was born. I love seeing how her imaginative little mind works and it makes me proud to watch her skills develop. It's nice to have an art buddy to get feedback from, too (even though it makes no sense most of the time...she is only three, after all).

What kinds of things did you most enjoy doing with your parents when you were younger, or what do you like to do now with your kiddos?

Kid Art- Monster Valentines

Because of the impending holiday, we spent an afternoon as a family constructing valentines for our daughter's classmates:

As with most of our mama-daughter art projects, this was a collaboration. I folded the card bases and wrote the inside phrase. She glued on the eyeballs, which she has a strange affinity for ("No, mom. We need three eyes on each valemtime, not two."), and left her John Hancock on the insides. Then she went through them all again and embellished her signatures just in case.

Each was laboriously glued and scribbled with love and attention to detail. They were personally assigned to individuals after much deliberation. P-dubs wanted to make sure that we included candy with each one mostly because that meant she had to taste test a few to make sure it passed her standards. Success!

Then, as if it weren't enough, we thought it would be funny to hold a huge extended family valentine exchange. So, we prolonged the art date beyond its natural limits and made a second set of valentines. Yet, we all survived, so it turned out to be worth it:

I recycled the idea but used a different set of scrap papers and silly monster embellishments instead of googly eyes. Pepper carefully placed the monster stickers on the card fronts, colored the heart in the sentiment, and wrote novels in every card. It was exhausting work for a tiny person, but she managed to power through and is so proud of her labors of love!

If you need a last-minute valentines idea and happen to have googly eyes laying around, the first set of cards could be a quick option (that is, if your child doesn't need to write a literary review on each card). Or, if you need a more grown-up version, you can see what I did here, for Feather & Fir.

Do you pass out valentines? If so, what were they this year?