A child's first work of art!

Jelly Bean Bracelets

Easy Paper Plate Bunny Project

Lunch-time Easter Egg Hunt!

Make Your Own Easter Basket

Easy (and FUN) Easter Morning Breakfast

Yarn Easter Egg Wreath

Mary Claire, from Louisiana, has created some wonderful artwork that just oozes SPRINGTIME!  We love them and thought you might too.

March 2013 Issue

Valentine’s Day is around the corner, so I sat down with my 4 year old yesterday to start making these flower cards for her classmates.  Doesn’t get much easier than this – a celery stalk, some red paint, and 8.5″ x 11″ pink paper cut in half!  Now we just need to find a little something (lollipop?  cookie?  pencil?) to go with it.  Any ideas?

Some tips:

• Dry the celery as best as possible
• Use a produce rubber band to keep the stalk sturdy while stamping
• Have some scrap paper handy to stamp some of the excess paint off a few times before stamping the actual card

Kids love nothing better than a space just for them to get messy and create!  While we want to our kids to feel inspired and free, we also want to keep our homes looking nice too…  We have rounded up some great solutions to keeping your Arts & Crafts area chic and organized.  Let us know how you keep your Arts & Crafts area looking just as good as the artwork that comes out of it!

Pottery Barn Kids Lazy Susan, $39:

We love the built-in paper roll on this Land of Nod Activity Table, $499:

How great is this use of Ikea Bygel Kitchen storage to create a great Arts & Crafts wall on the cheap?

Warhol inspiration through reusable soup cans?

Or repurpose a spice rack such as this one from RSVP International for all the little odds and ends, $55:

From young to old, from simple to complex, there are many ways to teach about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the legacy that he left all of us.  We found this project from the Art. Paper. Scissors. Blog.  Straightforward for the youngest kids, yet so deep with meaning for the older kids.

Materials:
- Tempera Paint
- White Drawing Paper
- Construction Paper (Red, Black, White, Yellow, Brown, Pink)
- Pencil
- Scissors
- Paintbrushes
- Sponges, Paint Scrapers (Optional)
- Glue

1. Paint paper any way you’d like it. You can blend, paint a design, paint a pattern, sponge, paint scrape, anything!

2. Trace your hand or a friend’s hand on all colors of construction paper except pink. It might be a nice activity to trace a different friend’s hand for each color, building on the “working together” theme.

3. Cut and glue into a collage either all holding a heart or a peace sign made from the pink paper. If kids have extra time, they can color in/ design their heart/ peace sign.

Every so often here at Plum Print we like to showcase some of the incredible creativity that graces our studio every day.  Today we highlight the Lessard sisters from the Anneliese Schools in California – two young girls who clearly know their way around an art classroom!  In just a small sampling of their artwork, they combine paint, chalk, paper, marker, pastels and we think the outcome is amazing!