Children's Art Wall

We have 5 kids and they make a lot of pictures for us to enjoy.  Our refrigerator is stainless steel, which means it's not magnetic, and therefore the only way to display their art was taping it to the wall.  Um, not ideal.  So I saw this idea on Pinterest (originally pinned from The Project Girl, who found it in the Utah Valley Parade of Homes):

I loved it!  The only deal breaker is that it's white.  5 kids and 3 dogs and white are not a match made in heaven.  So I picked up a bunch of blues, greens, and purples to make my background.

I picked 8 different colors and then spread each color all over a piece of plywood and mixed them together in the brush strokes.  Don't worry about it being perfect, just splatter it randomly around.

The entire sheet was done in about 8 sections so the paint wouldn't dry before I got to mixing it together.

I cut it down to 4' x 6' and then nailed it to the wall with my nail gun.  I screwed eyelet screws into pine boards and then nailed all the trim on top of the background.  Then I added picture wire between the eyelets for the kids to hang their artwork on.

A quick little close up:

I finished it off with a little paintable caulk to fill the holes and painted the pine boards to match the rest of the house trim.  Now the kids can hang their art as they finish it and change it out on a whim.  The best part is that they have a dedicated art space in the center of the home where it has a place of honor and everyone can enjoy it.

Minecraft Creeper Wall Art

The kids have been into Minecraft all year and Glenn has been begging for me to paint his bedroom walls with creepers and zombies. Knowing that they will outgrow it in a year or so I wasn't too keen on painting the walls again that quickly, though. But with a painting we can swap it out later when tastes change and this way we're both happy.

The pixelated style of the game makes painting very simple. Lay out a quick grid with some pencil and start filling. I used 5 shades of green and just randomly picked the squares as I went.

A little black paint fills in the face and voila! It's a Minecraft Creeper.

Kids Rooms: Fairies

Day 17/31:

Each of the kids has gotten to pick the general theme of their rooms. K wanted fairies and butterflies and I made the fairies little, as I imagined a fairy should be. See the first one to the right of the closet?



I added three Disney fairies to the room, each on a different wall. They were projected onto the wall with a craft projector using a free coloring sheet I downloaded online. Each one was traced onto the wall with pencil, filled in, and then outlined in permanent marker. The wings were done with a glitter craft paint (and I didn't trace that part with marker but just left the pencil) and the translucent effect came out just the way I'd hoped for.







Of course fairies have to have a fairy castle, too. Like I did for the fairies I used a craft projecter to get a graphic onto the wall and then filled it in with paint.



Now as her friends come over they can hunt for the hidden fairies that were sprinkled about and it adds a little extra fun.

Curtains, Forts and Monkey Bars

Day 15/31:

***Let me say first that I make NO safety recommendations on this and if you follow this project you do so at your own risk.***

One of the girls' favorite things on a playground is monkey bars. But most of the playgrounds closest to our home don't have them. So we built them in one of the girl's closets.



We fastened 2x4s to 3 walls of her closet and capped the front with a 4th piece. Electrical conduit is used to make the bars and we drilled holes into the 2x4s to hold them. Then we screwed down through the top of the 2x4 and into the bars to keep them from spinning as that would suck when trying to catch the next one. Originally we wrapped them with duct tape to soften it on her hands but we found she actually just preferred it as plain bars.



The girls have loved it but it wasn't very pretty to look at so I made some curtains for the outside of it. The same curtains that Luna ate a couple days ago. Last Thursday I was home with a sick kiddo so I made another curtain to replace it and got them hung up. Now it has a little reading corner inside when she isn't using it as monkey bars.



And the curtains can all close up to make a private fort as well.

Butterfly Mobile

Day 3/31:

Inspired by the Heartland Paper mobile (found via Pinterest) I made one for Erin's bedroom makeover.



It's really very simple (Heartland paper has a step by step and a materials list so I'll let you click over there for the list). I cut out two butterflies for every one I wanted on a string so they could be glued together around the fishing line. So, each string has 5 butterflies but it's made from 10 punches.



I folded them a little using a straight edge (a butter knife in this case) so that the wings would stick up a bit.



