Teach sculpting with vegetables? Yep, here it is again, recieved in one of those continuously forwarded emails...more food art. The creativity is awesome, the carving is great! Enjoy!
Want to see more fun food art? Go see the other posts on this topic of art, and check out the many links in the side bars on cheap art materials.
Keeping in the theme
of peaceful sun sets, and having just been to Graceland...here is a photo of the first record that went Gold for Elvis, recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis. If you want to do a virtual tour of Graceland, or the Jungle Room go here.
With cell phones, instant text messaging and email, the art of calligraphy is now normally only reserved for artistic activities. However, give your kids a chance to learn how to write with pen and ink, and you never know, they MIGHT even be inspired to write a letter... Calligraphy is good for kids for a whole range of reasons. But for me I like it because it is an activity that requires patience and focus and is fun. All you need are some nibs, a nib holder, inks, watercolor paper, and a font guide.
The ink is going to stain so put old clothes on and have paper towels handy. Expect a mess and you won't be disappointed with your kids! The font guide can be an alphabet printed from a word processing package using one of the fonts which you like best from the selection.
Sometimes I do this for the words I want to write in calligraphy - print them out in the font I want so I can just copy them out as I go rather than having to refer back to the alphabet for each particular letter. Shown here is a fancy calligraphy pen as well - kids love these feather pens, nibs are interchangable.
Want to reinforce something in particular? Then get the kids to copy it out with the calligraphy pens.
“Love your neighbor as yourself” is much more eye catching with flowers and love hearts in the margins. As the kids sit there and patiently copy this out, they will absorb the message as they go. This is written in Lucinda Calligraphy font (my favorite font for calligraphy in MS Word)
The key to good technique is to move your arm to get the curves rather than the pen. Hold the nib at a 45 degree angle to the paper. The thicker the nib the more dramatic difference there will be between the fat and thin parts of the letter. If you are just starting, practice shapes first, such as circles and triangles. It takes practice and repitition to understand exactly how much ink to keep on your nib, and exactly when to dip the nib back into the ink.
Watercolor paper will soak up the ink really well, giving the finished product a better look. Also, you can use watercolors to decorate the margins to give the work a real professional look. If you can find some illumination, it can be photocopied and cut out and stuck onto one side of the calligraphy as a quicker way to a great looking finished product.
Old English font from Word:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
You can buy a Speedball nib holder and 6 brass nibs for about $12, the nibs are interchangable. A bottle of really good black or colored ink (big enough for many pages of writing) will set you back $4-$6. Add some watercolor paper for $5 or so, and you are ready to go.
Aussie Kim
The real title of this post could possibly use the "streakers defence" or "it seemed like a good idea at the time". Encouraging your kid to play in the mud. So here's the down side in full visual force for you. Here's the other downside I discovered today. The normally unused screen door lock had to be used today, but it was jammed up with mud from above mentioned learning experience (muddy hands turning the knob to get in). Consequently we stood for 5 minutes in the VERY cold wind attempting to jam the key into the lock, past the mud, now turned to a powder very simliar to cement....
This is a simple, slightly messy but very aromatic craft that you could use for a Valentines Day craft with your kids. The smell is divine, all cinnamon and appley - and the feel of it is really gooey - just what kids love. Basically you make a type of clay from apple sauce and mega amounts of ground cinnamon.
Here's the receipe: 1 cup of applesauce to 3/4 of a cup of cinnamon. Make a dough. Too mushy - add more cinnamon; too dry - add more applesauce. 
When it gets the right consistency, you make shapes either with a cookie cutter, your fingers or for older kids a knife. They take about 2-3 days to dry depending on thickness. You could probably speed this process up by baking the shapes as if they were cookies. If you make a hole in the shape you can add ribbons and hang the ornament. Of course the shape of choice for Valentines Day will be .... the heart! Originally, this craft was done by a friend of mine for our kids to make Christmas ornaments - so you can also store this idea away for that!
Trust us, the kids will only try to eat this dough once, it is WAY too cinnamony for normal children to eat more than one taste.
