Sea voyages crafts

The month of November was dedicated to learning a little bit about adventurers and travelers, I posted a book list a few weeks ago (will post and extended one soon in my book blog). Now it's time to share two crafts that we did.
1. The inspiration for this craft came from here. D. was very excited to make a playscene of his own. He painted all over a cardboard box, I scanned and printed some boats from our favorite books, we coated it with some modpodge and voila!

2. We learned about Ancient China in the month of November, we talked about inventions, so making a compass was a good idea. Instructions how to make a compass at home can be found here.

Photopic Sky Survey

I found this via charts and maps community. 

The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity.

This.Is. Awesome. 

Learning about JAPAN: Japanese landscape art

It's all about Japan this last week in our house.
Today we looked through the book of Hiroshige prints and paintings.

We talked how there are recurring themes in pretty much every picture- trees, mount Fuji, rivers and sea (water), sunset, people. We talked how love and admiration of nature is an important part of Japanese culture. We also noticed that on these pictures colors weren't bright, nor were they even.

Then we attempted to create our own Japanese landscapes.
There are very good ideas at Smithsonian Education web site regarding teaching Art of Japan.
A few days ago I saw a lovely idea how to make pretty colors with markers and water at Deep Space Sparkle  and I figured it would be a great way to create these beautiful uneven colors.

First we drew our large shapes- hills, sea, volcano. We added extra color at the edges and some waves to the sea and pink clouds in the sky. Then we added small details- houses and  trees. We grabbed our paintbrushes and water and "washed" our paper. It was so much fun and running colors created a lovely effect. D. was delighted. It also good that we used several shades of the same color- it added to the overall prettiness. We did not "wash" small details, only large ones for fear that it's just going to be messy, so after our paintings dried up we finished coloring houses with regular markers.

D.'s finished painting

yet another mobile

We love love love making mobiles, and a wine rack on the ceiling of my kitchen is the perfect excuse to make things to hang.
So here we go again, this time inspired by the star mobile that Gardenmama made a few days ago.
We went about it a little different- painted card stock and cut out different shapes (traced cookie cutters and come up with our usual heart and birdies :)). After that we  covered our shapes in glitter and glued them together with a  a little bead added to each piece of string. We tied it all to the wreath that we got in a craft store.

Friday lights

D. and dad made jack-o-lantern, plus D. made one during his clay class. The clay one is the scariest I think (and so does grandpa claiming it's the creepiest thing he's ever seen :D)


D. is still not sure about his costume -he wants to be either an eagle (eeek, how am I suppose to make it I have no idea, although it does remind me about this weird yet really funny movie) or a knight. We'll see. It will be the first year trick-or-treating, past years we just went to the party at the book store, so D. is pretty excited.



I loved the idea of Pumpkin fairy from The Magic Onions, we'll probably do that since D. is not into candy all that much anyway.

Background noise for today is  Kisses and Cake by John Powell ("P.S. I love you" soundtrack), such beautiful compositions and so peaceful.

To friends and visitors- have a marvelous week-end!