I precut all of my butterflies and fishing line and then I started gluing them to the line. I didn't measure the distance but rather just eyeballed it to "close enough". The Elmer's glue Glue-All dries a little faster than the regular stuff and was perfect for this.



I ended up with 8 rows of 5 butterflies for the outside and 4 rows of 6 for the inside (but on the same size string).



For the metal ring on mobiles someone suggested buying a grease splatter shield from the dollar store and removing the middle for an inexpensive ring. It worked perfectly and was super cheap (does anyone know who said that because I can't remember which blog to give credit for the idea. I'll update this if someone knows). Next I tied the string onto my metal ring and then added bits of ribbon around the edges and to the fishing line across the middle. A little extra ribbon is perfect for hanging it and hides the tack that's in the top to hold it to the ceiling. It's so light that a single tack seems to be more than enough to keep it there.

The Importance of Art for Kids

I cannot express enough how important I think art is to children. Even the littlest of projects may stay in a child's mind forever and help shape the person that they will become. My grandmother was a very artistic and creative woman and started in early teaching us kids to love it too. She enrolled me in my first sewing class, helped us make enamels, taught me how to twist wire for jewelry and make coils (like this) and was always such an inspiration. Her home was very colorful and expressive and filled with interesting things for the kids and adults to find fascination in. She also gave me my first copy of Anne of Green Gables and helped cement my love of reading. I can only hope to instill in my children all of the gifts that she gave to me.

Below are a couple of the projects she helped me with. They created memories that I will never forget and, while they just seemed like fun at the time, it started a love of art that I'll always have.

Age 11: (I wasn't really this talented at enamels. My grandmother helped me quite a bit to recreate a drawing that Little-Little and I had made for her.)


Age 10: (My older sister used to draw this all the time and I wanted to recreate it as an enamel. Like the 80's ponytail?)


Age 7: (This was an exercise in perspective. I made this picture with the assumption that I was laying on the ground with the flower in front of my face and the houses off in the distance. My older sister made endless fun of me for thinking that flowers could be bigger than houses...)


After the kids went to bed last night I grabbed a level and a hammer started changing the art wall around to include my childhood enamels.



I added the canvases the kids made with punches this spring and the enamels I made when I was small (before we found out that the enamel powder had lead in it and they stopped letting me use it. boo). It also brings more blue to the top of the wall and it seems to make the chairs match everything better.



What kind of projects do you do with your kids/grandkids/nephews/nieces?

Tween Girl Room: Headboard

Having redone the older boys' room recently I figured I should turn my attention to the 3 kid rooms upstairs (the girls and K2). I've started on Erin's redo first only because the idea for it seems to be falling together first (Erin has had some fun ideas for her room that I think are pretty cool. Yay for my creative 7 year old).

The first project for her room was getting the full size bed in and the twin bunk bed out. In order to get the full in she was going to need a headboard. I saw this on Pinterest (originally from here) and loved the idea. Now, I don't have any salvaged wood so I went new. Also, for the theme I working on in there I thought "grow" would be a good word to put on hers instead of "love".

I cut 5 1x6 boards (about $3.50 each) down to 54" and 2 1x3 to 48"



I stained the front and sides of the boards and used the 1x3 for legs. The square made sure I had it all at the correct angle. I left 20" at the bottom for the legs (the height of the mattress comes to 21 so it will overlap a tiny bit) and inset the legs a little so they weren't visible from the sides. I did add another piece of wood in the middle, that isn't pictured here, so the whole thing wouldn't tilt later (needed!).



I made stencils for the letters from printer paper, one sheet each for the r and the o and two sheets for the g and the w. The ruler was definitely my friend here but I free handed quite a bit. To make the o symetrical I folded it in half one way, traced against a window, and then folded the other way and traced that side. That way all 4 sides would be the same. I did the same for the top part of the g as well.



Then I traced the outline of the letters with a pencil. It was barely visible on the stain color, which is perfect so that if I missed painting over a few bits (and I did) then it wouldn't be noticeable.



And voila! One full size headboard for about $20 for lumber and stain (paint I already had left over).



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