Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Herb Gardens


For mothers day I prepared some herb gardens for the 2 main mothers in my life, my mom and mother in law. I bought the herb plants, each pot contained 3 plants, so I separated them. I also found the cute planters. You can get herbs at most farmers markets and local farms. This is a great time of the year to start one. They you just bring it inside when the weather gets cold and you have fresh herbs all year long. Don't forget to water them!


The herb gardens turned out really cute, and I was excited to get them each something they did not already have. Each garden held basil, thyme, cilantro, and sage, which I labeled with some cardboard cutouts and permanent markers. I have been wanting an herb garden forever, so of course I made myself one too! They made great presents, I think it was probably around $20 for each garden. Here are a few more photos.


I also potted up a few aloe plants for my sister and sister in law. I figure those are pretty easy to care for and they are useful for minor scrapes and burns. They were under $8 for each plant and pot! Really affordable gifts!

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Andy Warhol- Picture Person Project

Today I went to my son's kindergarten class as Picture Person, to talk about Andy Warhol. There were lots of artist's we could pick from, as Picture Person, and Andy Warhol was NOT one of them. I wanted to do him anyway, because he is one of my favorite artist's and my son really likes him too. So i searched around town and ended up calling our local museum, Lakeview. Even though they did not have a copy of the print I wanted, they were very nice and printed me a good color copy of the print, Grevy's Zebra, along with some info on it.

For the project, I wanted to let the kids decorate their own Zebras. I traced a simplified version of the Zebra onto a thin piece of cardboard, then using am exacto-knife, I cut out a stencil. After the stencil was done I used white acrylic gesso and painted the image onto black paper.

Once the copies were dry, I let the kids test out their some different things on the paper. They tried multi-colored chalk, bright crayons, glitter glue, and bright colored puffy paint. Everything worked well except for glitter glue. Crayons showed up best on top of the white lines. The puffy paint really added a lot to zebra, traced along some of the white lines. We made sure and did the paint last. For an added texture effect we took a comb and went over some of the lines.


Here is the end result. The kids in my son's kindergarten class really enjoyed this project!