Art Project: Watercolours and Weaving

As I may have mentioned before, I am distinctly not a very crafty person; it's not my area of creativity.  However, my kids all love painting and colouring and about a gazillion other crafty things...and so I want to engage in these kinds of things for and with them.  Pinterset has been a huge help for me in this area; whenever I come across a craft project online that I think will work for the kids, I pin it to my Arts and Crafts board on Pinterest (here's the link to my Arts and Crafts board on Pinterest if you want to check them out: Arts and Crafts Activities); then, when I'm wanting to do some art or otherwise crafty thing with the kids, I've got lots of vetted ideas to work with.

There are a few blogs in particular that I love to follow when it comes to producing craft projects for the kids.  One of my favourites is A Faithful Attempt; another favourite is Art Projects for Kids.  I have been following these and a few other artsy-type blogs for a few months and the authors have been very helpful.  I believe that both of these blogs are written by schoolroom Art teachers and they post (usually) simple, lovely crafts for kids.  About two months ago, after I'd pinned a bunch of art ideas to my Pinterest board from these blogs, I went to the dollar store and to Michael's Crafts and collected enough art supplies to complete several of these projects with the kids.

Last week we did an art project that combined watercolour painting and weaving.  I think it worked out rather well.  On day #1 of the project, the kids learned about warm and cool colours and about wet-in-wet watercolour painting (which I'd just researched and learned about myself a few days earlier!).  We then proceeded to mix paints (I bought liquid/paste watercolour paints in tubes) and paint two watercolour pages each:  One in cool colours; the other in warm colours.  Before we set the paintings aside to dry, we all sprinkled our pages liberally with kosher salt, which we hoped would leave some interesting patterns behind as the salt absorbed the watery colours.

The next morning, when the paint was dry, the kids rubbed the salt off of the pages and they loved the patterns that the salt had left behind.  I helped the kids cut one of their painted pages into strips and cut lines through the other page for weaving purposes.  Then we wove the pages together in a basket pattern and glued the ends into place to hold it together.

It took quite a bit of persistence to get the weaving done to the end (Seth decided not to finish his weaving) but two of the kids and I completed our projects.

Here's the link to this particular craft in case you want to try it yourself:   A Faithful Attempt

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Painting our watercolour pages

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The next day, rubbing the salt off of the (dry) painted paper.

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There was a lot of salt rubbed off of the paper and onto the table!

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The warm-colour sheet here was cut into strips to weave through the cool colour page.

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Matthew's weaving in process.

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The lighting's not great on this picture, but here is Lizzie's project all done.  I was so impressed that she persisted and weaved right through to the end.  I coached her into cutting her warm-colour page into wide strips so that she wouldn't have quite so many strips to weave through the other page...I thought she might get frustrated if the weaving seemed like a never-ending job.  I thought she did a great job.

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I don't always do the craft that the kids are doing (usually I'm busy helping them!) but this one intrigued me a little and so I completed my own this time, too!