Artprenticeship Day One — Cosmic Sun Catchers

Children await summer vacations as joyfully as mothers dread them. Three long months of two toddlers lolling around the house the whole day, picking fights out of boredom is quite a frightening prospect. So, I thought to myself, what can be done? I could potentially send them to a summer camp, but then, they’re only going to be toddlers once. They’ve already spent every morning of the whole year at school and now is my chance to spend time with them before they outgrow their cuddly selves. But I do require some form of constructive entertainment or we’ll end up watching truck loads of television or driving each other up the wall! So, I decided to bring the summer camp home!

Artprenticeship is a once a week summer camp for tots where we spend two hours immersed in art, creativity and imagination. Some children shy away from art (out of fear of getting their hands dirty, or simply because it doesn’t seem captivating enough) and the idea behind artprenticeship is to turn arts and crafts into so much fun that their little minds simply can’t resist!

Last saturday was the first day of our summer camp. All three of us were very excited for our new friends to show up. We woke up early and sat out with our ideas, our aprons and our decorations all set up.

Once everyone was safely seated within the giant turquoise plastic, well away from my frighteningly white sofas, we began! We started off with making cosmic sun catchers (thank you to the artfulparent.com for the lovely idea!). Cosmic sun catchers make beautiful window decoration and, best of all, they are amazingly simple to make. You simply take a disposable plastic bowl with a flat bottom and liberally pour some white craft glue and swirl it around to cover the whole bottom of the bowl. Then you drop in some of your favorite colors (you can use food coloring but we used acrylics), and using a toothpick etch out some gorgeous designs. Beware, as tempting as it is to simply mix all the colors up, your cosmic sun catcher will look prettiest if you don’t blend the colors too much!

When we began, Manahil was the first child to fold her arms grumpily and proclaim that she was more interested in toys than painting. Some of the others kids joined her protest and sat on the couches, pretending to be mightily disinterested in making a cosmic sun catcher. But of course, Artprenticeship isn’t about forcing art down people’s throats! So the rest of us smiled patiently at the protestors and began to work on our sun catchers. And lo and behold, as we painted and designed bowl upon bowl, the protestors inched closer and closer, helplessly intrigued. I mean, paint plus glue plus a glorious mess, what kid could resist? And soon, we were literally a production factory of sun catchers as the toddlers created design after design till our glue ran out.

After we were all done, we set our bowls aside to dry, and worked on some other fun activities that I’ll be sharing on this page soon. Cosmic Sun Catchers take about 3 days to dry before they can be peeled off the bottom of the bowl. Then a hole can be punched through the top and a ribbon threaded through so that they can be hung on your bedroom window.

To try this at home you need:

-Disposable plastic bowls, or plastic or metal lids of containers

-Acrylic paint or food coloring

-Toothpicks to make swirly designs

-Hole punch

-Ribbon to hang  your sun catcher with

-A group of toddlers ready to create the most vibrant color combinations possible!

If you try this and enjoy it, do comment below and let me know how it turns out! 🙂