Easter egg garland

Posted on April 6, 2012 by happyhooligans

Easter Garland – painting with golf balls…

Each of the hooligans made an Easter egg garland last week using one of our favourite painting techniques: painting with golf balls. We love this activity. It’s super-simple, and it never fails to impress!

First you’ll want to find a cardboard box that will be deep enough to contain your golf-balls as they zing and bounce around. Handles are a bonus.

Cut your cardboard or paper to fit the box, and have the kiddos squirt, drizzle, or dab their paint onto their “canvas”.

Pop that into the box, and start shakin’!

Oooooh, and Aaaaaah over your masterpiece. Isn’t it purdy?

You’re free to turn this into whatever you’d like, but we had Easter garlands in mind, so I cut as many eggs as I could out of the paintings, and punched a couple of holes in the top of each egg.

Then the Hooligans strung them together with wool and a “sewing needle”.

Ok – super excited to share this little trick. Somehow all of our plastic sewing needles have gone missing, so I improvised with a drinking straw. Cut your straw to the desired length, and make a little slit in one end. Feed your wool through the straw, and slide it into the slit to secure.

How cool is that?!

Happy Easter!

golf ball painting – candy canes

Posted on December 19, 2011 by happyhooligans

We made laced candy cane ornaments this morning and the process that we used to paint them is always a huge hit with the Hooligans: golf ball painting!!

This project was really fun because it was so many things wrapped up into one: a painting activity, a craft, a christmas ornament and a lacing activity.

I got the idea from one of Teach Preschool‘s readers. She’d done some jingle bell painting, and turned the paintings into candy canes. We don’t have any jingle bells here. I swore I bought some in the fall, but I can’t seem to find them, so maybe I just THOUGHT about buying some.

Anyway, we pulled out the golf balls. We had a lot of fun golf-ball painting a few months ago, but we were outside in the nice weather. I was a little concerned about painted golf balls flying around the room, being inside, so we used a kleenex box, and another box with a lid to contain the balls. Both boxes had “windows” which was neat – the Hooligans could see what kind of progress they were making as their golf balls were zinging around inside the boxes. We used one box for red paint, and the other for green. (I put a rubber band around the box it would stay shut).

Once the paintings dried, I cut out candy cane shapes, and punched holes in them. The Hooligans used white wool, and did some “lacing”. Then I used some of the wool to make a hanger so they could put these on their Christmas trees.

Cute! And so fun!!

golf-ball webs and finger-spiders

Posted on October 13, 2011 by happyhooligans

I’ve had this one in mind ever since we did our fall colour golf-ball paintings. You can see the basic instructions here.

Today, we did some more painting with golf-balls, using Hallowe’en colours (green, orange & purple) to make our “webs”.

We followed that up with some hand-tracing to make our spiders. The Hooligans glued eyes on their spiders, and we punched a hole and added some yarn to make a piece of web for the spider to hang from.

We attached the yarn to the back of the painting with some tape, and… voila!

So cute! So easy!

painting fall colours with golf balls

Posted on September 19, 2011 by happyhooligans

This was so cool! I’ve seen so many posts that have kids painting with marbles in a cardboard box, and I’ve wanted to try it here for a while. We don’t have any marbles, but we have a huge bucket of golf balls, and I’ve heard they work well too.

Do they ever!! This was one of the best art/paint activities we’ve ever done. I love that it’s easy enough for even the youngest ones to have complete control over.

We talked about Autumn, and how the leaves change colour, and agreed that orange, red, yellow and brown were the best colours to use for this project.

We put a piece of white cardboard (you can use any kind of paper, or card-stock. We just happen to have a lot of white cardboard) into the bottom of a cardboard box. Then we dribbled Tempra Paint onto the white cardboard (this was the only part of the activity that I participated in, simply because I wanted to control the amount of paint that went into the box – you don’t need a lot.

The Hooligans tossed the golf balls in, and then had a great time tipping and tilting and jiggling that box while the golf balls did their thing.

The results were truly beautiful. What was really neat, was because the golf balls don’t get right up to the edge of the box, you’re left with a kind of “border” around the art.

If you haven’t tried this activity, you really must. It is so simple, and the kids will have a blast. I think these are pretty enough to frame, and hang in your child’s room.

**Update** Since making these little numbers, we’ve pulled the golf-balls out for painting several times. Each time, the process is just as much fun as in the past, and I swear, the projects just keep getting prettier and prettier! Have a look for yourself. We used golf balls to make spider webs at Hallowe’en, candy-canes at Christmas, and my very favourite were our egg garlands at Easter.

Happy Painting!!