We made our nature folk this Saturday.
My oldest granddaughter made the one in the middle with the beautiful wings facing forward, mine is the one with a crooked smile on the right, and my youngest granddaughter made the one on the left with the cute flower hat
I couldn’t find the non toxic heavy gel medium that Sally Haughey recommends in her ebook Guide to Art Materials so I bought the Golden brand she featured. It was not non toxic and the jar recommends “avoiding ingestion, excessive skin contact, and inhalation of spraying mists, sanding dusts and concentrated vapors”. I didn’t think we were going to eat it or inhale it and I planned to use popsicle sticks to apply it as Sally recommends in her book so I didn’t think we had to worry about excessive skin contact so we went ahead and “gave it a go”.
They came out really well and the gel did dry well but it was difficult to get some things to set initially so we did end up getting it on our fingers. It peeled off like Elmer’s glue and we washed our hands as well so it probably wasn’t excessive skin contact but it does make me a bit leery about using the gel at the museum or a child care center.
Update: I emailed Sally Haughey with my concern and she sent me the Amazon link to a non toxic brand – US Art Supply Impasto Clear Gel Acrylic Medium. The Amazon listing says it’s non toxic, dried clear, and can be used as a strong adhesive. If I order a jar, I’ll update again.
Since I didn’t know that “spill the tea” meant to tell the truth or share some gossip or know that T stands for the word truth in drag culture, I had no idea what the latest Shimmy billboard meant. My oldest daughter knew what spill the tea meant and some googling revealed that T for truth was popularized by the drag queen Lady Chablis in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”.
Roger Brown, a Chicago Imagist, left his home with his collections to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and I was lucky enough to get to see it (visits need to be arranged) last year as part of the Intuit summit. He collected the work of other Imagists, outsider artists, folk and indigenous art, popular culture objects, costumes, textiles, furniture, souvenirs and more! He lived above his studio/gallery in a small apartment and it has been preserved with all his collections intact. It was amazing to see works by Howard Finster, Henry Darger, and other artists whom I’m used to seeing in museums casually displayed in a home.
There was much much more – to much to photograph everything but I couldn’t resist taking a picture of this egg carton cross.
An amazing collection- I’m going to have to arrange another visit.
I had already taken a picture of these little guys I bought many years ago at a Waldorf fair to post when my preordered copy of “Wonder Art Workshop” by Sally Haughey of Fairy Dust Teaching arrived yesterday. It is a beautiful book with many wonderful ideas for creating with young children. I was especially drawn to “Workshop 7 – Nature Folks” which suggests using peg body forms, beads, pinecones and other items from nature to create nature fairies and people. According to Sally a product called heavy matte gel medium is strong enough to glue things together so that children can make things that adults usually use glue guns to make. I can’t wait to try it with my grandchildren. In addition to materials from nature I plan to offer some other materials. I think the characters above are wrapped in the fiber I use for felting and they have pipe cleaner arms. My favorite thing about them is that the acorn tops they are holding are filled with tiny sparkly beads. The flower fairies I’ve made are dressed in fabric flowers and have pipe cleaner arms and legs.
I originally made their wings with wire and old pantyhose but then I started using craft store butterfly wings and I still have some of them to offer. I can’t wait to see what my grandchildren create when they come for their first overnight the weekend after next.
I have been intrigued by a series of billboards in my neighborhood since I moved here. The latest one’s tagline is “A loan officer and a gentleman”. The last one was “Don’t drag out your mortgage” and like this one featured the same man with drag queen.
It turns out the man is Shimmy Braun a mortgage lender at Guaranteed Rate. He grew up an an orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn that was “so religious that he was engaged to his Chicago-born bride to be after knowing her for only 12 days.” They moved to Chicago and he built up a business as a mortgage lender in the orthodox Jewish community of Rogers Park. But when he came out as gay and got divorced at 40 he lost that clientele and needed to build up a new one. Hence the drag queen ads in the Boystown neighborhood!
Remembering Vegas and Dwyn on the last Day of the Dead with this remarkable picture of them not only in the same room but on the same bed right next to each other – a once in their lifetime occasion.
I hadn’t had any ideas for this years treats when Halloween decorations began appearing in stores. A Fortune Teller’s sign with a large eye image caught my eye (ha!) at Michael’s and that was my inspiration. I created my signs in Word using “shapes”, “word art” and copyright free images I found on the internet. Then I started looking for eye candy (ha!) preferably chocolate. I found some that tasted like Nestle’s crunch bars at the Dollar Tree. One is peeking out (ha again!) in the photo. The phrase “I see you” seemed to go with the eye and the fortune telling theme since when I googled it “I know you” or “I get you” came up as the definition.
My youngest daughter and I have been talking about Halloween costume choices a lot this year. Her youngest daughter really wanted to be one of the Rainbow Rangers (a character from an animated tv show) this year. Her older daughter had easily accepted that in their house they didn’t choose characters for Halloween. The one time she had said she wanted to be Elsa, my daughter had just said, “No, what kind of animal do you want to be?” and she chose a flamingo. (She did get an Elsa costume for Christmas that year for her dress up corner) But this year my daughter mentioned that she had once been Ernie for Sesame Street for Halloween and her daughter was shocked, “Wait, What? You were allowed to be a character? I want to be one too.”
I pointed out that yes she was a character but that I made her Ernie mask and bought her a red and blue striped shirt, I didn’t buy a commercial costume. I said I thought it wasn’t so much what you were but that it was important to make or put together your costume.
