We Are Going to China Town: Chinese New Year Squish Dragons

Happy New Year!  We've been reading up on the Chinese New Year, which is a 15-day event that starts today.  To kick off our celebrations, we ordered dinner from mom and dad's favorite Chinese restaurant (Meiwah) last night.  Dad was particularly up for that event, but Kane and I were at the end of a long weekend of a lot of indoor time (it was FREEZING here this weekend and we got our first "snow"of the year) and were throwing a collective tantrum.  And that tantrum was further fueled by our fight over who would get to sit on mom's lap as a bribe to eat.  Oh well.

We are planning on having a little party (meaning mom, Kane and me) at our house tonight and Kane and I are very interested in the tradition of receiving red envelopes of money.  We'll see how that works out for us.  To continue our party prep (we made these lanterns last week), we made some paint squish dragons for our wall.  Inspired by Kane's recent Rorschach prints and this monster idea, we dabbed some Biocolor on paper and then folded and squished the paint together.  We took a look, added more paint, and squished again.  I was much more into this than Kane -- he tends to like to scrub all the colors together, but it was a good opportunity for him to practice keeping some of the colors separate.

Once they dried a bit, we added some googly eyes and mom superglued on some metallic ribbon (we were going to go with tissue paper, but we had some ribbon to use up).  Some of them look more like dragons than others (one of mine seriously looks exactly like an elephant), but they were all super fun to make.

p.s. if you are in the D.C. area, check out the Chinatown Lunar New Year Festival at the Chinatown Community Cultural Center on January 29th from 12 - 5 p.m.  There is also a parade and other festivities from 2 - 5 p.m. on H Street N.W. between 6th and 8th streets.  We'll be there!

(OK, mom did this one)

my elephant/dragon

Don't Sweat the Technique: New Painting Techniques

One of my most favorite ways to paint is table painting/printing and we do that A LOT.  It's fun and it's easy for Cami to do, too.  But since I gave up my nap a while back, mom thought we could try out some new painting techniques during Cami's nap (man that girl can sleep).  I have had a short attention span for arts and crafts lately, so I wanted to try all of them at one sitting!  When we paint with watercolors, we usually use the liquid type -- it's usually easier for us to use than the pan type (although Cam is a repeat offender of tipping an entire cup full onto her lap), but mom broke those out for me to try first.  I was into it once I realized that you have to really wet them first (in the future, I think mom might help me out by doing that a bit before I get to them).  Then I moved onto painting with some pipe cleaners, which I though was pretty cool since I tend to like scrubbing the paper with my paintbrush and it was easy to do that with the pipe cleaners.  Last, mom and I took a crack at some folded Rorschach paintings -- this was super cool, especially since mom let me squeeze paint right from the tubes onto my paper.  But, I think next time (to avoid an excessive amount of paint on the paper), we'd put paint on a plate first and use a brush to drop it onto the paper.