Spoonful of Imagination

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Recycled Candlesticks From an Old Toy!

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recycled candlesticks

Do you have a hard time throwing some things away? There are lots of things I don’t think twice about. Clothes, pillows, dishes are few that I don’t blink an eye at. Maybe one of those are the thing that’s hard for you? For me, I definitely have a hard time throwing wood things away.

Wood seems timeless. It can be painted, stained and built onto and is such a sustainable product. Recently, my Jeremiah was cleaning out his closet and found this wood marble run toy. He didn’t want it anymore, and I kept looking at it thinking there has gotta be something I can create with this old toy!

I looked at the size of wood. They were perfect fun, block size pieces.

I looked at the texture. They were smooth, already sanded, sturdy pieces.

As I stared at the pieces, I realized I could turn them into a recycled candlestick holder.

Recycled Candlesticks Make Fun, Quirky Decor!

I found a wood circle in our garage to be a bigger base and gave that a quick sanding. I then added a little superglue to hold the pieces together and let them dry. I had so much fun moving the pieces around to see what size and angle I wanted them to be. The candlesticks looked really pretty just left as wood, but you know me. I love color, so I added some acrylic paint to jazz them up a bit.

After the recycled candlesticks were dry, I was ready to display them and enjoy! I love mixing homemade decor into our home. These added a fun element to our kitchen table.

recycled candlesticks made from an old toy

I love how they look in my office too, so only time will tell on where they officially end up. How fun are they!? I made something new from something that was almost just trashed or donated away.

My favorite ways to get creative are often to use something that is not expected. I like to use things we wouldn’t find in a craft store.

Being creative is just a process of pairing ideas.

recycled candlesticks

The Creative Process Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive.

We all have things we can repurpose and reuse to make something new.

One way to see things in a new way is to make sure our tanks are full. We can’t be operating on fumes, lack of sleep, deprived of things that bring us joy to have eyes to see things differently. It takes space to have energy or margin to think differently than our auto pilot normal.

That is the most expensive part of the creative process. It requires us to be more whole to think creatively.

recycled candlesticks

I am so excited about my new recycled candlesticks. Now, my mind is going trying to think of other things that would make great candlesticks. Fall is a great time to light some candles to bring some warm and comfort inside as the world is getting colder on the outside.

So, do you have something you can look at with new eyes and make something different out of it? If you need help with this, join us in my 30 Day Imaginative Journey. We are practicing small, quick exercises to get us thinking and practicing growing our creative muscles! Download your free calendar here!

Check out what my Reagan made for her Halloween costume out of trash, which was from one of the imaginative prompts!

Fourth of July Preparation -with kids!

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Do you love to celebrate the seasons with your artists by creating? Letting your artists help “decorate” is such an empowering, confidence building gift to invest in your child!

It is also such a fun way to talk about the upcoming season, by creating together. We designed this project to be all about the process! So, you can have fun being together, as you do all that!

Splatter, drizzle, squeeze, and pour paint to create your one of a kind Fourth of July centerpiece. Use it to hold candles or stick silverware in it for a utensil holder in the buffet line. There’s so many possibilities, when we use our imaginations!

What started as a phone call from Matt saying, “hey, do you want any of these old bricks?” led to such a fun process art paint project! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

If you don’t have any old bricks on hand, I know you can get some at a hardware store for less than $1.00 each. Here are some basic supplies to get you started. Please feel free to use what you have, or if you are local, you can pick this kit up in our shop as well.

Supplies:

brick (with holes)

paints

paper cup

stirrer (like a popsicle stick)

pipette

tea light candles (optional)

Once you have all your supplies out, you are almost ready to have some fun! You might be able to tell that I laid some paper down before I started painting. This project can get a little messy, so protect your surface. I also used washable Tempera paints. That means this centerpiece can’t stay outside for forever. The rain will wash our beauitful colors off, but it also means if paint splatters somewhere unwanted, it will come off too. Once you are set up, you are ready!

1. Splatter

Every kid loves to splatter paint. Use the popsicle stick or any stick you might have to scoop a little paint up and flick it onto the brick. It creates fun splatters of globs and some strains of stringing paint. I love the mix of amounts that get placed and that you can’t really control the outcome. It’s freeing!

2. Drizzle

This is a little bit slower of a technique then the splatter painting. As you scoop up the paint with the stick, you let it slowly fall off the stick, so it creates like a drizzle effect as you move your hand around. This has a bit more control as you can determine how much paint falls in a particular area before you move your hand -thus, moving the paint! I tired to aim for the areas that the dark blue paint didn’t get splattered.

3. Squeeze

Pipette’s are such a fun little tool to paint with! You can also use a small syringe, baby nasal aspirator, or pool toy that does the same technique of sucking up liquid! I used a small paper cup with a little water in it to pour some of my paint in on top. I then used the pipette to stir the water + paint mixture to create a more runny, liquefied paint. The pipette then sucked up that newly created paint and I got to spray it wherever I wanted.

Again, this can be a more controlled painting step then the splatter paint. It depends on how high in the air you squeeze the paint. Play around with squeezing it low to the brick verse about 2 feet high. Talk about aim and the different effects the height had.

4. Pour

How often do you just get to pour paint!? It’s not something that happens a lot as it can be considered “wasting”. I would argue that it is also a freeing step that gives a different look and teaches things like spacing, managing, and control. Pour a little paint and watch it drip down the sides of the brick! it can be mesmerizing!

