Autumn Spice Painting and Flower Prints

 We did a really fun craft the other day- painting with spices!

Spice paints are super easy to make- just mix about a teaspoon of spice with some water and begin painting!

Nutmeg, cinnamon, turmeric, ginger, paprika and cloves are the spices we used, but you could experiment with just about anything!

We painted on a fall leaf coloring page, but you could also paint freehand or whatever you want!

Another fun craft we did was Leaf and Flower Printing.

This was Rowan's idea :)

We collected flowers and leaves from the garden and laid them out on one half of the paper.

Next, you fold the paper in half and start pounding with a hammer!

You may get hungry, so it's important to have some raisins to snack on just in case ;)

The patterns and colors will transfer to both sides of the paper and you will have a symmetrical design!

These would make nice gifts!

Happy Learning!

~Beth

Pumpkin Decorating

 The other day Rosie came home from the store with one of those little decorated pumpkins. She fell in love with its little pink and green eyes and its sparkly witchy hat. She decided she wanted to make one out of the white pumpkin we got at the farm stand.

It was pretty easy, really. First she colored a face on the pumpkin. It's always more fun to do crafts outside if you can.

 

While Rosie was coloring she had me cut a witch's hat out of a paper plate. I cut out a circle, then made a cut towards the center and folded and stapled it to make a cone. After that we colored it pink.

After that it was time to glue on the hat. I had to trim the stem a little to make it fit. Using Elmer's glue, we glued on the hat, with a tuft of pom pom tassels stuck underneath for the hair.

Trying on the hat

And there we had it- another witchy pumpkin!

Are you going to decorate pumpkins this fall too?

Happy Learning!

~Beth

Primitive Pottery!

 

The kids and I have loved pottery for years, and we have taken a few classes at the Pottery Studio, but have always dreamed of firing it ourselves, in our own backyard.

Well, after years of dreaming, just yesterday our dream became a reality!

We ordered some chestnut clay online, and when it arrived, we could hardly wait to get our hands in it! Rowan had also harvested some clay from the lake and made a pot out of that too!

Rowan made some pinch pots, I made some slab mugs, and Rosie even made some toys out of clay!

Rowan even made some teacups!

I used flowers from the garden to print a slab!

Here is Rosie making her clay "picture"

I carved fall leaves onto this one!

Finally, our pots were bone dry and we were ready to fire them.

We read a lot of different ways to fire pottery the primitive way, and decided to start by preheating the pots first. We built a small fire in the center so they could come to temperature. We didn't want to take any chances!

We had to tend the fire a lot to make sure they heated evenly.

Finally it was time to cover the pots and let the fire grow bigger. We had previously cut small pieces of firewood so that they wouldn't fall on the pots and break them.

We let the fire burn down to coals and left it to cool.

It was like Christmas morning this morning when we went to find our fired pots in the ashes!

Thankfully, we only experienced a few minor breaks- one of Rowan's pots had a few chips come off of it, and a handle fell off of one of my mugs, but other than that, they turned out great!

Making and firing primitive pottery was super fun and we hope to do it lots LOTS more!

What do you think?

Do you want to try it too?

Happy Learning!

~Beth & Family