Painting with Egg Shells

or Why My Husband Doesn't Like to Leave Me Home Unsupervised   (I kid...)

I've been saving empty egg shells for a while and decided that we finally had enough to have a little fun!  I first saw the idea here.  I'm not patient enough to make a small hole at the top and wait for all the egg goo to drip out, so I used a knife to carefully chop off the top of the egg.  (Be careful not to get any shell pieces in your breakfast!)  I then broke another egg in half to make a little "hat" for my egg.  (Make sure you wash them out first.)

 Then fill them up with paint!!

 Hot glue the "hats" on.

And let the kids go nuts!

I got sprayed with orange on this one.  Guess mom should have worn a paint shirt too!

 And our finished artwork

(Cheap) Beach Crafts

I love to take my kiddos out and do all sorts of things with them, but sometimes the budget requires we have a little creative fun at home.  We go the Outer Banks every year for our family vacation.  This year, I planned ahead and took a crafting bag to keep everyone busy during the down time without breaking the bank.

Seashell Necklaces

This was super easy.  We found seashells on the beach, colored them with permanent markers, and put a cord through them.

We made it easy on ourselves by picking shells that already had holes in them.

We tie dyed one day too!

This is my patriotic shell.

Oceans in a Bottle

I think this has been around forever, but is no less fun.  Take an empty water bottle, fill it halfway with water, add blue food coloring, shells, small toy fish, etc and then fill the bottle the rest of the way with cooking oil.  When the kids move it back and forth it make "waves".

 Paper Bowl Jellyfish

Paint the underside of a paper bowl, glue on googly eyes, and add ribbon, streamers, etc to the underneath.  I saw it here,

Even the grownups had fun making these.

In cases of extreme silliness, they can also be used as hats!!

Clothespin Mermaids

I saw the idea here.  First, you need to color your clothespin with a Sharpie.

I bought glitter foam to makes the tails.  I traced the pattern before we went to make it easier for the kids.  I hot glued the mermaids' tails to the clothespins.

The kids wrapped yarn around their hands for the hair.

We took another piece of yarn and tied it around the strands and cut all the loops.

I hot glued the hair on top and VIOLA.  Mermaids.

4th Fun

Nothing like the day before to decide to do some Fourth of July crafting!

I woke up this morning and decided we needed shirts.  I used the idea I found here.

Basically, I painted everyone's left hand blue and then used masking tape to create the stripes and let the kids have at it!

Then, I decided we needed some accessories.  This was a little bit trickier.  You can see the original here.
We used Sharpies to color plastic forks.  (We tried spoons too but they shrunk up too much).  I put them on a foil covered cookie sheet and set them in the oven at 350.  You have to watch for them to start to bend in the oven.  It doesn't take anytime at all, so stay close!

I took them out when they started to bend and used tongs to finish bending them how I wanted.  They start to harden again really fast, so you may have to put them back in the oven to soften up so you can finish shaping them.