Project #5: Art Project

This would be the project where I started to question my sanity. When the third grade room mom was looking for someone to do a craft for the spring party, I figured "Hey, why not? I'll do it." I bought some pre-made blank cards, grabbed some dollar ink pads and planned on doing this cool stamping project that I had seen from lilmagoolie.com. Now had I stopped there, I think I would have been okay. But then I thought "Well that might be kind of out of the box for some kids. Maybe I should grab some dollar stamps too and give them several options that way instead of just doing the pencil stamping thing." Sounds good in theory. In practice, it was sort of insane. I had planned on them using baby wipes to wash off the pencil erasers between colors. I thought it would work for the stamps too, but I didn't test that. Nor did I take into account the huge volume of ink that 8-9 year olds would apply to the stamps. I should have.

Basically the party consisted of me throwing wipes at random kids, wiping down desks, reminding them to put paper under their cards and ink pads, and rinsing out stamps at the sink for 45 minutes solid. It. was. crazy. But the kids loved it. And in the end the only kid with stamping on his clothes was my own kid. Not bad. We didn't even stain the carpet or a desk. I am, however, considering getting rid of that hot pink stamp pad. It was seriously popular with the girls and so I was washing out lots of stamps with it on them. It took three days for it all to wear off of my fingers. If you ever do a "simple stamping project" you may want to skip the stamps and just do the pencil thing. Just saying. I don't have any pics because I was busy with damage control.

According to the boy his class loved the project though. So, we'll take it.

And that's about it for this week. The rest of my creative energy was absorbed making 2 spider costumes for the school play. It seemed easy enough but there were a few things that I learned with costume one that made costume two take about half the time. If you are ever making a spider/ladybug/etc. costume, I've got some ideas of how not to do it that I can pass along. In other news, I need to put my new found insect/arthropod costume techniques to use again someday so don't be surprised if you see one of my kiddos sporting extra legs this Halloween. I'm thinking I can sell the 4 year old on it as long as it is hot pink and orange.