salad spinning!

i should probably be doing something constructive with my time and energy.  i should be packing.  i should be emailing.  instead i've made a mess with my kiddos and a salad spinner:)

we invented our own artsy game this afternoon and if you're sitting around with your salad spinner--bored to death, with nothing to do...here's what we suggest:

first--gather some random supplies like:

• 6 colors of paint (kinda thin works better...we added water)

• 6 different kinds of paper

• alphabet stickers or markers (or both)

• a dice (oversized is most fun)

• a dictionary or theasarus (or any book for that matter)

• and lastly--a salad spinner (i didn't have one but picked up a cheapy at ikea juuuust for this lil project)

okay, after you've gathered your supplies, number the paper choices, #1-6 and number the paint colors #1-6. get creative (we used some random vintage numbers i got in my stocking this year but you could tear up peices of paper...whatever you got.)

okay so, here's how you play!  a roll of the dice always decides what you will do next--starting with type of paper you get to use.  i tried to choose papers of all different kinds to make it more fun.  so for instance, in this case, if you rolled a 1 you'd get to use the cool white bumpy paper and so on...

once you've rolled to decide which paper to use, next you roll to decide how many colors you get to add to the salad spinner when creating your piece.  THEN you roll to decide which specific colors to add.  

so if you roll a 1 and the green paint is labeled 1 you get a green dollop on the paper...if you roll a 5 and the white paint is labeled 5 you get to place a dollop of white on the paper (in the salad spinner).  i'm the world's worst explainer...i hope this is making sense!

after all this rolling of the dice...which makes things super exciting and suspenseful--place the paper in the salad spinner...we trimmed ours a bit so it would fit properly.  we taped it  down on the backside so it wouldn't slide around when the spinning got crazy!

here comes the fun part!  once you've rolled to choose the paper and rolled to choose how many colors and rolled to choose which colors--you put the lid back on the salad spinner and spin away!!!

the kiddos loved this part!  heck, i did too!  it was fun to see just how fast we could get it going and how fast we could change directions!

wait...don't stop here...it gets better.  then you get to open the lid to reveal the first step of your masterpiece!  

it was way fun to see what the salad spinner does to different papers and different consistencies of paint...your older kids will think so too...now your younger kids--they'll just want to spin spin spin away!

you could stop the lil game here but we didn't want to...we wanted to add WORDS.  so we rolled the dice one last time to decide which page of the book our magic art word would come from.

obviously the dice didn't go up to page 1415 like our theasarus did, so we just rolled for the last number of the page.  so if you roll a 6 on the dice you'd  flip the book open to the first page that ends in 6 and stop there....(example pg 1216.)  THEN you get to chose a word...ANY word you like from that page.  maybe you like the way it looks or sounds or perhaps the meaning.  it doesn't matter...it's your word.  you  get to choose.  this part is soooo fun to me...'specially with wonderboy.  he chose, blast off, belt and numeric. so wonderfully random!  jaeda chose creamy, creative and awesome.  i love how she put some thought and her personality into her choices...also beautiful!

so, here are our finished products!  i can't tell you how much fun we had making these mini masterpieces!!

rhett's 1st

rhett's 2nd (loved that he chose numeric as his "word".  because the piece is numeric since it all depended on the number of a dice:)

rhett's 3rd!

jae's 1st

jae's 2nd

jae's 3rd

and of course i had to do one too!  agh!!!  we had so much fun with this lil artsy game:)  you have to try it or something like it and show us what you come up with!

p.s. this is what the salad spinner looked like afterwards...kinda cool, right?!?