We made some beautiful winter crafts last year with clay and nature. We loved them so much, that we wanted to try something similar again for the fall. I am glad that we did. These fall tree mosaics came out just lovely and are perfect the upcoming season.
We have had a crazy few weeks weather wise. Last week, our yard was covered in snow. This week, we are wearing shorts outside. The snow was fun, but the warm weather was welcome. We took a family hike, went to park and just sat outside and enjoyed the weather. My daughter had a friend over during one of these gorgeous days. My daughter wanted to make a big art project with a roll of butcher paper that we have. I suggested that we take it outdoors in case it got messy and boy did it. The kids had a fun-filled morning of painting with nature and with their bodies.
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.
The winter is officially here and we enjoyed a couple of snowy days this week to welcome the start of winter. We played outside in the snow all day yesterday and took in all of the beauty of the season. Watching the snowfall and looking at the snow-covered trees was enough to inspire some winter crafting.
We love working with clay and nature items. We have a collection of sticks and stones set aside for occasions just like this.
We have a house filled with craft supplies, but still the outdoors is our favorite place to shop for craft materials. We have a large box that we keep on our porch filled with acorns, sticks and rocks that we collected and set aside for future projects.
Engineering activities are wonderful for improving your children’s fine motor skills, problem solving abilities and their imaginations.
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My daughter loves to build. She can and will construct out of anything. We build with recyclables.
We build with nature.
My daughter has recently decided that she is now a rock collector. She loves to bend down and pick up rocks wherever she sees them. Lucky for her, our driveway is filled & lined in rocks. Yesterday, she sat in the driveway & carefully picked a bunch to bring indoors and add to our growing pile.
It was another beautiful weekend and we had a ton of outdoor fun. While sitting out on the grass, I was struck by this beautiful shadow that was cast on one of the rocks. I quick ran inside & grabbed some paints and was going to capture the shadow on the rock with some paint. We explored shadows and art last month and I thought this would be a beautiful project to do. Alas, the sun disappeared and did not come back and I lost my lovely shadow.
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I have been looking forward to gardening with my daughter this year. She started helping me last year & loved helping me weed, plant new flowers & water them.
This year, we are in a new house. I have been so excited to get started on our gardens in our new home & now my little one will have a garden of her very own. Like many little girls these days, my daughter loves fairies, so of course her garden had to be a fairy garden. We started some seeds indoors & planted a few flowers outside as well.
We wanted to add a little magic to our fairy garden, so we collected rocks from our backyard to give it a few special touches. I found one large one to put our garden poem on & we picked up medium-sized rocks in random shapes for our fairy houses.
I painted each of the rocks in a different color acrylic paint & let them dry.
For the fairy houses, I painted the tops of each of the rocks in different shades of green.
I painted a rounded door on each rock in brown & black.
I painted two yellow squares on each rock for windows & then painted silver circles & ovals around the windows & doors to form stones.
I painted simple flowers around the houses & connected them with green lines for vines.
I used black paint to outline random areas to get them to stand out. I used nail polish to seal in the paint, but
paint sealer would probably work better.
We took our rock houses outdoors and placed them around my daughter’s favorite new flower. We lined our fairy village with some smaller pebbles that we found in our yard.
Our quote rock was much simpler. We used a Sharpie to write our poem on the painted rock & then painted some dots & petals around the words to make it more magical.
Our garden is still a work in progress, but the rocks added a lovely touch. My little gardener loved the little fairy houses. We are excited to add more magic to our garden.
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