Our Earth Day Pledge

Earth Day is an important day of celebration in my household.

I want my son to grow up with a sense of reverence for this great planet that we live on. I try my best to be a good role model to him in this regard — I bring my own bags to the market, I buy in bulk, & I try to consume less on the whole.  But despite my efforts, I know that I still need reminders, just as he needs to be taught good habits and behaviors. Earth Day may technically fall on a mere single day each year, but I would like my son and I to live consciously and make "Every Day Earth Day".

We spent the week that led up to Earth Day reading the following books on how we can take care of the Earth. Click on title below book to be led to Amazon site

The Earth Book, by Todd Parr

10 Things I Can Do To Help Save My World, by Melanie Walsh

Love your world, by Dawn Sirett

All of these books were wonderfully written and successfully engaged my son. They offered a multitude of ways we can care for the earth - by not littering, by using both sides of the paper, by growing a garden, by turning off the lights when leaving the room, etc. The Earth Book, by Todd Parr, offered a very silly way to take care of the Earth, and it got the biggest laugh from my son, thereby becoming the most requested. I recommend all of them highly.

Various views of our completed project

After reading the aforementioned books, we brainstormed ways that we would like to help the Earth throughout the year. We called this "Our Earth Day Pledge". I typed up the list on my computer (I found a kid font that I thought would be perfect called "rayando". Find it for free here). I printed out our intentions and cut them into strips. I mod podged them onto one of Earths we made out of paper mache (see the last post here for directions). *Note: for this Earth I used green paint for the land masses, not glitter.**If you don't know about Mod Podge yet, you should! It pretty much makes everything look better! Check out Mod Podge Rocks website for great tutorials on how to use it.

Close-up of tag hanging down

I then hung a strip of paper tied to a fishing line down from the bottom of the Earth that said "Earth Day Pledge" on one side, and "We love Mother Earth" on the other. The fishing line was suspended from a toothpick I pushed up through a drilled hole in the Earth.

Full shot of Earth and tag

We hung our finished Earth from the ceiling in my art studio, so that we can be reminded of our pledge each day.

Let us all try to embrace ecologically sensible habits. Efforts put forth by each of us can make a difference.

Thanks for visiting!

Make a bowl out of old magazines!

Recently I discovered "A Little Hut", a blog about paper crafting by Patricia Zapata. It was voted the #1 Mom Craft Blog on Babble.com. Surfing the pages of her blog I saw that the recognition was well earned. The site catalogs a plethora of innovative paper designs with concise, easy-to-follow directions accompanying them. I urge you to check it out. You will be happy you did! Anyway, in my exploration I discovered a tutorial on making a bowl from old magazines! This was a perfect activity for me to do — sometimes I need a craft to do all on my own — for myself, and this one called to me. You can find directions here. Please go check it out, and leave her a little comment love. We all like it :)

Here is a visual walk-through of the process.

Simple materials needed — Magazines and a glue gun! That's it! The strips were made by folding the magazine pages in half 8 times length-wise.

The beginning coil. A thin bead of glue keeps it together.

I discovered the use of a clip not only keeps the fold of the leading magazine strip secure, but it also serves as a placeholder later on in the project.

When the coil base got to be about 5 inches in diameter, I started building the walls up gradually. (Raising the "walls" about an eighth of an inch at each go around.) Note that the neater side of the coil base should face up as this is the side people will mostly see. When building the walls up, however, I flipped the position of the strips, so that the neat-sided fold was shown on the outside of the bowl (which means the neat side was found on the bottom edge of the strip)

Here it is done! The diameter of the lip of the bowl measures 10 1/2 inches. The height of the bowl came to 5 inches.

View flipped over.

I used almost one Woman's Day magazine, one William-Sonoma catalog and probably 1/2 of a Martha Stewart's Living Magazine. Next time I will omit Woman's Day, as I realized I don't really like the colors of the inks, and the paper seems low quality. I liked the sheen of the Williams-Sonoma catalog, and the colors seemed more organic. It would be fun to be more conscious of a color scheme next time.

My BOWL! A few hours of work was well worth it for this lovely utilitarian piece of art that cost pretty much nothing! I like that!

"Love makes the world go 'round" Hanging Mobile

As a salute to the highest state of being there is in life, may I present to you the Love Mobile...

This idea came to me a couple of weeks ago and it was too perfect and fitting for the Valentine Holiday not to follow through on. I made the Earth early last year out of paper mache' and it has been floating around the house ever since waiting for me to do something more with it.

Turns out I'm so glad that I never got around to it until now.

I 'm refraining from posting a tutorial on how to make this as my construction was haphazard at best (the slippery fishing line I used and my rudimentary knot-tying ability worries me, for one). But here is a list of the materials I used.

• embroidery hoop
• fishing line
• beads
• paper
• electrical tape
• tacky glue
• Glitter hearts (I bought 2 packs of 12 at Michael's for 1.99 each)
• paper mache' Earth

Proceed at your own risk if you must!

May you all open your hearts to giving and receiving love on this Valentine's Day Holiday. Have a good one!