Sand painting @ WBCL

It was a full house as it has been most of the summer and the creativity was flowing. Everyone got a sheet of blue paper and 6 colors of tempera paint. We added sand to the paint to thicken it and then painted with the crafts sticks using them to create the textured detail that the sand can provide. 


As you can see the variety of designs was superb and of course several of the parents were asking for paper too so they could paint along with their kids. We get a wide range of ages participating so it is sometimes tough to have projects for all ages but this on was not hard at all. 


The Family Arts & Crafts group meets at the Wells Branch Community Library every Wednesday night at 6 pm taught by Dianne Koehler. The program lets us turn donations and imagination into great projects.

you may also want to take a look at the new Art & crafts database the library recently subscribed to for the patrons. check  the website for details.

Painting Animals on Rocks @ the Wells Branch Library

Just when you think there is not a new thing to paint on--rocks appear. Actually I have this great set of books by Lin Wellford: Painting Animals on Rocks that I bought a few years ago. It calls for rather nice sized landscape rocks--nice smooth rocks--but all I had was cluncky, chunky ones and tiny smooth ones. We looked at then and got a feel for the creature within and started drawing and painting. One of them looked like a snake's face to me--not to the artist who used it. Another seemed to be a perfect beaver--she says it is a dog. Parents really got into this with their kids and by themselves--the cat at the top was done by a mom. Very detailed snakes were coiled on tiny rocks with lots of stripes--are snakes blue?
The group meets every Wednesday night at 6pm at the Wells Branch Community Library using the "storytime" room.

Pop up boxes

Most of the kids in Wednesday arts & crafts class at the Wells Branch Community Library were not sure if they had ever seen a Jack-in-the-box but they sure got the idea. They cut and folded their own boxes ( with just a bit of help from moms), then drew animals and other things to pop out of their boxes. They learned paper folding for the spring and many of them just had to decorate the outside of the box too. Maybe sometime we'll have to make gift boxes out of pretty paper!

Turning shells into critters

We had a fine time last night turning some inexpensive shells into the most interesting critters--cute little mice, scarry aliens, crabs and many that had no names. Sorry no pictures this week but one of the mom's took some and may share. I used 2 books--Look what I did with a shell and Exciting things to do with nature materials. They are both out of print but readily available. We have finally limited the group to 25 kids with parents and used tickets for admission. It seemed to work a lot better and everyone still had fun. (of course as families left we allowed others in but we were below the room capacity of 50)

Collage frames for stamped pictures

What an easy and fun project for a hot day. We took extra book jackets from kids books and cut them up into 1/2" pieces. The kids glued these pieces onto mats for picture frames then picked out a stamp and made a couple of inserts for their frame. A couple of the boys got adventerous and stenciled ants for their insert.