Check this out, y'all: on Thursday, it was a balmy 68 degrees in the Nashville area and they were calling for snow and ice the next day. Our weather-predicting/school DJ/head custodian announced that we'd be out. Now, despite those warm weather conditions, I KNEW we'd be out because our weather-predicting/school DJ/head custodian is NEVER wrong. So y'all better believe I was excited to spend my day off working on this needle felted color wheel coat ida that I'd been kicking around in my head.
Not too long ago, I found myself in Old Navy where I discovered this jacket on the sale rack. I'd already had the idea in my head and this style of jacket was exactly what I was looking for...one with a large flat backside that would serve as a big blank canvas for my color wheel.
If you've been hanging around this blog for even a minute, you know that needle felting is one of my favorite things. In fact, early this week I shared my Top Ten Needle Felted Sweaters. I've needle felted every type of fabric: jersey, knit, wool, wool blend, canvas, big ole winter coats, you name it. I've managed to acquire a beautiful assortment of wool over time which is great to have on hand when an idea like this strikes. I created a video of myself working to help explain the process:
The tools I used in the video, the pen tool and the cushion, are both by Clover and they are my favorite. However, I will say that because this jacket is a fleece or something, I totally busted all three needles in my pen tool immediately. The pen tool comes with very fine needles...but I have a stash of the thicker needle felting needles. I replaced them inside my tool and, once I got the hang of the surface, I was fine.
I simply tacked the roving down with the plan to further felt with my machine. However, if I didn't have a needle felting machine (see video) I would have just had to do it by hand. It probably would have taken twice as long. I rarely bust out that needle felting machine but when I do, I'm always happy I have it!
Of course I had to take pictures of it in front of all the new colorful areas in my art room. Seriously, my art room is my happy place. There are SO MANY projects I want to do...but I'm glad some are finally coming together. I have a self-appointed deadline for my art room but the date is pretty much pushed back to the end of the year. One of these days, I'll get my life together. Meh, prolly not. You can check out more details of my Mary Blair Mural here.
I decided to pair my coat with my needle felted palette beret...more deets here.
When I needed a break from all the stabby-stab, I decided to embroidery-bomb this broken Anthro necklace I'd had sitting in my stash. You can check out this blog post to see just how much I'm loving all things yarn-bomby right now.
I needed a little bling to go with the jacket, right? I'm thinking of painting the wooden beads that hang from the necklace...or maybe not. I kinda dig it right now.
My jacket tho is pretty much giving me life. I went to grab pizza after working in my art room this morning and dude at the pizza placed thanked me for my jacket. "Thank you for bringing a rainbow in here." I thought that was so sweet!
And now for a bunch of picks of my backside. Ahem.
If you look closely, you'll see that I had to do a little color blending to achieve a complete gradation. You can kinda see it here: check out the purple and pink sections. To blend, I just had to pull and tuft the rooving repeatedly to get it completely blended.
By the way, this is what the inside of my jacket looks like. Notice how the fibers have been pushed through.
I liked the necklace before but I am loving the rainbow makeover!
And of course I had to take pics of my jacket in front of the rainbow wall and the rainbow tree! If you've not tried your hand at needle felting, I encourage you to do so...then we can be color wheel coat friends!
So there are some things I decided shortly before school started. Let's start with the first: I had too much purposeless decor in my art room. I'm an over-decorator. Just take a peak into my sewing room or my crafting space (yes, these are two separate rooms and yes, I'm spoiled rotten) and you'll know I ain't lyin'. When it comes to my art room, I tend to overdo it there as well. I have a bad habit of getting sucked into the vortex that is the Target Dollar Spot and purchasing every cute thing under the sun. When I bring these colorful happies to my art room, I don't think: Is this going to benefit the art makin' of my students? Is this going to educate and not just decorate? Oh no. Instead I'm all: WHERE'S AN EMPTY SPACE, I MUST FILL IT MEOW. I realized the error of my ways over the summer when I came in to grab some things and I took a good look around. All I saw was clutter. Cute, colorful clutter. And in a fit of coffee-fueled redecorating rage, I tore down posters of unicorns, giant maps (why three? WHY?) and reference images that I never, er, referenced. I crumbled it all up into a big heaping wad and stepped back. Immediately I was horrified. What had I done?! My room looked so bare! And that's when I came to my second conclusion: Eh, you'll figure out what you need as you go. Your room DOES NOT have to look PERFECT on the very first day...week...shoot, man, even month! of school.