We used a bowl to mix the ingredients in and wax paper to roll the dough out on wtih a rolling pin. If you make a hole (about pencil size) about half an inch (1.5cm) in from the edge it should be strong enough to put a ribbon through to hang.
If you feel like the ornament is too plain, you could always glue things onto it. If you want the ornament to smell even more, allspice, nutmeg and cloves could be added. Thanks to Bobbie for this craft!
Wishing you an aromatic Valentines Day!
With temperatures around the 75F mark (22C) for the middle of winter, we were not going to sit inside all day doing school. OK, we were not going to sit inside very much at all - at least until the Severe Thunderstorm Warning (hail and 45mph winds) and the Tornado Warning went off. At that stage, school inside looked like a good idea. But until then, Mud Pies were the obvious activity of choice for outside. Plenty of water from previous rains, large mud patch which the dogs had dug around a tree, and temperatures warm enough for light clothing and barefeet.
Mud Pies are a wonderful activity on many levels. Those new to homeschooling with young kids should take note. Mud Pie "work" strengthens the muscles in the fingers they write with and improves their dexterity. It allows for uninterupted (stay away from them!) play - this improves their ability to focus. 
Ever seen a child in "The Flow"? Watch one (from a distance) playing with mud or sand. "The Flow" is when you go into a time warp, your mind is on your activity and is not cluttered up with running through the "to do" lists. (Remember how that used to be?)
If Mud Pies are made with friends, then this often helps them role play social situations ("Would you like some tea with that mud?").
What better introduction to pottery or other three dimensional media? The science of Mud Pies, you learn that if you add dry dirt to wet mud, your creation becomes firmer (Chemistry). 
What happens if you throw a mud pie that is sloppy? Is it easy to catch (Physics)? 
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. There's more benefit in letting your kid play outside in the mud than just a quiet house. But the main reason I think Mud Pies are a must as part of a childhood is simply because it is fun.
Almost forgot! Mud is another VERY cheap art material....
Note: The boy version of Mud Pies is Mud Bombs.
Aussie Kim
Having grown up totally in the Southern Hemisphere, the fact that ALL the leaves drop off the MAJORITY of the trees here for up to 5 months was really quite a culture shock for me. It all looked so drab and dead. How could these trees possibly come back to life? I had a bad case of "homesickness" every winter, longing for trees with leaves.
Eucalyptus trees (which is what I was used to) loose their leaves throughout the year, at the same time that new ones are growing. There are no times when native Australian trees are standing there doing the "I am a dead tree" act. Sometimes I used to look out and think I had lost my ability to see colors. However, after 10 years residence in the Mid South of America, I can now see the beauty in the winter grey forms of a cypress break (group of American Bald Cypress trees in a bayou). I have attempted to capture this with my handy dandy digital camera.
When you pause to look closer there are actually lots of colors. Notice the green moss on the trees (I must be taking the photo from the south, right?). Or better still, notice the chewed off sections of cypress tree base about 1/3 of the way into the photo from the right (beavers). The tree branches in the foreground are actually a weathered copper color, and there is a Live Oak tree in the background which still has it's light brown leaves on. Looks like a watercolor waiting to happen right!
So next time you look out at a drab winter landscape, search for the colors that are actually there right under your nose! Same goes for life I suppose!
Aussie Kim
There is a chinese restaurant I ate at about 5 months ago (we ordered Flaming Pu - kids loved it!) which had the typical paintings of fishermen with triangular hats in small boats on a tropical waterway. However, I noticed the water in the painting had an unusual appearance. On closer inspection, I realized the painting was over the top of broken up egg shells. Ah ha! Another cheap art material, very beautifully used.
And so, think of this as a recycling option: cook your eggs, but keep the shells and the egg cartons. Less landfill, more art materials. The egg shells should be washed and put out to dry. When dry the egg shells can be used for a whole range of projects, either crushed up, or with just a small hole at the top.
The least mess way to crush up egg shells is to place the dried egg shells into a ziplock bag (or paper bag!) and crush. Of course, don't even think of depriving your child of this fun activity! Your options for the crushed egg shells are to put glue on whatever paper/board/canvas you are using and then place (or for kids, sprinkle) the egg shells ontop. You could draw the picture out before hand (saving the egg shells for one particular area (eg the water etc) or you could paint the entire picture onto the crushed egg shells. It could be a mosaic of sorts, or even just a sensory event with no particular finished product in mind.
