:) 1. Artwork
Ah, it feels good to be back blogging. :)
Before I forget everything we did while observing Lent this year, I want to write a few posts about it. So today and the next couple of days may not bear much relevant reading, but it will give me something to link back to next Lent, heh. ;)
First, I’m going to share the Lent-specific arts and crafts we worked on. We have a door that goes from our kitchen into our breezeway and is made up of glass panes. I want to call it a French door, but I’m not sure that’s correct. Anyway, you get the idea.
It is perfect for filling up with sun catcher-type artwork, which, as you know, is really overdone around here. Although, as I sit here and look at my kitchen walls which are covered with the creations of a 4 year old, I’m realizing maybe we just overdo art, period. Or maybe Mama has a problem with throwing some art away from time to time.
Or maybe we are just happy and don’t want to change a thing. :) It won’t always be like this, right?!
Anyway, back to my kitchen door. To celebrate Lent and a few special days within Lent we decided to create 7 pieces of art and arrange them on the glass panes of the door in the shape of a cross.
And, for fun, we experimented with a few new (for us) artsy ideas in the process.
I started by cutting black frames for each section of the door, then brought one out on each special day, along with whatever other supplies were needed. We looked through the calendar and chose 7 special days to create something for our door.
First, on Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent), M made a purple cross pane. The cross was made from construction paper, and sandwiched between two pieces of wax paper. To make it pretty M sharpened some old crayons then used the shavings to decorate the empty areas, and I ironed it a bit to get them to melt:
This was our first attempt at this, and I like how it turned out, although I could have used a bit cooler iron, I think.
Next up was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th. We melted crayons and painted with them, which was a huge amount of fun! The texture of the finished artwork is fabulous. We made a shamrock with a rainbow stem, and talked about how St. Patrick used the shamrock to explain the Trinity. We used some sketch pad paper for this one. It is heavy enough to hold the melted crayon and still let the light through a bit. I’ll be writing more about this fun activity in an upcoming post.
M had so much fun painting this way that we decided to make a heart also, for the top section of our cross. After painting it, I cut it out and taped it to a piece of wax paper:
And our window cross began to take shape:
For St. Joseph’s feast day (March 19th), and The Annunciation of the Lord (the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, celebrated on March 25th, 9 months before Christmas), we used small cut-out pictures from online or magazines, contact paper, and tissue paper…
St. Joseph:
I love how this simple activity looks so pretty and a lot like stained glass:
For the Annunciation, we added in some pieces of aluminum foil around the picture of Mary and the angel, for a bit of bling:
The finished pieces made the horizontal cross piece:
For Palm Sunday I knew we should use a palm leaf in some way, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do. M cut one of our palms into sections and we arranged it on a piece of contact paper. M wasn’t interested in using tissue paper again, so I dug through my ribbon collection and found some beautiful sheer ribbon that looks gold on one side and red on the other. We snipped it into pieces and placed them on the empty areas of the contact paper:
Doesn’t it look nice? 
However, once it was hanging in the window, the fact that it is very sheer ribbon meant that you could barely see the colors of it. We took it down and lined the back with white tissue paper, which helped a bit; but, as you can see in the picture below, this one didn’t turn out as vivid as the other panes:
I like the idea of using ribbon in this way, but next time we’ll find something a bit more solid or use a darker color behind it.
Last, but not least, was Holy Thursday. We used a picture of the Last Supper printed from online, and some wax paper. You could use parchment paper for this too, but I really thought the wax paper gave more of a pretty glow in the window.
I intended to use our oil pastels, but could not find them – ack! I love those things, so I hope they turn up soon. We ended up using some Elmer “Slicks” which are very much like oil pastels. They are a creamy sort of crayon, but a bit messier than pastels. Window crayons would work too. I used a gold paint pen to draw random lines on the wax paper, and M (who, I must say, learned to color within lines overnight it seems) used the Slicks to color each section:
Then we taped our picture of the Last Supper in the middle, framed it and hung it on the last pane of our cross:
(I think this was my favorite of them all!)
Our window cross was finished just in time for Good Friday:
To finish up our Lenten artwork, we made a super easy Easter (or Paschal) candle.
This idea was straight from Catholic Icing’s Paschal Candle post.
Simply scratch your design into the candle with a toothpick, paint over it, then rub off the excess with a wet paper towel. We didn’t have cloves, but M did want to add some star “jewels”. We kept the design very simple – a cross with the year, and a shining sun on the back.
We’ll leave our window cross and our Easter candle up for the entire season of Easter (it’s a 50-day feast!). Our “door cross” is beautiful, and a really lovely reminder to take time to reflect on our faith; while our candle reminds us of the wonderful Light we have been given.
Have a beautiful day! :)
I made this for him a couple of years ago and it is still a lot of fun – for him and the grown-ups around here. 
This is a fun way to work on one-to-one correspondence and practice counting to 10.
I made this for M a couple of years ago, but for some reason never shared it on here. He went through a phase where he loved putting little animals together with shapes. This is a fairly closed-ended activity, but it’s good for shape recognition and learning to follow directions!
