So easy a caveman could do it...

Or me...

It has been incredibly, uncommonly, wonderfully warm here for this time of year for the past 5 days.  Therefor, the 2’s, mini and I have spent a lot of time outside and almost no time with our regular routine.  We’ve been doing a lot of this...  

and this... 

and some of this... 

which is great, because just a few weeks ago we were doing this... 

(yes, that’s a pool in my kitchen.  When it’s 20 degrees in March and you have cabin fever, you do just about anything to beat the winter blues!)

This leaves very little time for what we would normally be doing at any given moment of the day.  Including napping, crafting and blogging.  Therefore, today’s artsy/crafty moment is a departure from my normal attempts to tackle bigger projects than my skill level will allow.  Yes, today’s project is right up my alley.

I’ve been feeling very springy lately due to the sunshine and general cheeriness of the weather.  I even made up a little song for the kiddos about Spring... I’m a little shy singing in front of people, so I won’t bore you with a rendition, but it involves blue skies, trees, green grass, sunshine and, of course, flowers!  Beautiful flowers!

Last fall I was doing some searching (through the internet and my own craft stuffs) to find toddler-worthy arts and crafts for bug and K.  I wanted some things that were educational and some that were just artsy and fun.  I remembered doing this coffee filter “dip dye” when I was in 6th grade science (in fact, I still have my best friend’s coffee filter that she made in class and gave to me).  I really don’t know what this has to do with Science, to tell the truth, so I think the lesson actually failed.  But I do remember the activity, which is really the important part, anyway.  

Basically, you color all over a coffee filter with markers and then fold it in half three times.  You dip the point into a bowl of water and watch the water spread up the filter and bleed the colors together.  The more saturated with color the coffee filter is, the better.  Then you unfold them and lay them out to dry.  They end up looking a little like tie-dye.  

So I figured, why not make some flowers?  What better way to welcome Spring?  And this is something little 2-yr-old hands could help with.  

The kids had fun coloring with markers - especially since I NEVER let them color with markers (what sane person would?) - and we used washable.  

Which was good because bug thought it was super funny to color all over himself.  He started by drawing on his hands.  Then he moved to his mouth.  He laughed as he drew on his lips, “I putta lipstick on!”  Silly boy.  But it was bad because it was a little too washable when we dipped the fliters in the water.  They still turned out alright, some of them were just a little pale.  

Then we took turns dipping, and I let the 2’s use a little dropper to sprinkle water on the filters, which they thought was so cool.  

bug had a minor meltdown when K took her turn with the dropper, so all fun and games were put on hold for nap time.  

I turned the filters upside down for a while to let the water and colors run all the way down, then spread them open to dry.

After nap, we came back to the table to play with pipe cleaners.  bug and K thought bending the cleaners into shapes was oh, so cool.  I made them both circles and we sang the circle song while I started shaping stems and leaves and poking them into the flower.  I initially tried to make a structured flower shape, and discovered it was really better to just gather the filter up, stick it together with a little bit of tape and wrap the top of the “stem” around the bottom part of the flower.  

(please ignore the pink hair clip.  I think he sometimes feels left out in a house full of girls!)

Tomorrow we are making a vase out of a Pringles can to go with them!  And voila!  My Spring centerpiece!

It’s not rocket science, I know, and it probably isn’t even very original.  But it is a tribute to spring that even my two-year-old can do!  You gotta love that!  








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