If you have kids that are older, you can poke a small hole in the top of the egg and drain the contents out for breakfast, allow the egg to dry, and then paint directly onto the whole dried egg shell. For stability, get some plasticine or clay and make a ring the egg can sit on. Any acrylic/craft paints should be fairly permanent. Another option is to decopage the egg with tissue paper and clear glue or varnish over the top. Make your own Faberge eggs!
This website has a really neat picture of regular eggs changing into painted eggs (exquisite artwork)! Click on through to the website after you have watched this and there is a plethora of differently painted dried egg shells. Click on egg gallery then scroll down to chicken egg gallery 1 to see the Ukrainian artwork by British Columbia artist Gloria Olynyk. This photo is courtesy of her website ukrainianegg.com.
Want to see some more examples of egg art? Try eggsamples from International Egg Art. Once again this is an example of beautiful paintings on unusual canvases! Some of the ideas here are: beaded, decoupage, diarama, engraved, hinged, jewelled, lamps, painted, sculpted and pysanky (dyed with wax drawings). Enchanted Hen Productions (neat website name!) has a huge selection of Pysanky egg art you can view.
If the egg cartons are the cardboard sort they can be saved up, and then when needed, soaked overnight and used the next day for paper mache. The beauty of using these egg cartons as paper mache is that they do not need glue - they use it to make the boxes stay in the right shape in the first place! Once your paper mache creation has dried it can be painted.
What are some other options for those egg cartons? Here's one I liked: a gift box - wrap the carton in pretty paper and put straw or coconut inside and place home baked chocolates, or other edible inside. This would work for both the cardboard or the foam types.
So, who's ready for some scrambled eggs?
Aussie Kim
Just when y'all thought I had run out of cheap art materials, I have found the ultimate use for cast offs from those couch potatoes who will be watching the Football games this weekend...pistacio nut shells.
These photos are by Balla Tamas, http://www.ballatamas.com/kreativ/en_creative.html for more information.
Corlette T. Baylock from Cleveland has his own website (art on the half shell) where you can go and discover the many uses of pistacio nut shells. The photo below is courtesy of his website.
How can we turn the humble pistacio nut shell into a method of teaching children body proportions? Well, I remember learning if you draw a round shape for a person's head, then the typical person will be seven more heads long.
Another of his neat projects - You can make a rain stick by sealing the pistacio nuts into a cardboard tube. Note to self: keep pistacio shells next time I indulge - that sounds like a really fun open ended project for kids!
But why stop at people? these nut shells also make awesome looking jewel beetles (Christmas beetles - June bugs); jewellery; furniture decorations (might be hard to sit on though) and any other 3 dimensional craft.
Kid's bored and needing entertainment? Can you imagine how well a pistacio nut shell with a face on it would fit onto your finger - and there you go, a mobile finger sized puppet theatre. Don't care if the kids see you drawing on your hands? Then you could finish off the body down your fingers. Note to self: place pistacio nut shells into pocket for doctors waiting room (how Corlette got started).
OK, now the kicker, he recently completed a commissioned (think largish sums of money) nut-art picture of a crowd scene - 700 faces including Paul Newman. I wonder if he's done the Mona Lisa yet?
Here's an interesting aside: Pistacio trees are a quite ancient crop thought to have originated in Central Asia. One of the main producers in the world was Iran, until the war. The dramatic decline in supply has caused prices to rise, and other areas with similiar climates (California and Australia) are beginning to grow this crop. After grafting it is 4-6 years before you get your first crop, and 20-25 years before the trees bear fully. Trees often continue to bear nuts for 40-60 years more (at the ripe old tree age of 85). Before you think about putting some trees in - check if your climate is right: cold winters (less than 5ºC in July, and down to -18ºC) and long, hot dry summers (more than 32ºC in January, and up to 38ºC).
Regardless of your chance to grow these trees, you're nuts if you don't recycle these shells nextime you buy a bag......
Aussie Kim
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