All Crafts! All the time!

Still catching up from summer, this seemed like a good post to follow on the heels of my ramblings about tape.  Ani's best friend, Ari, is perhaps the biggest lover of tape we know, and here she is to prove it:

Yeeeeees, for her seventh birthday she and her Baba created a stellar duct tape dress.  Wow.  There are very few people who can carry that off, but Ari is definitely one of them.

Ari is new to the sleepover, and we are honored to be one of her preferred spots for sleeping-over, so we had two slumber parties during the summer and they were chock-full-o'-craftiness!!!  I'm a little worried that we've set this precedent that will be impossible to follow - I turned into the Mr. Rogers of the craft world, supplying supplies and focused, cheerful attention for a good 24 hours.  I have heard through the grapevine that Ari would like me to join the ranks of her mothers (she is fortunate to have 4 already), and while I am deeply honored, I am pretty certain it's because she thinks we are All Crafts All the Time here. 

We all adore her, so that's a pretty good reason to hang out with us too.  An added bonus is that she has a really lovely peaceful effect on my daughters, and they rarely fight when she is over.  Love that.

So, what did we get into?  Well, first there were the free-for-all supplies: coffee filters and brads; egg cartons and craft sticks. Tape, tape and more tape.

When they wanted some ideas and direction, I brought out a bunch of yarn and asked if they wanted to learn to make Ojo de dios, or God's Eyes (we used the instructions here).  We proceeded to spend hours on these, nearly missing dinner, and then we picked them up again in the morning.  Very meditative and so beautiful...

The girls needed help starting them - tying the sticks together and wrapping the first few rounds - but after that were able to switch colors and continue wrapping on their own.

A: I love this sleepover!

Me:  This sleepover loves you!!

A: It's because you three love me! And you love to CRAFT!!!

Mmmmhmmmm.

I'm blending sleepovers here, but another project we did was making found object prints.   They painted their paper first, and we had supper while they dried, and then went back to make our prints.

We used bits from nature - rocks, pine cones, dried lotus pods - and things from around the house, like spools and yarn-wrapped blocks.

I think they are so beautiful! I had to strongly suggest that they stop at a certain point, so that their delicate marks weren't totally obscured by zealous stamping!

In the morning the A's took their homemade tape-and-craft-stick baskets to collect fallen flowers, like the rose of sharon blossoms that cover the sidewalk at the end of our block.  

I had to include this next photo to show how street art we get. Pretty hard-core grunge (grungy?) if you ask me.  Yup, right on the street, with the recycling truck.  Well, none of the artists seemed to notice.  They were too busy bashing the flowers between pieces of paper, with hammers.  I think art projects that include hammers pretty much take the cake.

The girls seemed pleased with the various shapes of flower-mush-blobs they got, and they experimented on all the other plants within reach - clover, squash, tomato (fruit and leaves...).

These kids have endless energy for making.  At one point I sent them on a scavenger hunt around the block, clipboard in one hand, a trash bag in the other, and they happily found all the items (a plant with heart leaves!  a bird sitting on a wire!  a yellow flower!) and were back for more art in no time!!  This next project they came up with on their own...tracing objects and then coloring their overlapping spaces.  

We have another sleepover planned for next week....wonder what we'll get into?!