fiance, student, homeschool retiree, preschool teacher wannabe, Senior Living Coordinator, writer of many things unsaid, blogger, lover of the creative, most cheerful depressed person, devourer of books, crafty wanna be, amateur tech support, internet junkie, facebook stalker, tweeter of tweets, Pagan, friend, sister, daughter, aunt, karaoke super-star
On Monday we always do a short art lesson. Currently we are learning to draw and sketch with pencils. I found this great website called
Drawspace, that provides free lessons you can view online or in PDF. I plan on working our way through the courses.
This was a fun lesson, that referenced a sketch from Leonardo da Vinci's Study of an Old Man. (
Here is a color page too )
In this lesson we learned to find our natural and most comfortable hand motion.
Here are the boys attempts, their findings are circled.
On Christmas Eve we made some gingerbread cookies for Santa.
Just after I took this picture Kaleb (7) says, " I don't even look like I've been cooking!" Then he grabbed a handfull of flour and rubbed it into the front of his apron.
Here I am looking very cheesy.
Ha! And Levi after I made him look like he was cooking too!
We usually make one new ornament every year. We make it in bulk and then pass them out as gifts to friends, neighbors, and family.
This year we picked this little craft from
Family Fun called Nutty Elves.
photo from Family Fun.com
They were pretty easy to make with the bigger boys (10 and 13). The little boys (7 and 5) had trouble because of the small size of the peanuts, but they made about 5 each. Oliver (5) loved gluing on the noses. You could easily do these assembly line fashion as a family, giving each person a part based on their abilities.
Tips:
- Pre-make hats and shoes.
- Cut arms and legs ahead of time with wire cutters.
- Pose them before you glue them in.
- Use tacky glue and have hot glue gun on hand.
- Hot glue to wrapped candy canes
After we assembled the elves, I hot glued them in fun poses onto wrapped candy canes. We used fishing line for the hanger and I just hot glued it to the candy cane to make it secure.
We think they turned out cute and hope they last a few years. They sure made people smile when they opened them.
