create (with kids): M is for mask

First of all today, let's take a collective breath, shall we? ((deep breath)) Thanks, I really needed that. Life has not been easy these past few weeks. If I didn't have little ones that require me (in the best of ways) to get out of bed and participate in daily living, then I might have taken a hiatus under the covers and called it a day. My husband has Crohn's- which we've been able to keep under control, and him medicine-free, this past year. Currently that's not the case, and it's taken a lot of energy to keep us moving in a forward direction. Lots of things have been helpful during this time, including writing about our lives here. This space encourages me to continue to bring creativity into our lives and is a wonderful reminder of how important it is for all of us. Wonderful, life-giving creativity that gives us pause and lets us catch our breath. So thank you for being here, for sharing the journey and creativity and everything in-between! One of our latest creative projects was to create masks last week in conjunction with our studies of the letter "M."

The foundation of our mask was a fan given out for free recently at a fair. It worked out well, and I think we'll duplicate it by hot-gluing tongue depressors onto cereal cardboard in the future. I cut out some eyes, then Isia painted it. We decided it needed some flair- so first she glued on ripped up magazine pieces and circles of toilet paper rolls. But it still needed something else... glitter!

I don't know about you, but sometimes just the word Glitter starts to give me hives. Don't get me wrong- I love flair- but there's something about finding glitter for weeks afterwards that makes me hesitant to get it out. And this would be fine, but Isia Loves glitter. So I'm trying to find ways to contain the glitter to the project only, and not all over my house. I think I've found a few helpful techniques, including keeping our little volatile container of glitter in a larger plastic container. Not only does this safe-guard my house from the glitter being transported (and inevitable dropped) from the art trunk to the table, but it also gives us a easy, large-mouthed place to dump all extra glitter after projects.

The second technique we've tried is only using glitter over a container that can catch (most of) it. In the past we've used baking trays, this time we used an empty cereal box with the top cut off. This even allowed us a place to rest our mask handle- unplanned but useful. All in all, the glitter stayed mostly on the masks. The clean-up was minimal too since we dumped all extra glitter out of the cereal box back into the glitter container and recycled the cereal box afterwards.

Here's the final product! It hung on the wall to dry before getting put to it's final use, chasing all of us around- especially her twelve month toddling brother. Luckily, Billy has the best sense of humor of us all and thought it was very funny!