If you are anything like us, you have piles of watercolor paintings and other beautiful artwork from your children somewhere in the house. It is hard to throw away art, so we let it pile up in boxes, cupboards and filing cabinets. We use them as backgrounds in our bookshelves and hang them on the walls.
This year, we decided to use our watercolor paintings for other projects. Here are some of the projects that we have done.
Gift tags and cards for birthdays, thank you and holidays
Star lanterns
Vases for holding pencils, knitting needles, egg tree branches and more (glue onto a oatmeal can)
Cards with embroidery
Backgrounds/matting for picture frames
Rune Cards
We would love to hear your ideas!
13 comments:
Great post :) Lots of ideas here. We like to cut big watercolor pictures down into greeting cards and gift tags. Will try out some of these other ideas though too.
Thanks for the ideas!!! Love them!
Thank you for the ideas!
Two other things we've done:
Made the Easter cutout tealight...lanterns/stands? (not sure what they should be called) suggested by Natural Suburbia. (naturalsuburbia.blogspot.com) We did at least a dozen of these this year to give as easily-mailed gifts.
Made paper flowers, following directions at www.craftstylish.com. (Search crumpled paper flower; it should be the first result.) My boys were 4 and 6 when we first did this and it was a bit hard. We might try again now, a couple years later.
I like to use watercolors for journal pages. Excellent idea for small gift boxes, and can I just say that I heart enya!
We use ours to make birthday cards, alphabet cards and watercolor lanterns!
Que belleza¡
Oh I like the rune cards. Thank you for all the lovely ideas.
Using the artwork for greeting cards and other things is so beautiful, especially art work from the Tan family.
I use them in my Baha'i children's spiritual education program. We copy prayers and holy writings from the world's religions onto watercolor paper with a gold pen to make it really special. We also cover match boxes with them and cut them into small mosaic shapes and glue them onto paper, making pretty designs. The children in the class feel that these papers are very special.
your home is such a wonderful mix of education, comfort and joy! I love it.
Such great ideas! We are already gathering a lot of these, and we haven't even started kindy yet!
I love our WOW paintings...
We use them to...
* Cover tins for storing pencils
* Cover matchboxes after drawing a flame on it.
* bookmarks
* Make up mealtime blessings cards
* Cards
* Notebooks see http://weefolkart.com/content/little-gnome-and-fairy-books and scroll down for instruction on binding the spine neatly.
* Table with Steiners "day of the week" qualities
* pinwheels
* Envelopes
* Lanterns – dodecahedron : Christmas Crafts bk, Berger
* Book covers
* Paper beads – cut long very thin & tapering-to-a-point-strip, put glue on the back and wind up carefully around a knitting needle.
* Woven basket. http://www.jamboree.freedom-in-education.co.uk
* Starbox – thetoymaker.com
* Valentine heart chains
* Background for homemade jigsaw thetoymaker.com
* Labels for storage jars in my pantry
* Boxes to hold treasures http://www.jamboree.freedom-in-education.co.uk/w's%20craft%20corner/box.htm
* Christmas stars – see ‘The Magic Onions’ blog
* Triptoglyphs or transparencies borders
* Chatterbox
* Paper spirals for decorations
* Advent calendars
* Lamp shade – haven’t tried this one http://www.ninjavspenguin.com/blog/2008/06/10/origami-lamp-shade-instructions/ can brush with oil
* Make a button jointed paper dragon puppet with skewers attached to move it.
The body has 3 parts and the head is one part. The middle body parts are created by placing the child's hand on the paper, tracing around its oval-shape using a pencil and cutting it out. Make two oval body parts.
For the tail: use the child's hand but have them pile up their fingertips one upon the other to make a 'point' for the tail (add a little extra to make a pointy tail) and round the other end at the wrist area. Cut this out.
For the head: use the hand but split the fingers open inbetween to form two jaws and point the thumb upwards to make an 'ear'. Trace around, rounding the wrist area into an oval, and cut out of the paper.
Lay out the dragon, overlapping the parts. Punch holes in one end of the head and tail, and both ends of the body parts.
Use the cotton and buttons (one button on each side) to make moveable joints to make all four parts into one long dragon. decorate....add scales etc.
DRAGON picture: I have posted a photo of my watercolour dragon if you are interested.
You will need to belong to the homeschoolingwaldorf yahoo group to view.
See last page of photos under the album "Castle Creations"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/homeschoolingwaldorf/photos/album/129693/pic/435690164/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=41&count=20&dir=asc
Thank you to Marsha Johnson for the instructions.
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