Open Ended Art - yellow collage

Click here to see what everyone else did for OEA!

Not only did we start on this late, but it was not a very auspicious beginning:

After your milkshake, would you like to do a collage?
What's a collage?
It's when I give you glue and paper and you do some sticking.
No. I want to drink my milkshake.
Of course, but when you've finished your milkshake?
No. I want to play in my house.
How about if I give you the paper and you can stick it to your house?
Hmm. No.

Ah. So I tried again after the milkshake:

Would you like to do some sticking now?
No.
Not even if Mummy comes and watches you?
Yeah! Sure! Sure!

Bingo. Must remember to specify that first, next time!

Here's what he did before getting bored:

Click on the photo to get a closer look

An advert for the local bus service, fireworks, Swiss flag with yellow cheese cross (from a magazine). It's Swiss national day soon, can you tell? Also an old handprint and a bunch of the sticky-backed plastic that we used in our OEA with paint last time! Which is why those bits are yellow... and in fact he had already added them to the house, when it was still just an Ikea cardboard box.

To use up the leftover glue, I made serendipity squares - first time I've made them. They're not quite finished yet so no photos. But here's my lovely boy in his newly decorated house instead!

The handprint is one we made for party invitations back when he was turning one!

Open Ended Art: Tissue paper

This time I actually found open ended art rather stressful. Yesterday we did tissue paper. When we talked about it the previous night Froglet seemed to have some very clear ideas about what he was going to do and what he would need to do it, so today I just asked him to tell me what he needed and I would put it out. He chose three colours of tissue paper, white glue, water, paintbrushes and green glitter. (Yesterday he mentioned toilet rolls but as he didn't reiterate it today I didn't bother reminding him).

Then we sat down and I watched while he gave a running commentary on what he was doing.

Look, it makes the glue red! Maybe the flies will come and watch me do it. They will enjoy doing that with their mummies and daddies... Look the glue goes all watery and runny! I'm going to stick some of this T-shirt paper on.

After the initial discovery that painting with water on the red paper made the paper under it go red too, but that it didn't work with the pink paper, he stopped being very interested in the tissue, and mainly wanted to paint glue and water onto the page and add glitter to it. The picture below is meant to show how the glitter was actually floating about on the water!

I'm getting water on the sparkles so they will go fizzy like that volcano. I don't like them floating. I will put some glue in the water.

Eventually I got tired of this and stopped watching - it stresses me out thinking that he will ultimately make a hole in the page through wetting it over and over, and then he will get really upset and frustrated and refuse to do anything else for the rest of the day. I don't like it when that sort of thing happens, it leaves both of us with a bad feeling about crafts. And it frustrates me in advance knowing it's likely to happen.

However, it didn't happen - perhaps because he didn't carry on for very much longer once I had stopped watching! This is the final product. More glitter than tissue paper, but never mind. I'll do a different tissue paper craft with him later in the week - maybe fabric dying, then he can do whatever he likes with it and I can cut it up to do something with later.

This all goes to show that I am not very good at being hands-off! Something to work on - I blame my personality type. ;-)

Check out what everyone else has done with their tissue paper here.

Open Ended Art

Yes it's another blog carnival! I came across this blog when reading a post by Susana from Our Homeschool Fun:

Her carnival is about Open Ended Art, which is basically when you give your child the materials and then get completely hands-off and see what results. The more specific principles can be found here.

Last weeks topic was Puffy Paint. There is a recipe involving flour and water on the site but I'm not keen on using flour in craft materials because of maggots and stuff so I had a scout around and found a different recipe using shaving cream and glue instead. It's 2 parts shaving cream to one part glue. Mix and add food colouring as required.

We put in the food colouring first, with the glue. Froglet chose blue and yellow and we tried not to mix it too well, but in the process of trying to get it into a squeezy bottle it all got thoroughly mixed anyway. We discovered that our squeezy bottle was bit large for this sort of thing. Next time I would just make the white mix in the big bottle and then squeeze a bit of it into several small bottles along with a colour. But we would need small bottles, which I haven't managed to find yet.

You can see some rice got stuck to this one!

After the first couple of pictures we decided to add some more yellow colour (straight into the bottle, which Froglet then shook a bit) and some green glitter. We could have put in more really, then it would be more noticeable.

Several days later the paint is still puffy but a bit wrinkly as it has shrunk. I'm late posting, of course, so didn't get in on the McLinky, but we enjoyed doing this and will definitely participate again! This weeks topic will be Tissue Paper.