It’s Almost Time for VBS

And I’m testing out some of the crafts!

One of the crafts we’re going to make is an ‘under the sea’ corkboard.   The kids will take a corkboard tile (had to look long and hard to find these at a decent price) and paint the top blue leaving the bottom brown for the ‘sand’.  Then we’ll let them stencil or paint in seaweed on the bottom. 

 The little circles are clear, flat marbles with little circles of cardstock punched out and a fish sticker attached to the bottom.  We’ll glue these onto the heads of flat thumbtacks and take a photo of each child to put on the cork board for them to take home.

One of the other projects is a seashell suncatcher.  The book we’re using suggested making these with acrylic water (the kind that floral shops use with silk flowers).  You place some small items on a plastic plate, mix the fake water and pour it into the plate.  After it hardens, you take it out of the plate and you get something that looks like this:

It’s actually quite cute – I also added glitter flakes and fine glitter to my sample (you can see it better in the photo below).

The only problem is that the acrylic water dries to a tacky finish, making the suncatcher flexible, but making it sticky to handle.  In fact, you don’t even need a suction cup to hang these – they’ll stick right on the window all by themselves!

I just ordered some clear resin compound to try as well – I’m going to see if it dries to a better finish before we buy large quantities of fairly expensive acrylic water.

Better living through chemicals, right?