Spoonful of Imagination

Add it to a Family for Something Beautiful

Butterfly Nature Craft for Kids

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What is a better way to celebrate that spring is here with young kids than to do a craft together!? This butterfly nature craft is a perfect opportunity to have fun, get outside, encourage the imagination and teach new vocabulary with your young artists.

This multi step project allows you to prep a little and the artists to paint, explore, and design. It’s fun and I’m pretty sure it can keep your artist happily entertained for a WHILE! Let’s dive in…

The first step is to collect some cardboard.

Grab a cardboard box and cut it into a fun shape. We did a butterfly in this sample, but you could also keep it simple with a rectangle and turn that into a picture frame!

Divid the cardboard into sections with rubber bands.

Simply slip rubber bands onto your cardboard image to create some natural divisions in the design.

Painting comes next!

We kept it pretty simple with including only 3 tempera paints for our sample and a q-tip for each color. One thing with creating is we can control the mess by how many supplies we put out. Don’t be afraid to put out less.

It allows artists to experiment and try new things. Simplicity breeds invention. For example, we didn’t give purple paint. In the creating process, colors can be combined to make new colors and purple can be created with the colors we provided.

This paint project allows your artist to learn some new vocabulary.

  • They can paint by doing lots of dots to create a pointillism look. The goal is to collage each section of the butterfly with color to fill the whole image.
  • They can practice painting semetrical so the sides are identical or not- it’s up to their taste!

While the butterfly dries, your artist can go on a scavenger hunt.

Can they pick, find or cut small nature clippings like these:

    • dandelion
    • grass clipping
    • leaf
    • feather
    • stick

Once the butterfly is dry, your artist can stick the little nature clippings into the rubber bands on the butterfly.

This butterfly nature craft can be done or you can explore with more details and textures.

We added some circle stickers to help hold the natural elements in place and allow another texture to be in the project. Kids love stickers, right!? You can’t go wrong with stickers as a detail.

It is our hope that in each step of the project your artist can create, play and imagine the possibilities! There’s even a good chance that on the nature scavenger hunt, your artist starts playing organically outside. It’s a win-win.

If this craft sounds fun, but you don’t want to do all the prep- you are in luck. We have a few kits listed in our online store. You can jump over there and see if they are still in stock!

Have fun and get out and enjoy the blooming plants this spring season!

Celebrate Earth Day 2023 with your artist!

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I love teamwork. (**stay tuned to later in this post where I share Earth Day Craft kits for $1). In celebrating, Earth Day 2023 we can practice working as a team.

It can sometimes be overwhelming to work with others. We may feel like we get lost in the discussion or like we could handle things better, if we did it on our own. Yet, we have all been there, when the overwhelm and stress sneaks in from trying to tackle something too big solo.

We need one another.

There’s big issues like our planet that we literally can’t take on by ourselves. We need everyone working together as a team to help preserve our earth. This Saturday, April 22 is Earth Day.

Earth Day is an annual celebration that honors the environment and raises awareness of the need to protect the Earth’s natural resources for future generations.

These are all little changes to our habits, if we collectively do together, they can leave a big wake of change. Just imagine the possibilities! One of those above ways may be easier for you than the others. Lean into it!

For me, recycling and reusing trash is one of my favorite ways to give more life to already created objects. We can do so much with tools and resources that come into our home daily-rather than just tossing them out!

One of my favorite materials to recycle into something new are soup cans!

As an art instructor and mom, I know one of the easiest ways to have a conversation with a child, is to have a project that goes along with it.

It opens the door to have a tangible, physical element to refer back to.

Save your cans and use them in a craft with your artist this week to talk about Earth Day 2023!

If you need help, I have some pre-prepped cans with paint + yarn as a kit for just $1 each this week in honor of Earth Day. Snatch up your kits today!

Imagine the Possibilities with me!

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Imagine the possibilities with me for a minute! What is a way you LOVED to create as a kid?

  • Love playing outside and building forts with sticks and mud pies?
  • Come alive cutting and gluing paper?
  • Enjoy the heck out of painting free and big?
  • Play with blocks or legos for hours?
  • Was rearranging or redecorating your room the normal?

Chances are the way you enjoyed creating as a kid you will still enjoy today!

I know for me, growing up in a family of nine kids there were always DIY projects going on.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how expensive raising nine kids must have been for my parents. As my kids grow, it feels like it just keeps getting more expensive. Our oldest is learning to drive, and we all remember when we first caught wind of a brand we liked. Not just any pair of shoes always works anymore. I know my parents had to be thrifty to make our world work because I was so blessed and never went without. Being resourceful has been modeled for me.

I remember when my parents expanded our house. With nine kids, we outgrow the size house we had. The addition brought saw dust and scrap wood components to our lives. To this day, I still enjoy working with scraps.

