Safety Pin Bracelets

A couple of months ago I went to the Main St. Fort Worth Arts Festival which is the number one Arts Festival in Texas and the third largest in the country. This is my second year going since I moved to the area and my family and I now look forward to it. There are over 200 artists, live performances, fun activities for the kids.....and the food....oh my, there are so many delicious things to eat. I starve myself the entire day before I go! Anyhow, about the bracelets...there are many cute shops along the bricked roads of downtown Ft. Worth and I found this art store with all kinds of treasure (wish I remembered the name). I bought a cool Frida bag and a really beautiful safety pin bracelet. Every time I wear it I get compliments and people ask if I made it. So, since school is out I ventured down to Hobby Lobby and bought lots of beads and safety pins. These are the two I made so far! I paid about $12 for mine and I saw some on ebay for $20. It did take me quite a bit of time especially on the first one I made (top) because I used really small beads that were in a mixed pack. The second one has smaller pins, larger beads and a spacer bead so it took about half the time. Plus, I finally got my rhythm down. I am taking some graphic design classes that are taking up most of my spare time but I really love the bracelets and hope to make more!

Sweet Surprises!

When I was in college, one of my professors told us to get a box to keep all of our little "presents" from our students. I haven't been very good at keeping all these treasures. I get a lot... especially from my daughter who is also one of my students :)  I used to go through the box on tough days...you know those days it seems like you have yelled way more than you should have, or the day one of the kids says "I hate art!" Well, I was going through all of the portfolios to hand back to the students and found this picture a girl drew of me. It made my day!

Butterfly Mural from Art Projects for Kids

We had quite a few changes in schedules this year at my school (which is the norm). They took many fourth and fifth grade band students out of band for 6 weeks and put them with the regular specials to accommodate their homerooms standardize testing schedules..and many other complicated issues that I do not wish to go into. Anyhow, this left me with 25 + students in my classes...many of whom had not been in art all this year or last year. I know many of you are okay with getting out the expensive watercolors and acrylics for this many students but I am not afraid to say that I AM NOT...lol. Especially due to the fact that most of these student didn't spend the first of the year going over procedures and routines in my class. I was looking for a lesson that wasn't too messy and involved materials that could be shared by such a large number of kids. I downloaded this butterfly mural from Art Projects for Kids, we used crayons, and some rubbing plates. The kids had to use warm colors for the butterfly parts and cool colors for the background or vice versa. They were only allowed to use one rubbing plate on one area. At first I let one class color them however they wanted, and they were a mess! They used crazy color combinations and too much texture. So for the next classes I had to set the rules. There were a few who strayed from the guidelines but they still came out okay. Overall I am happy with the results. I had more completed butterflies but only took these two pictures :(

Summer is here!

Sorry I haven't posted in months, I have been insanely busy. But summer has arrived which means I have time to post some lessons I did in the Spring (better late than never). I saw a similar post on There's a Dragon in my Artroom about coffee filters and they lovely things you can do with them that I have been wanting to blog about them but Phyl beat me to it ...lol! Anyhow, I will still do it anyway. Last year (my first with elementary kiddos) the Pre-Kinders (who are Kinders this year) made flowers and butterflies by completely coloring coffee filters and then we spritzed them with a water bottled to get the colors to bleed together. (Lots of ohhs and ahhs from them.) We did the first round on newspaper and when I took them off after they dried I noticed the awesome effect on the newspaper so we did the next round on white paper.

So then I hoarded all of these colorful papers for a whole year, actually I kind of forgot about them...then I saw a project on another blog about bird in a trees (can't remember where-sorry) and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for the Kinders to cut them up and use them for bird parts!

And here is our lovely tree!

...Stay tuned for the Kinder rainsticks using the same coffee filter paper.

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