But it turns out my daughter has another issue with characters which is that during trick or treating grownups often don’t know who you are. “Oh, what a cute Cinderella!” necessitating an “I’m Elsa” footstomp or eye roll. Given this explanation my older granddaughter who had wanted to be Mal (daughter of Maleficent) from the movie The Descendents said she would like to be a purple witch. Pretty clever since Mal is basically a purple witch. So my daughter bought her a purple witch costume and the younger one decided to be a witch too. Problem solved for this year!
The purchased character costume versus the home made or assembled costume is an argument that plays out in many houses. In an article in the Parade this weekend Kelly Ripa answered the question, “What was your favorite costume when you were a kid?” with this familiar sounding answer, “All I wanted was one of those costumes with a plastic mask that came in the box. But because my mom was not big on store-bought costumes, I always wound up wearing my ballet costume from the year before.”
I didn’t even have last year’s ballet costume, my memory is that I went as a gypsy every year with my pink and orange skirt, a peasant blouse, a kerchief, and curtain rings as hoop earrings. The last year I went trick or treating I tried to make a butterfly costume out of hangers and tissue paper which was very difficult but I managed to create something and then it rained so I just had to go as a modern dancer in the leotard and tights I had planned to wear with the wings.
My children have some interesting home made costume stories too. There was the year my husband created a Tin Man costume for our older daughter out of aluminum duct pipe which looked wonderful but was hard to walk in – she couldn’t bend her legs to climb the stairs! There was the year I made a Hershey Kiss costume for my younger daughter using a lamp shade for the kiss base that was a bit too short.
They went on to create some great costumes for themselves, though. There was Devil in a Blue Dress (Blue dress and Devil horns and tail) and with another friend A Little Bit Angel and A Little Bit Devil (one dressed in white and one in red and they each wore some Angel and some Devil costume pieces), A Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich (Large felt pieces of bread one with jelly and one with peanut butter that attached together), and a Gangster and his Moll (the perfect Chicago costume).
This year Halloween falls on the day I volunteer at the Children’s Museum and I have heard of some amazing past costumes. Since I’ve always thought a hat I had acquired for my classroom dramatic play area looked like Mary Poppins’ hat, I decided to create a Mary Poppins costume. Although when I put it on and look in the mirror I think maybe Mrs. Doubtfire would be more fitting at this point in my life. On the other hand it may seem like an inspired choice since rain and snow are in the forecast for Halloween this year and I’ll have a wonderful Mary Poppins umbrella!
We found a little free library outside the Kohler Art Center. I think its little front porch is a nod to the Italianate home built by John Michael Kohler that was donated by the Kohler Foundation to the Sheboygan Arts Foundation and became the art center in the late 1960’s. While there have been two additions since the house is still an important gallery space for the museum.
The little free library had a couple of surprises inside.
I don’t know who the picture is of. It isn’t labeled and I thought I might be able to find out by looking up the box number on the little free library site but it didn’t seem to be registered.
The other surprise was what I found in the box – a catalog still wrapped in shrink wrap from the inaugural exhibit of the works of folk artist Earl Cunningham at The Mennello Museum of American Folk Art in Orlando, Florida in 1998. The museum which was built to house the Menello’s collection of Earl Cunningham’s work has since expanded it’s collection and dropped the “folk” from it’s name but is still the home of Cunningham’s paintings. I had not seen his work before so finding the book made our visit to the art center even richer!
On our way to the Bookworm Gardens we found another little free library with a beautiful painting on the outside.
We didn’t find any books we wanted in the inside of this library but at Bookworm Gardens we found many beautiful gardens inspired by children’s books. I only took pictures of a few of them.
Little House in the Big Woods
Peter Rabbit
The Three Little Pigs
Many of the gardens didn’t seem to have their main characters so I was glad to see Horton.
The largest and most elaborate scene was of a book I had never heard of titled “Conor the Caddie” which turned out to be set at the golf course in Kohler.
The Bookworm Gardens had its own little libraries with the garden’s featured books rebound for Garden reading.
The Young Artist Program is up and running again. Since the art studio is in a children’s museum not an art museum the projects aren’t usually inspired by the exhibits. But the current exhibit “The Pigeon Comes to Chicago” is based on the work of children’s book author and illustrator Mo Willems. One component of the exhibit includes videos of a talking head Mo attached to a Mo drawn body instructing children on how to draw his iconic characters. “Drawing,” he says, “is just a bunch of letters and shapes put together in the right order.”
One of Liz’s past Drawing Lab exercises focused on finding the shapes in animals in order to draw them and that became the inspiration for our first project of the year – animal collages.
The collage paper is from a former project a large version of the marble in a box project – balls in kiddie pools! (I wasn’t there for this activity so I really hope we do it again)
Since the resulting pictures look more like the work of Eric Carle than Mo Willems, images from his books hang on the inspiration wall as well.
After they finish their animals everyone gets two googly eyes to “make them come alive” says Liz noting that Walt Disney said he always added the eyes last for that reason.
I always loved art classes in school but I don’t think we ever had drawing lessons (which is why although I was accepted into college as an art major I quickly realized I wouldn’t be able to graduate as one) so I never heard about the concept of using shapes to draw until I was a preschool teacher. I was trying to copy a Leo Lionni frog and I wanted him to face the other way but couldn’t figure out how to do it. I asked a teacher who could draw for some help. She pointed to his back legs and said, “You see this triangle here you just need to flip it so it goes the other way.” This triangle? It was eye opening. Liz says that when she created her drawing lab exercises she started by thinking how can I teach those who don’t know how to draw instinctively the techniques that artists use. It is exciting that while the art studio visitors have fun gluing shapes to make animals they are hearing about this important concept.
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 