Art doesn’t have to be expensive. We all have little things that we can reuse. For me, wood scraps has always been something I used, so to this day, I save them. The texture, possibilities of small pieces, and options of several things coming together to make something new is something I have always loved. Wood is a great material for all of those things to happen in the creative process.

Now, it’s no secret that I love to create in LOTS of ways. But, for many of us the ways we created as young kids can still be enjoyed years later or maybe the way we choose to create changes as we change.

Do you remember how you love to create? Has it changed?

Let me encourage you to imagine the possibilities.

Imagine trying that childhood creative process again that you loved so many years ago. Or, if you know of a new way you love to create imagine how you would feel if you took thirty minutes to do that activity this week?

We both know that your heart, mind, and soul will be better for that time of being FREE and using your hands.

I miss encouraging others in their creative process. It’s been a year, since we decided to close our art studio. So, as I was playing with some wood scraps, I dreamed up a kit with a lesson that I could share with all of you. If you need an extra nudge to get creative and imagine the possibilities, join me for this LIVE class one week from today. I will walk you through using these wood scraps to create a playful wood mobile. There will be a replay video, so if you miss the live. You can watch the tutorial replay back at a more convenient time.

Snatch up your kit to let me encourage YOU and your creative process. We will paint. Playing with order and design will definitely happen. Yarn will be wrapped. Of course, we will celebrate options and diversity. It will be so fun!

My hope for those that snatch up this creative kit (and for you on your creative journey) is that after playing with new materials and tools you feel a little more empowered in believing in yourself, knowing you can make good decisions, and trusting that how you think matters.

The creative process is a window into what’s going on inside us.

We find that inner discovery in playing, and pulling out of the expected. Keep playing. Keep creating. You never out grow the need to create.

 

The Perfect Collaborative Art Party Game

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Do you have an artist who loves to create with friends! It’s my bet that he/she would LOVE this collaborative art party game!

Over the years our art studio was in business, we hosted hundreds of birthday parties. We found that even after the individual projects were done- the artists would want to keep creating. We always had a coloring station, magnets and play-dough available, but we quickly became known for this fun art game that we held at the end of each of our parties.

We would play an art version of i-spy

Have you ever sat in a restaurant or a doctor’s office and needed a way to entertain kids, while they are waiting? I-spy is a classic game and one you have probably turned to in a moment like that.

Kids get into it and have fun-without even realizing you may just be making the most of some idle time. It’s fun. It forms a connection and you learn a lot about how your child thinks, what he/she notices, and enjoy each other’s company in the process.

We would create a recycled art collage to use for our art version of i-spy. If you want to learn more about how we created this collage, you can view the 5 Reasons Why Creating With Trash Matters post or this quick video lesson from Erica.

How to play i-spy as an art game

I always demonstrated a couple of rounds of leading/playing i-spy first. The idea is you call out things you spy, and they can only be on the i-spy board. The importance is to have a creative collage that is full of different items to make a well rounded, entertaining game. A few idea categories to think through and call out as you play…

  • shapes
  • colors
  • item’s uses
  • item’s location
  • funniest

After I did a few rounds, I would let any artists who wanted to think of one to call it out. If everyone was excited to call an “i-spy” item out, we would just take turns going around the table with everyone getting a chance.

We would play this for as long as kids were really interested. Want to see this game in action? I convinced two of my kids to play with me in this video, so we could demonstrate it to you! They are getting a little old for it, but once they were playing, they still had fun!

Paint that i-spy board

When the fun in the i-spy game is winding down, you can breath new life into the game by allowing the artists to paint the board together! We always just gave out the leftover paint from individual projects and each child a brush. We tried to encourage that teamwork happens in art too. They could each start by painting what stood out to them.

It was so fun to watch the artists paint such unusual items. They’d paint in the items, on the items, around the items and get to see how the paint moves, absorbs, and takes to each item.

We use tempera paint, just in case paint gets on clothes, as hands start reaching. I promise you will know the moment the game is ready to end. You simply say, “on the count of 3, it is time to end and then brushes need to be placed down. 1-2-3 brushes down!” and then it’s time to wash hands. Your artists run off laughing and talking about the fun they just had.

It’s not everyday that artists get to paint a bottle cap, straw or broken shell. Let alone do it with friends after talking, studying and playing i-spy with those items. This i-spy game really is the perfect collaborative art party game. From creating the i-spy board to playing with it and then painting it, you breath a lot of extra life, engineering and fun into those recycled materials.

Sometimes the birthday child would want to take his/her collage home and sometimes we would share the picture and kindly toss the piece.

Isn’t that the beautiful thing about the process being the focus of creating and playing in the arts? If the focus is to have fun, play, and learn as you go then there is no pressure to save the final product. It can just be tossed!

I hope this game inspires you to play a creative art game at your next party or artist has a slumber party. If you need a little extra encouragement, check out this 5 minute video demonstrating a game in action. Let me know, if you try this fun!