kindred imaginations

Ahhh! Summertime!!! I'm sharing our best creative endeavors from the past two weeks. We are collectors. The kids are always bringing me flowers, feathers, bugs and some stuff you wouldn’t believe. So we took a bunch of the collected duck, goose & turkey feathers that we had around, and painted them with acrylic craft paints. It was really fun, particularly for S and me! We found that painting the dark feathers with white paint first was helpful some times, but that it was also cool to let the feathers’ natural colors show through. I was playing with ombre color transitions and found that mixing colors right on the feather was pretty sweet. AJ also mixed colors right on the feathers until he got pretty much the same grayish brown that the feathers started out being. J wanted to get really detailed, like painting Darth Vader on his feathers and he lost interest pretty quickly. I mounted some of our best feathers on a 2'x3' black masonite board and it's now hanging in our living room.

You want to see some close ups of these fabulous feathers don't you!

We busted out a new box of sidewalk chalk and drew and drew and drew!

Then that night there was a whopping thunderstorm which washed our sidewalks clean. So we drew and drew and drew again the next day. S is into big colorful drawings.

a dragon in its mountain top lair.

a mermaid on a starfish covered rock

a sea serpent and its babies (I added the octopus and J did the sunken pirate ship and ocean floor)

J is into detailed explosives factories, battle scenes. . .

and drew little sticks of dynamite all over the place so you have to be careful where you walk your you might explode too.

AJ drew lightning and helped color in some of my drawings.

After the whopping thunderstorm, the kids found a small cactus blooming in our wild yard. Instead of bringing me to the cactus, they dug up the cactus and brought it to me. (?!?!?!?) So we put it in a pot with the cactus starts that they inherited from their Great Great Grandma P and a little jade plant that wasn’t happy indoors.

The last project was a little too much for my nerves. The two oldest got white t-shirts with their running club logo on them, and they wanted to tie dye them. I bought a good dye kit and then was a little uptight about them potentially getting the dye on anything other than the intended shirts. The shirts turned out beautifully. J’s swirl is as perfect as any Deadhead ever dyed.