Beautiful Butterfly Garland

I recently discovered Play at Home Mom's blog and facebook page. They have lots of great ideas for activities to do with your kids. What's really great is that their kids are about the same age or younger than our daughter, so the ideas are generally age-appropriate! Yay!

One of our favorite new activities is painting with liquid watercolor.

You add drops of concentrated liquid watercolor into water and start painting--very easy!

Our little artist's favorite thing to do is pour and mix the colors.

The paintbrushes are pretty cool, too, they're good for mixing the colors on the paper!

Most of our colors got mixed to look mostly purple. :)

Hanging up to dry!

Then I decided to do something fun: I rubbed both sides of the paper (it was 110 lb cardstock) with oil and sandwiched it with papertowels and heavy books to help the paper flatten again. The oil caused the paper to become slightly translucent. Then I traced butterflies onto the paper.

I cut them out...

And sewed them all together into a chain at different intervals.

Then we hung the butterflies up over our girl's bed. They turned out so beautifully!

She was thrilled with them and wants to make more. :)

So that's some of our summer fun around here!
~Regina