Wednesday, August 13, 2008

It Just Happens





Today was a cool, rainy, crafty day. These amazing shirts occupied us for a LOOOONG time. Take permanent markers (Sharpie or Bic work well), draw a pattern about the size of a quarter. Drape the pattern over a cup or bowl and using an eye dropper or syringe, drop rubbing alcohol on the pattern one drop at a time (approx. 20 drops). The color is NOT soluble in water, but is soluble in alcohol. The capillary action of the fabric wicks the alcohol along, mixing colors and producing amazing results. When the fabric is total dry, heat-set the color with and iron or in the dryer. We tried different patterns, sizes, alcohol methods. It was so fun. I got the idea from Steve Spangler Science. I love his website and get TONS of great ideas for experiments. The blog is fantastic too.

We talked about decimals a lot today because of the Olympics. Evie played a computer game online involving decimals and discovered a flaw in the game! We wrote to the company, we'll see if we get a response.

On the way to log rolling Evie declared, "I love words!" We have been playing a lot of MadLibs so we started talking as if we were a MadLib i.e. "I (pronoun) have (verb) itchy feet (adjective, noun)". It got very silly. That got Evie started on composing poems again (a frequent biking activity) which got us on to onomatopoeia. We then tried to come up with rhymes for the word "onomatopoeia." The best ones were "a Spanish aunt 's a Tia," and "here comes goddess Rhea."

I love how life provides endless opportunities to wonder, share knowledge, ask questions and create.

1 comment:

denise said...

The shirts look great! What a cool idea. We painted fabric yesterday too-a nice rainy day to be in and crafty.