Kids Food Face Collages

Looking for a fun, silly project to do with the kids? Let them see that they are what they eat with our Kids Face Food Collages! Head over to Honest to Nod to check out the project.

Artworks: Collage Monsters

We are in full-on Halloween mode over at our house. Costumes have been tried on numerous times. Spooky stories are in rotation. And I am chomping at the bit to decorate the house for the holiday (I have to wait until after my birthday party to throw the spook around). This past weekend, I asked mom for a scary art project and she suggested that we make use of the giant Vogue magazine Nona gave us at the end of summer, which was full of page after page of fall-makeupped models holding their limbs at odd angles. Perfect for making our own collage "monsters."

Daddy rarely gets to participate in an art project with us, but we recruited him to help us cut out body parts for our collages. Once we had a good pile full of decapitated heads, bodiless arms and legs, and extra mouths and eyes, we set about to glue our monsters together. Mommy and I favored multiple-headed monsters. Cam liked the big hair. And daddy kept gluing odd noses onto faces. Pretty scary (and a good way to also use those unsolicited magazines and catalogues that roll in)!

We got so into it that we drew some ghosts and ghouls up on our chalkboard wall and snuck some of our costume accessories out when mom wasn't looking. What's everyone else have on tap for fall art projects?

In Home Entertainment: Collage on Cardboard

One of the projects we spent the most time on during our NYC children's art museum trip was collaging on cardboard. The cardboard provides a nice sturdy surface to hold all the collage bits and helps reuse the always incoming cardboard boxes and at our house. I'm big into cutting with scissors and I spend lots of time cutting paper into various shapes, which I like to fold, crumple and collect. And collaging also helps reuse all that paper. In addition to the items we recycle, our most favorite collaging materials are buttons, large gems, and pipe cleaners. On our most recent round, we added in our suminagashi'd hearts and some valentine hearts I've been cutting out by the dozen (mom's favorite is the one on which I requested she write, "Female Love.")

You can use anything you've got to whip up a fun collage session, but we've included below links to our favorite supplies. In case you forgot, we're Discount School Supply affiliates and the links below to DSS are affiliate links. If you click on any of these links (or the general DSS link on the right hand side of our blog) and make a purchase, we will receive a small percentage of the sale from DSS. So do us a solid and help support our arts and crafts habit -- if you are going to purchase something from DSS, do it through Not-So-SAHM!

Assorted Grandma's Buttons Huge colorful assortment of buttons range in size from 1/4 to 1 1/4Dia. Choose 1 lb. or 3 lbs. of buttons- 1 lb. set includes a convenient storage tub or buy the 3 lb. bag for extra savings! About 1000 buttons per lb.

Jumbo Foam Shapes - 150 Pieces Make cityscapes and jumbo-sized collages with these colorful geometric foam shapes. Kids will have fun using them for color and shape identification. 12 different shapes 2 to 5-1/2.

Giant Glittering Rhinestones - 1 lb. Add some glamour to your arts and crafts projects!

Striped Pipe Cleaners - Package of 200 Yikes stripes! These brightly-striped pipe cleaners come in 5 color combinations for amusing imaginative creations.

I Got Bugs in My Room: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

We heart Eric Carle and have seen a lot of really fabulous art projects for kids in his style (especially over the summer -- his bday is in June -- like these).  We are on the letter "C" in preschool right now and on her recent "duty day," mom decided to do a project with us making our own very hungry caterpillars.  Of course the moment she decided to do that was the moment that our copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar went AWOL.  After searching high and low for about 25 minutes, we finally found it in the bottom of my bathroom book box inside of another book, obvi.  At school, mom got us participating in reading the book by bringing our The Very Hungry Caterpillar felt board -- we all had different felt pieces and put them up on the board as mom read the book.  Afterwards, we made our own caterpillars using pre-cut ovals of patterned/textured paper, pipe cleaners, and googley eyes.  We would love to do a real Eric Carle painting/collage, but multi-day projects don't really work that well at school.  Mom had lots of left over paper, so Cam got to do one while I napped that afternoon.  She mostly liked eating the glue and making her own collage of paper.  But I have a feeling we'll do this one again -- because mom still has about 8,000 paper ovals that she cut out.