Cultural hour

In Slovenia we celebrate Cultural Day tomorrow. So that's a good excuse to be 'cultural' and take a cultural hour for yourself and your creating. What first comes on my mind (because we remember our famous poet Prešeren on this day) are books (with their special scents), then bookmarks, then letters and after that all the other (official) 'cultural' things.

So, why not creating something in an hour? How about creating some simple and unique bookmarks?

You can write an initial letter of the owner of a bookmark on the top and decorate it. And on the rest of the bookmark, you can write (your) thought, quote, poem, part of the book that you like the most and you want to have it always near you.

That's how our experiments turned out in red ink (for Irene, Zara and Nicolas)...
How about yours?

From my heart

Keep warm!

PS:

Did you know that reindeers can be born from ladybugs? You don't believe it? My reindeers on the image above were made from the image in this post. See-e-e-e??? (You can grab them in our shop).

Be creative!

Xmas Cards from School

We are busy bees with children in Montessori school. Getting ready for Xmas Bazaar. All Xmas cards are almost ready and here is what we decided to do this year - we are going 'eco' this year:

First we made our own stamps (many different kinds of Xmas trees grew up from our scissors).

Then we saved one old book from the trash and painted its pages with white paint.

We then stamped Xmas trees onto the 'recycled' paper the way we wanted. Lots of artistic freedom here we've had.

Of course we had to add some tinsels ;) and if the cards were still a bit 'boring' we added some stitches to bring them to life.

And if something went wrong, we had a solution for everything (you see, we are trying to take care of our environment, so we don't want to waste too many things). Sometimes we added some cloth, and sometimes we fixed imperfect stamping with adding some stripes and patterns over the tree. Smart kids we have here, eh? ;)

We are busy bees, but also very excited. With the money from the Xmas Bazaar, we will buy new learning materials for school, so we are doing our best to create beautiful, unique and special gifts for the visitors. We are sharing our idea to inspire you, but please, don't copy this - we know you can be creative your own way, too. Enjoy the creative process and stay warm!

Back to School: Cleaning paint-brushes

We're back... - to school. This time we will show you how we take care of our paint-brushes with kids.

We tell them they should not leave the paint-brushes in the water, because the brushes' hair will change shape:

They should put them out and leave them on a cloth:

[It is a bit different for acrylic paint, but since we usually don't use acrylic paint with kids, we teach them this way (for working with watercolors or tempera paint).]

Every time we change the color or want to clean the brush, we dip the brush into the water and push it hard to the bottom of the cup:

Then we wipe the paintbrush on the cloth (if there's too much water on it):

When we're done with painting, we usually clean our paint-brushes with a soap:

And then we wash them under running water:

That's why it's very important to use quality paint-brushes, so that they 'survive' all the painting and the cleaning process and serve us well.

We hope you find this information useful, so now you're all ready to have fun with the paint and with your kids :)! Enjoy!

Back to School: How to hold paint-brushes

If you learned by now how to hold drawing materials, then you probably won't have any problems holding paint-brushes. 

You can hold them like you hold pencils. If you paint details, you hold the brush closer to the tip:

If not, then you hold them loosely, away from the tip:

However, if you use wider brushes and paint bigger areas, you can hold your brush like this:

Or you can hold them the same - like smaller brushes:

Easy, isn't it?

Hmm, and now that our paint-brush has got dirty... - what's next? Well, you will have to wait until next time or you can come to Koper on Saturday (24. Sept.) and watch me paint at the event Sladka Istra (= Sweet Istria)...