Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Water Color Resist for Thank You Cards...and Ennui

Josephine had a birthday over a month ago and as planned she had a nice party with lots of friends and family and very generous and sweet gifts. After the party it came time to write thank you notes and I developed a case of preschool art block, similar to writer's block except with an aversion to finger paint and pipe cleaners. Ennui set in. I love that word by the way, but whenever I want to use it in a sentence I stop myself because I'm never sure how to pronounce it, even though I've looked it up plenty of times. Just more ennui.

I taught Jo the word and she told me I was over complicating things as usual (although maybe that was me talking to myself) and would I please put this shoe on her doll and could she please have some gum and Tessie's a meano-moo. Finally, Jo and I decided she'd do some water color resist to make her cards. This is always fun, and it always looks cool, especially if you use liquid watercolors. I cut some watercolor paper in half and Jo wrote all her classmates names and drew them little pictures with a crayon. Then she picked a handful of paint colors which I put in a muffin tin for her and she painted the cards. The watercolor doesn't absorb into the paper where the wax crayon is and the look is really pretty.

The only downside was how long it took us! Jo is still working on making her letters so things are already a little slow going and coupled with my...apathy we'll say, it took a few weeks longer than it should. But it's done now and they look cute and better late than never, right!? And Jo got to practice a lot of writing and work with the liquid watercolors, which we all really enjoy. Of course I then forgot to take a picture of all of them together since the effort of making them nearly did me in and I could only recover (still working on that by the way) by sitting still and sighing deeply.