I bought a pack of 10 foam butterflies from the dollar section of Target on a whim. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but that is how it is with about half of the art stuff I buy. I always come up with something really fun for Lil either from Pinterest, blogs or my old preschool teacher memories. This butterfly craft was just something I pulled out of my… head one day.

I wanted to make a butterfly mobile for Spring. I gave Lil 6 of the butterflies to paint and decorate and then I was going to find some way to make a mobile out of them.

First Lily painted them with glitter glue.

This is my secret to using glitter.  We love how glitter sparkles and is so much fun, but I hate how spreads so I put a bunch of glue on a plate and dump a lot of glitter on top and stir it up.  After the glue dries you have your glitter sparkles with so much less of a mess. It’s true that you don’t get the coverage you get with just dumping the glitter directly on the piece of art, but this is better in my opinion.

5 butterflies painted with glitter glue and one covered with tissue paper.

Here’s where I have a problem, I don’t know when to stop when it comes to art.  After the glue was dry I gave her a few bottles of puffy paint, poof balls and feathers.

This was the first time she’s ever used puffy paint and loved squeezing the bottle and making big pools of puffy paint.

So proud of herself.

The next morning when they were dry (well mostly dry, some of those big pools of puffy paint were still a bit tacky) Lil helped me punch holes in the butterflies and we laced plastic twine in the holes and taped them to the ceiling.

I had wanted them all hung on a twig or something cute, but by the next morning I was totally over them and gave up on trying to figure out how to hang them up. I just put them at different lengths and called it cute.

Lil loved talking about the butterflies and decorating them.  She doesn’t quite get the whole season thing, but we are working on that.

I took a little unexpected blog break for the last few weeks (minus a tiny post here and there) for a couple of reasons. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with Lil and don’t find the time to blog about it, and of course we were very sick for a few weeks, and I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization V with my free time.

One of the things that Lil and I have been doing is a lot of art.  These three projects were pretty quick and didn’t get a lot of pictures taken of them so I put them together in one post.  The first up is marble painting, which is something that I’ve seen a lot of on Pinterest.

We took a cardboard box and cut the top flaps off.  Luckily the small posterboard that we buy fit in the box perfectly so all I did was put a few pieces of double stick tape in the corners to make sure the posterboard stayed down.  I put a few globs of paint in box (Lil’s choices) and dropped three marbles in.  Lil was a little unsure of moving the box too much at first so I showed her how to make the marbles roll.  She liked it and thought it was fun, but as with almost all painting that happens here it turned into finger painting.

I kept trying to turn her interest back to the marbles, but she kept going back to painting the box and the posterboard.  I didn’t really mind and gave up after a while.

The next thing we tried isn’t really art so much as a fun homemade toy.  I’m not talking about a hoop and stick (seriously how was that fun, I don’t care if you don’t have electricity, how is hitting a hoop with a stick fun?), we made a poofball popper.   All I had were 7 inch balloons so I used a small yogurt container. I cut the bottom of the yogurt container off and the top of the tied balloon and fit the balloon over the mouth of the container.  I grabbed a handful of poofballs and let Lil go to town.

She had some fun with it so it was worth the two minutes it took to construct, but she got over it very quickly.  She had no interest in popping one poofball at a time so she loaded the entire handful in and popped it. It was a lot of fun to see how far she could get them.

Unfortunately she spent more time pushing the balloon knot back out because every time she pooped the poofballs the knot turned into a innie rather than an outie.

We bought Lil a 1 pound tub of these little beads and I thought she’d love to string them into necklaces and patters, but all she wanted to do with them was make shapes.  I took a few cookie cutters and traced them to make shapes for her.  Then she wanted to make a happy face in the big circle so I free handed a happy face. I’m no artist, that’s for sure.

I am totally obsessed with Pinterest and I think I’ve made that clear in my recent posts.  Well here’s another idea I got from a Pin, I can’t find the link though.  Anyway it’s totally easy.  I got some 8×10 canvass at Hobby Lobby and some blue painters tape. I used the tape to shape Lily’s name, luckily her name is all straight lines. Another idea I saw was to use vinyl letters in place of the tape.  Once the tape is all stuck down (and I had to keep pressing it down, it wanted to pop up so badly) Lily and I painted the canvases.  I don’t normally paint with her, but I found with the last canvases she painted that if she left globs they cracked as they dried so I would spread the paint around. I also helped out because I wanted the whole canvases covered.  Once the paint was dry we pulled the tape up.  I love how they turned out.  The paint bleed a bit under the tape, but I think it adds to the whimsy of the paintings.

She started out painting the tape, I had to explain a dozen times that the blue part was coming off and she needed to paint the white part.  She finally got it.

Do you see the sideways cat?

Sorry about the blurry pictures.

I love how they turned out.  We had a hard time deciding where to put them up and finally decided on the wall of the family room above the animal clings.  I love how it all came out.  This wall is right at the top of the stairs so it’s the first thing you see when you come up. It’s great.

I got the idea to do streamer painting from the book First Art.  You take some streamer (ours were leftover from Lily’s birthday), roll it up and tape the end together.

Dip the non-taped end in water and go to town.

I was honestly surprised at how much ink came out of the streamers. You just need a little bit of water or they get very soggy, very fast. I found that these fell apart pretty quickly, but the author claims you can snip the soggy end off and keep going. I just don’t see it working though.
You know, I didn’t read the instructions very well and just improvised. I bet she meant for me to take a length a few inches long and roll it the long way rather then the short way I did. Hmmm, I might have to try it one of these days. I got the book from the library and don’t have it any longer to check if I’m right or not. Anyway, Lily liked this and thought it was fun, but lost interest in it quicker then she does regular brush or finger painting.