MAKING : Sneak Preview of a special softie that’s getting the final touches for a good friend’s daughter’s first birthday party this weekend.

We did some work with watercolors for the first time a few days ago for some lantern making to celebrate the seasons and light changing to colder and darker.

Normally I would never cut up children’s art work like I did with Ellie’s watercolor (that’s a whole other post about respecting children’s art, something I’ve studied and implemented in all of my classrooms when I taught preschool- I touched on it briefly here), but because we had set out to create lanterns and the fact that this was less of  an art project and more of a craft project, my conscious didn’t feel as bad, cutting into the painting to create something else with it.

the finished product!

Add a LED light and we had ourselves a lantern!

We took a little walk the other day with the lantern in the dark right before bed and Ellie seemed to think the whole experience was pretty cool. She didn’t want to go inside! (If you want more information about celebrating Martinmas, and how you can make lanterns, you can find some great info here, here and here. We’re not quite sure if Martinmas and it’s religious aspects are something we necessarily want to practice celebrating, but I really like the idea of lighting the darkness and celebrating the seasonal aspect of welcoming autumn and winter). 

LISTENING: We’ve been hearing a lot of banjo tunes around these parts these days, some by this guy, some oldies and mostly from Daddy. He’s getting pretty good.

-joining in with Dawn over at Simplethingsnotebook.