5. Dry

This might be the hardest step! After layers and layers of paint, the newly created decoration is going to take some time to dry. It might test your young artist’s patience. That’s another valuable skill to invest in! Try to not touch the brick, while this important step happens. It helps if the brick sits in that hot June/July sun to dry more quickly!

6.  Decorate and enjoy

Once your newly created centerpiece is dry, you are ready to enjoy it! Place tea light candles it for a fun decoration or use it as a utensil holder in the buffet line!

We know your artist will get so excited explaining how he/she made it to all your Fourth of July visitors!

Have fun and embrace the process! The best part is this was hopefully a really fun memory with your artist. The second best was it was also really cheap. Throw the brick out after the holiday and create a new one next year! There is no need to store it.

Just get creating memories and fun!

DIY Painted Journals

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Do you ever find yourself needing just a safe, inexpensive way to play?

With everything going on in the world right now, it can be hard to go places. We can create fun at home by creating in our home.

This past week, I found myself analyzing the fall, plans, what to do, how to move forward and it was all real heavy when you mix in COVID-19. I bought some notebooks and just started painting for no reason other than I needed too. It was a safe place for me to play, experiment and enjoy the creative process.

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” -Neil Gaiman

With back to school shopping happening, composition notebooks are only about $0.50 each right now. What a cheap canvas! I bought eight notebooks, gave them a quick spray paint to have a blank canvas and got started just brushing them with big bold strokes of  acrylic paint.

I played with colors mixing, making subtle blends, and big bold blends. It was so fun and satisfying to squirt paint directly onto the notebook and to just start brushing and watching that paint move. I played with directions, pressure of the brush, and the amount of paint. It was therapeutic to play with colors I love and stretch myself with new colors.

I loved having eight notebooks to do at once. It allowed me to keep going and not having to wait long periods for a base coat to dry before I painted more. Once all eight of my first coats on the journals dried, I came back and added some more concrete brush strokes on top of my abstract blends.

I loved picking contrasting colors and create movement that went against the other brush strokes. The final step was stamping some circles and squirting some runny paint on top. The mix of all these colors, layers, and different techniques blended together to create some fun abstract notebook covers.

What do you think? Will you pick up some composition notebooks next time you are at the store? I had so much fun creating these covers that now I am continuing on in them! I love art journaling and after leading some art journaling workshops at the beginning of quarantine, I realized one of my favorite parts of journaling is creating base coats like these.

Doodles, words, collages, poems, paintings, and special notes look amazing on top, but they are also pretty fun just like this!

Have you art journaled? If you haven’t, you may just love it. It is one of my favorite ways to rest and process the world around me!

Do you have a student a little nervous to walk back into a new school year? Maybe painting their notebooks for school might help in the excitement and also open up an opportunity for you to talk and process it all together.

I hope you can find sometime for YOU to create, breath and rest, as you also process the world around you! We are in this together! If you try these paint techniques on some inexpensive notebooks, I would love to see them! Please find me on social media!

Instagram: @ericadeuel

Facebook: @spoonfulofimagination

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Create your own inexpensive foliage!

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Are you ready for spring?

I don’t mind the winter, as long as there is snow and it’s pretty! Sometimes the pretty is just the trees’ silhouette outline on a colorful sky, since we haven’t had as much snow this winter. There have been a lot of gray, wet days. It has me itching to bring back color, so the other day, I took down all the winter decorations at our art studio and started creating some spring ones. Let me show you how I came up with my foliage!

As the founder of a non profit art studio, we get a good amount of local craft donations from other artists or businesses in town. Recently, we got some fabric samples from a home designer and it got me thinking if I could turn those into some inexpensive green, spring foliage.

I loved how there were different patterns, texture of fabrics and shades of colors. I started by cutting about 3″ long leaves. I didn’t measure or worry about the exact width or shape. This is a great activity to do during a movie or couch lounging one night.

Once I had a huge stack of leaves, I simply started hot gluing and folding them around some wire stems.

You can use whatever wire you have or you can pick some up in the craft floral section at your local craft store like I did. I added a dab of hot glue on the wire and kind of folded one end of the leaf around it. I don’t have any pictures of this step, but if you look closely you can see what I am saying.

I worked in about 3′ long pieces of wire and made a stack of this foliage as I went. I made 8 separate pieces, but you could make as many as you wanted. I intended for my foliage to hang like a garland, but you could create yours on dowel rods for a sturdy base to stick in a vase as well. There are lots of possibilities!

I love how the fabric creates a soft leaf and foliage look. It really makes it more believable by how it moves and does not have a harsh fold. I took my foliage to the studio and hung it down in our faux fireplace.

I love the natural, yet creative pop of inspiration it gives in the space.

It was a perfect way to add some spring decorations in an inexpensive way to our space. What do you think?

So, are you ready for spring? Or, do you want to will it into existence by creating spring looks too?

Creating doesn’t have to be expensive. Use what you have. If you have some old green Christmas decorations, you can cut that up for some leaves. Do you have some green shirts with a stain? You can use that too! On those little leaves, you can’t tell where they came from or what they use to be. When they are all strung up together though, they create a beautiful look!

Have fun and imagine the possibilities! If you create some inexpensive foliage, tag us on Instagram or Facebook so we can see!