clay gift tags.

The gift making craftiness has begun. It is time for list making, gathering supplies, and making. The boys love making things too. One of the things we started this week is gift tags. We change it up from year to year, and this year decided to make some using air dry clay. It is a really simple process and the variations and possibilities are really endless.


For this first round we rolled out air dry clay fairly thinly and G picked out some stamps. Using a napkin ring (it was the perfect size we needed - you can also use cookie cutters of any shape you like) we cut out circles.


G then took a skewer and pierced a hole in the top of each one. He then stamped them. He did one batch that he stamped "a gift for you" and he added some little embellishments with other stamps around the edge for texture. Stamp words, names, designs, whatever you want.


We let them dry for 2 days. The first day they dried stamp up. We then flipped them over to dry a bit on back too.


You can use them as is - the white clay looks nice. Or, you can paint. We wanted an earthy look to go with some of our tea blend gifts, so we squirt a dab of gold acrylic paint on each disc, made sure the paint was in the sunken stamped areas, and then gently brushed/rubbed with a sponge brush to remove most of the paint from the surface (don't forget the back and edges), leaving the low lying words filled with darker paint. G finished a few dozen happily painting and brushing. Let dry. They look earthy and beautiful and are great for hand made gifts.

You can insert ribbon, raffia or twine through the hole and tie onto your gift. You can leave more generic or you can use the back of the disc to write a name (a paint pen works great). We are planning on making a few more batches of them since they look so nice - some that are long and skinny with stamped names going down the front, as well as a few other shapes/variations with stamps (snowflake, leaf, star). Love it!

clay!

For this fall, the boys wanted to try some new classes/activities. Of course the challenge is that asthma boy is not supposed to be in crowds of kids during cold/flu season, and we have to be *really* careful (not to mention that my other sensory boy can't do loud/crowded anyway).


One of the activities the boys have wanted to do is clay/pottery. We found an awesome local studio that has open studio hours during the week days and we can go whenever we want to and not worry so much about crowds of kids and loud and too much and viruses. PERFECT.


We went to our first open clay studio last week and the got familiar with the setup and how things work. Both boys really enjoyed themselves, and we will definitely be going all winter. We even hope to have a private lesson so they can learn the wheel! Fun!


And the bonus is this mama can participate too - love it.

clay tea light holders.

Over the past few weeks G has been making tea light holders with me out of air dry clay. We started by making a few as a test to see how it worked and turned out. It is quite simple and anything to do with clay is good with G.


We started by taking an air dry clay (we like this one) and rolling it into a ball - about palm size. We then took a tea light and pushed it into the middle firmly, until it was even on the bottom and pushed it around sideways a little to be sure there was extra room for the tea light to go back in when it dried. G dipped his fingers into water and smoothed around the tea light a little bit.

We let them dry a few days with the tea light still in it, and then took it out, turned over the now mostly dry clay, and let the bottom dry too.


G painted the clay with a craft acrylic paint - we found one that said it was for ceramics and was shiny. He did two coats.


Once that was dry he took a brush and dabbed glue on the holders and then sprinkled glitter on that to stick. After they were all dry we lit them! G loves the sparkles in the candlelight.


They look nice and festive. We are making some more with different colors/shapes and less glitter for gifts.

To make the clay base even it does require working together with little ones more closely in the first molding phase, but the painting and decorating is no holds barred! :) Fun!

air sculpture: falling leaves

The boys wanted to hang the waxed leaves (we made on Friday) from our dining room light fixture, but they wanted something to make it special. So, we rolled some air dry clay, cut out leaf shapes, let them dry, and then painted them before stringing them up as the center point of the "air sculpture" (as A calls it).


To get the leaves to hang just right we tied red twine to the ends and strung them up at varying heights. They said it feels like leaves are falling right in our dining room!

clay beads.

With two sick boys (yep, both) we took it slow much of this week. They didn't have much energy to do too much at a time, but did want to be somewhat busy, so in between playing a lot of board games, reading books, listening to books on CD, doing sticker books and watching a few movies, we also did some craft projects. Both boys really like working with the air dry clay, and enjoy any excuse to include that in a project.

This time around we made beads. Making beads is pretty easy - pinch off a bit of clay, roll it up, shape it into whatever you want it to be (cube, circle, tube), and stick it onto a skewer.


From there we decided we wanted some texture, so the boys rolled the beads over some stamps to imprint the moist clay. We also tried winding thin craft wire around and then removing to add a pattern too.


We let the beads dry about 24 hours and then moved on to paint.


Using acrylics, the boys painted a base color - we used brown and deep red. Before the paint was dry we wiped it quickly with a sponge to get most of the paint off (while there was much that did still absorb into the clay). The boys then added some metallic paint over the top. They liked the idea of copper (which we saw at the geology museum), so we used copper and green as our two metallic colors.


We let that dry and then just coated one layer of clear matte acrylic varnish.


We have beads! They turned out great. They can be added to twine or leather to make a necklace, or - what I think we plan to do - they can be tied on to string or twine as embellishments...I'm thinking holiday gifts!

While the boys worked on their beads, I played around modeling heads (inspired by Gwen). Here is one of my screaming heads in progress... ;)