Since then, I've slowly started rethinking my decor and redecorating my art room. I made the following decisions: what I use to decorate must also educate; if I can't find what I'm looking for, I'll make it; more 3-D and less 2-D when it comes to visuals. Basically, I want my art room to be a space that really inspires my kids without cluttering their creativity.
So, what have I created so far? Why, I'm so happy you asked. Here you go:
* My ART room rules that are (hopefully) life rules and inspired by growth mindsets.
I was inspired by art teacher Katie Lynn. She shared this image of a color family on the Elementary Art Teachers page on Facebook.
I thought her idea was GENIUS...and decided to create a set of my own. Her drawings are so stinkin' cute, they are inspired by the book The Day the Crayons Quit, a kid fave. Big shout out to Katie Lynn for the inspo!
Since I had these "crayon boxes" left over from an art display, I decided to borrow her idea and create this 3-D color family. My kiddos did this very project a couple of years ago and it was a HUGE hit. I'm thinking I need to bring this project back this year...but I'll definitely be going about it a different (and much easier!) way. I'll share that below. In the meantime, here's a video I created back then for this project.
So what did I do differently this time around? I skipped the papier mache and used plaster strips instead. But let's start at the start, shall we?
My good buddy the custodian started collecting the paper towel tubes at my school. I like these better than you standard paper towel tube as they are much sturdier. Added bonus: upcycling! (can we please just go back to calling it REcycling? I dunno why, new words for old things always drives me bonkers).
My very artsy mom-in-law was visiting this weekend and I knew she'd be up for the crafting challenge. I cut rectangles of used tagboard (lookie, more recycling!) while she cut the strips of plaster. We found the plaster strips at our local craft store. After I rolled the tag board into a cone shape, I added a bit of tape, fitted the cone over the tube, cut tabs for easy folding and added a few more bits of tape just to hold.
While I did that, Diana took to plastering. I loved this so much more than papier mache because it dries faster, harder and isn't a snotty, slimy mess.
With her help, creating these 12 crayons went by in a blink!
We did find that one roll of plaster just didn't cut it. We ended up using two. We didn't cover the tube completely as the paint would take care of hiding the fact that we didn't. Also, when I hang these at school, I plan to display them hanging up with the crayons in the box...so no one will see the bottom. Altho, now that I say that, it might be fun to make them removable to make them interactive. I'll have to think on that idea.
I burned a little too much of the midnight oil (2am, ahem) getting them painted and STILL didn't quite get them complete. Diana helped me finish painting the "paper" and the crayon part.
I used a flat paint brush and watered down black paint for the stripes.
Done, son!
You better believe I contemplated making ANOTHER color wheel with these guys. But I forced myself to stick with my plan.
Initially, these boxes were created for the kids' display a couple years ago. I'm so glad I hung on to them. They were created from cereal boxes.
I just cut off the top, cut a curve, gessoed them a few times before adding the paint.
Since they needed "labels", I just painted a black oval and used white for the color fam names.
I'm excited to hang these in my art room next week! I'll use Command Velcro strips and they should do the trick. These guys are pretty light weight. The strips have done a bang up job holding up my painted oars!
I know my older kids are going to be so stoked when I tell them that they'll be creating their own versions of these as well. I foresee a TON of giant plaster art supplies in their future (eep!).
Take that, Target Dollar Spot. Get thee behind me, Satan, er, Target!
I'm so happy I decided to wait and only decorate when I feel it will educate...and it is necessary. More to come. Just know: your art room, if you are lucky enough to have one, doesn't have to be perfect on the first day of school. Go with what is pleasing and needed by your kiddos. You know best!
If you recall from this post, I recently picked up a bunch of oars (or paddles, whatever you fancy callin' 'em) from a local big box craft store. Initially I was just going to paint the primary colors...but they looked so good, I decided to do the secondary colors as well to create a large color wheel. I finished off the color wheel last week and thought I'd share it with y'all today.
In case you missed the Paddle Painting Mayhem, here it is in 60 seconds or less:
If only I could work that fast! I do consume a ton of coffee...but I've not reached Level: Lightening Fast...yet.
