Finally. The Beautiful Oops instalment of our Preschool Book Club with our friends from Buggy and Buddy, Sugar Aunts, Frogs Snails and Puppy Dog Tails, and Homegrown Friends. We love this book!
Tag Archives: flowers
Coffee Filter Flowers
Gracen and I have been spending a whole lot of time at the beach lately (yay!), but this afternoon, we finally got around to finishing off a fun little project we started days and days ago.
It began like this. Coffee filters, coloured water, and a plastic dropper out, creative table-style. Simply left out for her to discover and explore when she felt up to it.
Of course it didn’t take Grae long to find a table full of fun materials to experiment with. Without hesitation, she began using her dropper to slurp up coloured water and spew it back out on the filters.
She really loved watching how the colours spread and mixed with one another.
So much in fact, that she fully covered upwards of 30 separate filters. Thank goodness for a big laundry drying rack! We placed the filters on the rack in our solarium, and they dried in no time.
After tucking them away for several days, we came home from the beach today {some of us still sporting our bathing suits and sandy fingernails} and dug them out for a quick pre-nap project. We also gathered a pair of scissors, some long green pipe cleaners, and some short colourful pipe cleaners (regular pipe cleaners cut into thirds).
To transform our beautiful watercolour-y filters into flowers, we started by carefully folding them in half three times.
Then Grae would give me some sort of petal description (‘long and skinny!’, ‘pokey like the rose bush!’, ‘big, big, big, big, BIIIIIIIG!’, and ‘you know…..like….ummmm….like the little circle circle ones?’ were a few) and I’d cut the curved edge to match. I also snipped the very tip of the point off at this point too.
Then came her very favourite part – carefully unfolding the cut filter to reveal its shape.
Here are a few of the other shapes we came up with together.
Next, Grae would pick a small pipe cleaner, bend over the top so it was no longer pokey, and place the bottom through the tiny hole in the centre of the filter.
Then she’d bring the filter up around the pipe cleaner and pinch it at the base.
While she held it tightly, I’d wrap a long green pipe cleaner around the filter and short pipe cleaner to form the stem.
Fun, right?
Every flower turned out completely different from the last…
And by the end we had a beautiful bouquet of colourful flowers perfect for the mantle, a table centrepiece, or a Mother’s Day gift.
♥
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Spring Flowers Felt Board Set
Today after her nap, Miss G and I enjoyed a little crafternoon. We set up shop in the warm sunshine pouring through our front window and she worked on decorating felt eggs while I worked creating this new spring felt board set.
This time around, I created paper patterns by drawing very simple flower shapes onto scrap paper. The ‘line drawing’ section of Google images is great if you’re in need of some inspiration, or if you simply want to print off some templates and skip the drawing part all together.
Next, I cut around my flower shapes and pinned them onto bright, colourful sheets of felt (I use the inexpensive stuff made of recycled plastic bottles for felt board sets and save the more costly wool stuff for my Littlest Lulu projects, but both work great).
Then I carefully cut out both my paper patterns and the felt flower pieces all at once. I used the same method to create several differently shaped leaves too.
Afterwards, I cut out several long, thin pieces of green felt to act as stems.
As well as several centres that can be mixed and matched on the flowers.
Here’s our finished spring flowers felt board set… Flowers that can mixed, matched, and combined into tons of different possibilities. Just for fun, I may add grass strips, soil clumps, terra cotta pots to the set later on. And clouds, sunshine, and raindrops would be fun additions too!
Here’s my little love’s finished project. A beautiful colourful felt egg to display in time for Easter.
To learn how to make your own easy felt board and to see our other felt board games, click here.
♥
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Fall Flowers
It may be the first of October, but the flowers in our front gardens would never let you know it. Today Miss G took some time to sniff her way around our yard and comment on each of the flowers she found – “Dis one soooo beautiful, Mama!”.
Soaking up the last signs of summer around here…
♥