butterflies

Our latest painting project has been to make butterflies! I picked up some small sized plain white coffee filters at the store a few weeks ago and broke them out on one of the recent days when it has been too hot to play outside for long.

I decided to limit our paint to some bright warm colors, instead of allowing blue and red and orange to all mix together into a big brown mess, and Jonathan didn't complain too much that his paint tray had only red, yellow and orange. He dove right in with the brushes, his hands, and finally just outright wadding up the coffee filters and dipping them in the paint. The tricky part was laying them out flat again to dry (a few ripped too badly to be used in the final product)

When they were dry, I folded them with accordion folds and had Jonathan help me put two each along with a bit of green ribbon into the mouths of small sized IKEA chip clips. And voila! Butterflies! Jonathan had a blast running around the house with them making them fly along behind him.

When he tired of that game, I used some push pins to secure them to the ceiling. So now these beauties are hanging in our sunroom! I love it. I am actually thinking of making something similar for a "mobile" of sorts for above the baby's crib.