Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair: Egg Carton Spin Flowers

We saw these super cool painted egg carton flowers on Pinterest and thought we'd give them a whirl.  Literally.  It had been a bit since we used our salad spinner for some art so we wanted to try spin painting the egg cartons.  Mom cut the carton in half (from top to bottom) and then the bottom portion in half again -- into 2, 6 cratered halves.  Each half was fairly easy to wedge down into the bottom of the salad spinner, but it took some experimenting to get the paint to spin around the way we wanted.  We found that putting a bunch of paint in the bottom of each egg crater as well as some along all of the sides worked best.  We used our BioColor paints (because they overlap, but don't mix) and Colorations "Make It Glitter" for some sparkle.  Once they were dry, mom cut them up into flowers for us (although Kane is working on his cutting, the cardboard was a little stiff and required sharper scissors than mom wanted to hand over to him).

Then it took us some time to decide what to DO with the flowers.  Mom tried out a garland, but didn't like it.  And she made some flower jewelry for me (just ran some twine through the center), but I tore it up promptly.  For the moment, mom made some flower bunches for our tissue paper vases/lights.  She actually found a super cool new (to us) art material at CVS last week -- Bendable Building Sticks.  They are basically wax-coated string, but they stick together and are bendable and easily reshapable.  So she ran one of those through the center of each flower and wound it around a green pipe cleaner.  We are definitely going to have fun coming up with different arts and crafts for those sticks.  As for the rest of our flowers, mom was thinking they might be cool glued onto a picture frame (and we might get at that hot glue gun after all!).  Kane suggested gluing them onto sticks.  Then he suggested bringing them outside with us and gluing them onto sticks still attached to trees and "leaving them for people" -- a kind of cardboard flower bombing if you will.  I like it.  We'll see if we can work out the logistics.

Kane also filled up all 6 craters of one egg carton with different colors of paint and declared that they were lakes around the volcanoes (the portion of carton sticking up in the middle).  He refused to spin the paint and wanted to let it dry like that.  10 days later the paint had evaporated and then he was not happy that the lakes were gone.  So mom set up a little sensory bin with water and pirates for him.  Even when the egg carton had long past fallen apart, he continued to play for a solid 1/2 hour more.  I see a water/sand table in our future!

Kane's lakes and volcanoes

turned into icebergs vs. pirates