Our yard is filled with acorns. This is the case every year at this time. We only just need to walk a couple of steps in any direction to stumble across a pile of them. We have gathered up a bunch and are excited about all of the possibilities. My daughter already has some great Christmas ideas for them. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. These Day of the Dead painted acorns are just perfect for Halloween.
I love painting with my little girl. We love exploring different techniques, canvases and tools to paint with. Forks are a great painting tool and we were just thrilled with how these fork painted spring meadow landscapes came out. 
Have you ever tried salt painting? It is a fun and fascinating process and working with the glue is wonderful for honing those fine motor skills. That and the kids love shaking the salt. These salt painted Easter eggs are so much fun to make, you will want to make them again and again.
We love playing around with different painting methods., especially ones where we get to paint without brushes. If you have a disposable fork and some paint, you can make this pretty project today. This technique is fun, easy and perfect for painting Christmas trees or winter tree landscapes. 
Our little girl loves books. She has gone through many different favorites in her five years on this earth. They usually change from week to week. Ever since we have gotten into chapter books though, there has only been one favorite and that is Captain Underpants. She cannot get enough of him and his sidekicks, George and Harold. We have read them all. She draws the characters all the time and the characters have even inspired her to want to become a comic book writer. We went to a local farm this weekend and stocked up on pumpkins. Since my girl loves that whacky superhero so much, I thought that I would make her a Captain Underpants pumpkin to greet her as she leaves the house and comes home from school every day. His simple features made this an easy and fun painted pumpkin.
It is amazing the beautiful things that you can create with nature materials. Whether you are painting nature items or leaving them natural in your crafts, the results are amazing. We love using leaves in our crafts. There is a wonderful variety of shapes and sizes to choose from, so your possibilities are endless. Peacocks are a favorite of ours, so it was only a matter of time that we made a nature peacock. This easy leaf peacock is gorgeous and includes a free printable template for your convenience.
We love crafting with wax paper. It’s transparency and delicate texture make a wonderful canvas for painting and for stained glass tissue paper projects. Because of its transparent and delicate nature, it also makes it the perfect material for making insect wings. Dragonflies are one of our favorite insects. With summer here, they have been out in full force in our yard. They are so beautiful and my daughter and I love to watch them. These gorgeous creatures inspired our latest project. We have provided a printable template for your convenience.
Recently, we played around with painting on texture and painted on bark from our wood pile. We enjoyed painting the bark. Our finished bark had a very tribal look to it. It was cool and they reminded me of tribal masks. Since that day, I have wanted to try to make tribal masks using bark and paint. It took a few weeks to get to, but we finally had an opportunity and a couple of good pieces of bark to work with.
You don’t have to be Irish, to want a little bit of the luck of the Irish on your side. If you are looking for a simple St. Patrick’s Day craft, these painted rock shamrocks are perfect. The best part is you can find most of your supplies in your backyard. All you need for these simple sham-rocks are rocks, sticks and some acrylic paints.
We don’t throw anything away in our house. We save cardboard tubes, egg cartons and every little scrap of paper. We work with construction paper a lot and we love to use scrapbook paper for our projects as well. Every left over piece of paper goes into a drawer in my daughter’s craft room. The drawer is full of scraps. You may wonder why we would save a drawer of scrap paper. Here is one reason that we love to hold on to these pieces.
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We dug through our drawer and found the colors and patterns of paper that we wanted to work with. We looked for larger pieces of scrap. I love the look of torn paper, so we tore our paper into different sized strips and tossed them into a box.