Tag Archives: group art project

What We’re Making: Spring Celebration Cards

April 21, 2016Creativity/Spirituality, What We're Makinggreeting card, group art project, handmade card, Spring, Texas, umbrella

Spring is here!

Here in Austin, it’s wildflower season; the highways and fields have exploded in Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes and Pink Evening Primrose… it’s a beautiful wash of color in what are normally plain patches of grass.

With our groups last week we made cards to celebrate Spring! Kaye also worked in quite a bit of learning with these, she’s so good at that. 🙂

To make our Spring Showers Bring Flowers cards, the participants got to practice their accordion folding skills, talk about what rain does for us, and learn the ROYGBIV of rainbows. Participants could do a little or a lot with their card, as you’ll see in the photos.

Here’s how we made them!

Choose a piece of colored construction paper for your umbrella.
Fold your construction paper accordion-style from the short edge. (You might find it helpful to use a popsicle stick to keep the folds even.)
Fold the umbrella paper in half.
Run a gluestick across the card like so:
Glue down the folded umbrella paper.
Glue the center of the folded umbrella paper together.
Draw a face under your umbrella! (We traced a circle there ahead of time to give our participants an idea of where to start.)
Bend a chenille stem at the end to form the umbrella handle.
Run liquid glue* down the chenille stem, and place it in the crease of the card underneath the umbrella. Hold it in place until it sticks.
Above and to the sides of the umbrella draw dashes for the rain. You can use a ruler to keep the lines straight.
On a separate piece of paper, draw a cover for your card. Here we made a rainbow and wrote “Happy Spring”!
Using glue stick, position your artwork inside the cover of your card and glue it in place. Enjoy your beautiful work as it reminds you of spring!

*A tip for the umbrella handle: we used chenille stems, which are such a fun tactile addition, but which didn’t want to stay glued down, even with liquid glue. Kaye’s solution was to have participants try it themselves, let it dry as well as it could, and Kaye would come around to help touch up any spots that weren’t sticking with more glue. Double-sided tape might even work better, in retrospect. We’ll try that next time!

Here are some of the cards our participants made!

Happy Spring to you! Who would you make a Happy Spring card for?

What We’re Making: Foil Designs

March 7, 2016Creativity/Spirituality, What We're Makingaluminum foil, group art project, group craft, Sharpies

Oooooo, shiny!

What a fun take on tangle art*. The 3D nature of the yarn and the sheen from the aluminum foil really makes these stand out!

Here’s how to go about making your own foil designs!

You will need:

pieces of posterboard, size 10″x12″ (color doesn’t matter, as you’ll be covering it all in foil)
yarn that can stretch across your posterboard (again, color doesn’t matter since it will get covered in foil)
scissors to cut the posterboard and yarn
glue sticks or liquid glue (liquid glue would be better if your group is small enough to supervise thusly; we used glue sticks for our larger groups)
pieces of aluminum foil, size 12″x14″
Sharpies of many colors (use the regular tip Sharpies; the fine tip ones tend to tear the foil)

Decide how you’d like your yarn lines to criss-cross your posterboard, then glue them in place. Let the yarn hang over the edges of the posterboard.

Once your yarn is glued down, cut the extra yarn from around the edges.

Then, lay a piece of aluminum foil on top.

Gently start smoothing the foil over and around the yarn, so that you start to see the outlines against the smooth posterboard.

Once it’s totally smoothed out, you should have very clear outlines; it will look something like this!

Fold the foil around the edges to keep it in place.

Now you’re ready to color! You can do some solid-colored sections:

But also try some patterned sections!

And keep coloring until you’re happy with the results!

Check out some that our participants made!

(On the bottom right there you can see that, if you happen to tear the foil, no worries, just tape it back together! We only had matte tape, but if you’ve got a shinier tape it’ll blend in all the more.)

I love the combination of all of the colors and patterns. And I love that these are made with materials so many of us already have in our houses! Send us pictures if you give this one a try.

*Not familiar with tangle art? Here’s a good Psychology Today article about it.