One More Cup of Coffee: Spray Painted Coffee Filters

Momma generally dislikes doing a lot of overly "cutesy" arts and craft projects, so she's stayed away from lots of the coffee filter ones floating around out there.  But we've done a few of them at school this year and she thought she'd give one a try.  And we used it as an opportunity to break out a new tool -- the spray bottle.  I should have known I was in for something good when momma starting draping the entire table in butcher paper, but I was still incredibly excited and surprised when she started filling up spray bottles with washable liquid watercolors.  I LOVED IT.  I was a painting machine.  I couldn't get enough filters, fast enough.  Cami wasn't able to use the spray bottle by herself, but she liked having mom help her use the bottle, shaking paint out of the bottle herself, and painting with a paintbrush.

I think our current plan is to periodically do this project (likely outside next time!), save up our painted filters, and use them for a party garland (like this or this).  But this was such a success (despite the household casualties, see below) that I think we're going to try also try some of these:

- coffee filter spray art with markers (which would avoid the spraying of paint everywhere)
- outdoor spray painting
- some printmaking

Oh -- even though I did a really good job of (mostly) keeping the paint aimed at the table and in the direction of the coffee filters, momma would like me to point out that the "washable" watercolors indeed come out of clothes and off of skin quite easily.  The same does not go for our bamboo wood floors and white walls, which were unfortunate and innocent victims of this project.  We think an arts studio should be at the top of everyone's holiday lists for us.

Pebbles and Marbles: Marble Painting

We've seen many many versions of marble painting and we decided to try out one of our own.  Because we go through paper towels in our house like no one's business (we know, we know, it's not very green.  But believe me, it's very very Green), we have lots of paper towel rolls saved up and decided to use those.  Mom rubberbanded a piece of foil on the bottom, rolled up a piece of paper and put it in the tube, dipped the marbles in paint, dropped them in, tinfoiled the top, and let us shake away.  Kane wasn't very interested, but I thought it was pretty fun to shake away.  But this project didn't hold my interest for long either -- I couldn't really see what was going on and mom wasn't in enough of a "free for all" mood to let me dip and drop the marbles myself (and, no, i don't think my past history of ingesting small gemstones should have been relevant to that decision).  Oh well.  Clearly the only way to go with marble painting next time is large scale.