the trouble with libraries

The summer before last, when I was at the Steiner Institute taking my felting class, I stumbled upon a book in their catalog that looked like a fun addition to our crafting library. I flipped through it, bought it, flew home with it and then...it disappeared. I assumed I set it on a shelf in our home library to save until December, but when December came, I couldn't find it anywhere. I looked every shelf of our library, search all the bedroom shelves, thinking one of the kids might have walked off with it. Nothing. I even began to doubt my sanity. Maybe I hadn't actually bought the book...maybe I just thought I bought it. About a month ago, I began searching again in earnest. No luck. Then last week, as I was helping Elizabeth look for this book (she's obsessed with the Pietà sculpture right now), it appeared...in one of the places I've looked many times before but pushed back a bit and out of view.

Needless to say, we've been pouring over the amazing crafts and dreaming about our favorites. I found several more patterns for window stars including this 8-pointed star with wide points. It just screamed winter to me in the dark blue and purple kite paper. There was also a 16-pointed star pattern. Wowzers, that's a lot of skinny folding!

Elizabeth was anxious to try the potato printing. So on one of her days off from school last week, she and Finn gave it a whirl.

They dug out a few cookie cutters that would fit on our potatoes and then we carved around the cookie cutters.

They stamped, washed their potatoes and stamped some more.

They even began using the cutouts from the potato to make negative space stamps.

What a fun time they had! They must have worked with these stamps for close to 2 hours.

Another afternoon when Finn was napping, Elizabeth and I decided to make a watercolor paper collage. We painted several pieces of cardstock with different watercolor paints, trying to keep them rather mottled looking.

Then we cut out the shapes to make the collage. You can see the collages in the book in the upper right corner of the picture below.

We ended up with a really cute little shepherd collage to stand over our nature table. I'm sure we'll have more projects to share from the book as we get further into advent!