Ripped Paper Rainbows

As happy as I have been to have a real winter this year, it's that time of year where I start to crave color. Not just because the world is white - but because I know that pretty soon we'll enter New England's fifth season - Mud Season- and everything will turn brown.

So while putting together our post on Paper Plate Wreaths I got inspired to try creating a paper plate rainbow with the boys and that lead to these Ripped Paper Rainbows.

This was a great project to try on a "stay home day" that didn't require a lot of prep, materials, or project time. Yet, the result was pretty and it could easily be done by several different age groups.

Playdough Invitation to Build a Rainbow

The other day we had a friend over and I decided to set up an easy and colorful playdough invitation. Although the boys all created their own versions of a rainbow, because of the high energy they had that day, it wasn't quite as peaceful as imagined when I set it out. (There was a lot of monster and smashing talk while they built the rainbows . . .) But, there creations were colorful! And we were a little bit calmer afterwards.

Earlier this winter we adapted our basic cooked playdough recipe to make a white sparkly snow playdough for our snowmen at work playdough invitation. This white playdough has been a great base for other playdough invitations, including this one. 

Crepe Paper Rainbow Collage

We're stuck in this funny place: winter but not really winter at the same time. Very little snow outside but enough so that we can not go out without snow pants. Too cold to really spend the day out there, but nice enough to feel like we have to get outside for something. Everything is brown, white, and gray. So this week we've decided we need to add some color to our world which has included some fun rainbow play.

Last year around this time we made St. Patrick's Day Windsocks using crepe paper streamers, and as we still have the crepe paper, we put it to use again.

For this project we not only used the crepe paper, but another favorite material: contact paper. We've used contact paper to create a rainbow before too, in an original Sticky Rainbow Collage project. For this collage we used a similar process, although we knew we wanted it to hang the finished product in the window. 

St. Patrick's Day Rainbow Windsock

With a few more weeks until St. Patrick's Day we're having fun creating colorful crafts to brighten up our house a little. Color means lots of green and rainbows! We settled on one craft where we could combine both of them: a St. Patrick's Day Rainbow Windsock.

This windsock is a decoration windsock for inside and is very similar to the one we made for the 4th of July this summer. 

Sticky Rainbow Collage

This is definitely the time of year when we need a little color in our world. It feels like it will be forever until spring arrives. As we were in search of a little color, and I was feeling inspired by all the St. Patrick's Day rainbows I see popping up online, I decided to set up a Sticky Rainbow Collage.

In January we discovered the fun of sticky collages, and now we've tried both a used wrapping paper collage and an arctic collage. But this was the first time I've drawn on lines for our work.