Dawn Doran

Well, we made it through 3 days of the first week of school before the kids were sick… One EVILVirus and one with THE STREP.   WOW.

That being the case, the long holiday weekend was a little more laid back than originally day-dreamt.  Today we had a bit of family art-making, messing about with all kinds of paper-crafting.   I am excited have a bit of art with Jimmy in the works and having to do with said paper crafting.  In the meantime I have been thinking a lot about making things.  A LOT of things.  I’ll share it all, I’m good like that.

To start with, the girls made these pretty cool “personal ornamentation racks”.  They started with a double layer of cardboard, taped and paper mache covered.  You can see that Rosies has a custom hairband holder, made from a paper towel tube and some scraps.  After the mache dried, they were painted and cuphooks added.  WA-LAAAAAH! Function and form combine for lovely moderne art and jewelry display!

Pretty clever poppet-work.

MORE GOOD STUFF TO DO WITH A BOX. ( or a few)

Then the little drew up some plans for a dwelling. 

You see, when Marigold was the little, we built her this really magical tree house one year….

It’s gigantic.  It has load of little furniture and irresistible miniature goodies plus fairies like these to go with it–

Rosie is permitted to play with these, but you know how it is to be the second sibling…  There are lots of clarifying questions like ” These are HERS, right? … But is this one MINE? …replay.)  Hereby, I am going to do my best to remedy the imbalance of fey real estate.  Today I began the construction of The Taj Mahal of toadstools for the recently completed gnome family to inhabit.  A sort of tutorial will follow along with it.

Here is phase one.  It’s not going to look like a whole lot at the end of this, but have faith and patience.

Gather up:

A bunch of boxes

a box cutter/carpet knife

a LOT of masking tape

The first step is to have a plan.  You might want to draw up a road-map, or if you are a cowgirl-art-mama like me, you just start making shapes and know that you have LOADS of tape  and boxes to make changes.  This is one of those creative flow sort of projects.  Give yourself permission to just build it like you’re six again.

Does that all make sense??  I know it’s no instructable, that’s for sure.  Let me know if you need words or coaching to go with the pictures.

That’s today’s  installment kids.  Next, it will get some holes for doors and windows, some floors/levels, and a WHOLE LOTTA paper mache.  This is going to be an ongoing project. Jim says I should finish it before I go posting a tutorial, but bah!  It can be a make-a-long for the time being, or just a progress log if you don’t want to play.  We’ll make furniture and folks and critters– sounds fun right??

Get yer cardboard and make a mushrump. Or a jewelry rack.  And show me yours!

Hang in there.  More coming this week.

Tags: children, crafts, fairy house, gnome house

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 12:46 am and is filed under Art and Craft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.