I love dying our eggs each year, especially the batik style eggs we do with beeswax resist. There is something soothing and meditative about the experience. It is only in the last few years that I have been able to truly enjoy it. When the children were little, I used to find it overwhelming; there…
Category: Art
A Homeschooler’s Review of the Book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools
How we are using the book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools to teach art in our homeschool. My daughter and I just started her sixth grade year of homeschooling. One of my favorite aspects of this year for our family is the introduction to charcoal in art. An interesting part of Waldorf pedagogy is…
Grade 5 Freehand Waldorf Geometry: Ellipse Exercise
We’ve been working on our freehand Waldorf Geometry block the last couple of weeks. Check my Geometry highlights on Instagram for more. We are using pushpins as string to first draw a circle from the center, and then moving the focus outward from the circle to see the changes in the circle. It’s a cool exercise just by…
Artist of the 1800’s and 1900’s
We do not usually do artist study separate from our regular studies. With our intertwining of Charlotte Mason (CM) and Waldorf, artist study is usually incorporated into a short CM-style lessons themed to accommodate our main lesson. Since we do history chronologically, this means most of our artists have reflected what we were studying in…
Making a Book
Occasionally my daughter will come to me and ask me to make her a book. We first started out with simple single-signature books, but then I found this wonderfully beautiful book, The Little Book of Book Making. This book has taken our book-making skills to a new level. It shows the art of book-making. It…
Wild Bird Egg Replica Project
When we arrived on birds within our animal block, I knew I wanted to replicate Hana’s, with Pepper and Pine, egg project. Her YouTube video has been so helpful in avoiding mistakes that I’m almost sure we would have made without her wonderful guidance. We made a couple of deviations from her process. We were able…
Wax Resist Naturally Dyed Eggs
Dying eggs is just so gratifying, especially with natural dyes. When my children were young, it was overwhelming to use natural dyes and the best that I could do was a kit. As they have gotten older though, I am able to spend the time making the dyes, usually the night before. This year was…
Paper Quilling a Snowflake
I added paper quilling to our handcrafts back in October with some pumpkins. This was the first bit of paper quilling that we had added to our homeschooling. It is a delightful craft and easy to do with children. The pumpkin is a nice beginning piece, because it goes over a few basic quilling techniques…
Peg Dolls Skin Tones Using Natural Dyes
Recently I was gifted several wooden peg dolls from Woodpecker Crafts. I had seen Hana with Pepper and Pine’s project of using natural dyes to color wooden peg dolls and was excited to try it. I’m hoping to incorporate these dolls in our Explorer’s Unit and upcoming homeschooling year when we focus on some of…
A Spring Project: Dying Eggs Naturally
I find color so alluring. It entices me with its beauty and temps me into so many, many projects. Projects that sometimes never get finished. This time around it’s naturally dyed eggs. Those beautiful muted colors created from plants have most years been too much, too long, too complicated. But not this year! This year…
Fall Window Cling Tutorial
One of our favorite things to do in the fall is to make window clings to place on our windows for decoration. There is a little bit of wait time involved, but this project is it rather easy one and a lot of fun. The overall project includes making lead lines with black fabric paint….
Native American Inspired Beading Tutorial
I had some requests on instructions for the beadwork that my children did for our Native American studies. This activity can lend itself to a variety of ages. Some things to consider when choosing what materials might be appropriate for your child: The size of the loom. The size of the string and…
Sumi-e for Japan
This year we have been doing a “travel buddies” geography for my youngest who is doing kindergarten, mostly because she doesn’t want to be left out of “school” and needed something like her brother. It has been so much fun. We were approaching Japan, when I had a spark of inspiration. Scrolling through my instagram…
Master Gallery-Exposure to Impressionism
I try to pair music, art, and literature with history. The reasoning is that perhaps this pairing will give them a reference, a framework, if you will, to how the art developed and existed in context. That is my hope anyway. A mother can dream. In history this session we studied Story of the World…