arts & crafts ideas

Noah has blossomed into a new love of art activities since he turned four. (Or maybe since I stopped working a million hours a week and started offering to do fun art activities with him, and he moved to a new preschool with more individual attention from teachers and a whole room dedicated to art. It’s a mystery!)

Here are a few blogs I’ve started glancing through for fun inspiration. We don’t generally do complicated projects, and we don’t have tons of art supplies (we really really try to have a low-’stuff’ environment, however doomed that effort may be …), but these sites still offer neat ideas for us:

• Made by Joel
• The Crafty Crow
• The Artful Parent
• Paint Cut Paste
• TinkerLab
• Color Color Color
• Maya*Made
• Filth Wizardy (win for the title, at the very least!)

And a few specific fun things:

• “sock friends“
• bean mosaic
• “paper critters“
• easy homemade play dough (I added an extra half cup of flour during the cooking process and then kneaded in another extra half cup once I’d taken it out of the pan, to make it firm enough to hold its shape the way we wanted. Also, we don’t have food coloring, so we just play with dough-colored dough and avoid the whole colors-getting-mixed-up trauma. And, in the further pursuit of non-trauma, we play on a big cookie sheet to keep the dough all in one place and off other surfaces. Especially ones my dog can reach, because play dough makes her vomit. Immediately upon consumption.)

What do you like to make?