Because the grouping of paddles ended up being so stinkin' big, I had to completely rearrange my art room to find a wall space big enough for it. That meant a complete overhaul of this part of my art room. I was fine with that, as I was ready for a change. In fact, this summer, when I popped by my art room, I noticed some of my displays were falling. In a fit of annoyance, I tore it ALL down. You can see what this area previously looked like here. Getting rid of the previous displays forced me to rethink my space and my displays, making both more intentional. By the way, I created a video of my desired art room routines...and showed it today on our first day of art. That's what you see on the big screen. I'll do a complete blog post about that soon but in the meantime, you can check out the video here:
It was a huge hit with the kids today and...IT WORKED! Yay!
Having this big space also allowed me to hang my ART room rules. I shared them recently here. You can hear me go over them a little bit in the video above. I plan to do a more extensive chat about my rules soon...they really tie in with the growth mindsets that we are working toward in my art class this year.
After I hung up the oars, I noticed that I had enough space to allow for the tertiary colors. So I cut out some cardboard with an Exacto knife, painted them and attached them to the wall with hot glue. The oars were hung up with Command Velcro Strips and have worked like a charm!
Over the summer, I managed to pick up several folk art pieces. The Mojo Man and the Big Love signs are by my friend Bebo. The other paintings are by Okra Girl. I painted the Stay Sharp sign using a wooden picket fence I found when shopping for those wooden oars. Here's a video of how that was created in 60 seconds or less:
I'm currently addicted to painting all things found in the wooden aisle of my craft store!
A couple of art teacher buddies have really taken off with these ideas and I love seeing what they create! One buddy painted the saying, "Draw Light Until You've Got It Right"...how perfect for those pencils!
Another painted hers into crayons, hung it horizontally and it is going to display her art jobs. Y'all better believe I'm doing that very same thing! Great minds, I love it. By the way, if you have not entered to win the book giveaway, GET YOURSELF OVER HERE AND DO IT ALREADY. Please and thank you!
My dear moms was visiting this weekend and in between us hitting the local Farmer's Market, eating, shopping at a vintage fair, eating, visiting my long-lost aunt and uncle and, you guester-Chester, more eating, the topic of retirement came up. My mom is a nurse and has been for about a million years. I asked when she was going to stop sticking folks with needles and call it quits and she was all, "but if I didn't go to work, what would I do?" Like, whut?! Growing up an only child for the first 10 years of my life, I've always been super good at entertaining myself. I mean, I could craft, sew, color, paint and glue for dayz on end cuz my mental makerin' to-do list is so stinkin' long. For zample, this here color wheel clock idea is one I've been kicking around for-stinkin-everz. If I had endless amounts of time on my hands, I foresee that I'd spend weeks, neigh, months in my pajamas surrounded by empty coffee cups, dark chocolate wrappers and mountains of crafting mayhem. It sounds both glorious and horror film-esque all at once. So I suppose it's best I stick with the art teacherin'.
But I suppose you didn't pop by here to hear all about my questionable dream-life, did you? Let's get to the craft at hand, ermkay? I thrifted this clock well over a year ago simply to take it apart and revamp in this colorful way. Only when I started redoing my art room, did I decide to buckle down and bust this bad boy out. I started by taking the clock apart and sliding the mountain of paint chip swatches I picked up at Home Depot under the hands of the clock. YES, I got permission to pinch all of those paint chips. And YES, I only asked permission after the suspicious sales person was all, "Um, can I help you?!" (By the way, if you follow me on Instagram-crackers, you've seen most of these snaps. If you don't follow me on insta, like, whuh? You totally should.)
Once I figured out how I wanted to lay out the colors, I created a template with one of the paint chips. This template was used to help me cut each chip to the correct size and slid it under the frame of the clock as you see here.
Good ole Aleene's Fast Drying Tacky Glue was used to adhere these into place. I opted out of using a hot glue gun. I thought that might make the paper chips stand up too much and prevent the hands of the clock from ticking.
Bam, done. No time flat, really. And it looked pretty snappy with just the color on the inside, says moi.
But why stop there when you still have all of those pinched paint chips?! So I started to play with the idea of extending the rainbow of fruit flavor beyond the confines of the clock.
So I set my clock on some white matte board and proceeded to glue the rest of the chips with hot glue around the edge. I did have to cut a hole out of the center that was the size of the clock so that I could both hang the clock and change the battery when needed. So, without the clock, the background looks like a color wheel donut. Which, you gotta admit, sounds yummers.
And, yay! The clock now hangs proudly in the art room. It makes me so happy every time I see it. Y'all best give a color wheel clock a go and lemme know how it works for you. And tell the kind folks at Home Depot I said, "haaaaayyy!"
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