Creativity Camp

About 4 or 5 years ago I had the idea to host a Creativity Camp once a week in the summer. Not just art, but anything creative. I was going to recruit other moms and we would each take turns hosting a project but every year would come and go and it sounded like more planning and organization than I could handle in the summer so it always got put on my good ideas that I never carried out shelf.  This year I decided that my kids will not be young enough to be interested in something like this for many more summers but it still sounded like a lot of planning and stress so I decided to just do it on our own, with no advance planning and on any day when the mood struck us. We ended up doing 10 different projects, some that I planned and others that the kids chose. You already saw our tie dye, Jelly Belly art and the cakes we decorated for Bernie's birthday. You will not get to see our coloring contest because we chose giant pages and never finished them, but here are the remaining 6 projects.

Candy Factory
My brother Jeff and I used to pretend to be inventors when we were kids and we would come up with new gadgets and foods and then draw pictures of them and present them to our fake company. Lots of our ideas were new candies so I decided to have the kids not just draw pictures but make a real life pretend candy factory. This is what they invented.
 
Alyssa, back when her hair was still long. She mostly just dipped stuff in chocolate and she called her dipped Hot Tamales, Hot Chocolates. 
 
We made a candy bar pie, cut up a variety of candy bars and put them in a pie crust and baked them at 350 until the crust is done. It was very rich and pretty tasty.
 
Chloe put watermelon wedges in peach rings and all kinds of other combos but her grand invention was the skittle filled gumball, or as it shall hereafter be known, the Skumball. 
 
Candy Medal
 
Candy glasses from Alex as well as sushi rolls and a triple decker dipped Twix. 
 
My friend, Cheryl posted about making homemade rock candy and I decided that would be a perfect addition to this activity.
 
The blue one did not turn out because we were low on sugar by the time we got to it but the other two worked.

Duct Tape Bags
Since duct tape is incredibly popular we found a fun variety of tapes and then I was too lazy to google any duct tape projects but I have seen people with duct tape bags before so we went with that. We just taped two pieces together and used them for a handle and then taped around and around a 2 gallon Ziploc bag until we had bags. They are actually quite durable and we made them big so that we could use them for library books and they hold a stack of books quite nicely.





Shaving Cream Art
This one was actually the kids idea. It was something fun that each of them had done in preschool. I never did this in preschool so I was like a kid in a, well, preschool I guess. This was so much fun!

Put shaving cream in a pan and swirl food coloring around in it. We got the traditional and neon colors. 
 
Press the paper in to the mess
 
Peel back
 
Scrape
 
Voila!


 
After Chloe made her first one she quickly had buyers remorse and wanted to do a Packers one. She actually ended up making several marbled pages. 
 
Alex was using the colors of Mike and Sulley from Monsters.He used a fork instead of a skewer to mix his colors and got a much more marbled effect.


 
We saw the idea on Pinterest to add a picture to the background. We used watercolor paper to keep the food coloring vibrant but our black paint did not want to stick to the paper. They had to dab it on a dot at a time. I used a Sharpie on the Packers one.

Iron Chef
Seth and I were recently invited on an Iron Chef group date, where we were going to be given a secret ingredient and then see which couple came up with the best dish. It ended up getting canceled but I thought I would borrow the idea and use it for Creativity Camp. The secret ingredient was Crescent Dough.

Chloe made Churros (recipe online) with half of her dough and the other half she stuffed with Nutella and caramel candies and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. We have had them with Nutella before but she added the caramel so I suppose she semi-invented this recipe. 

 


 
Alyssa made banana cream pies, which she did not find online, but in her head.

 
Alex made Strawberry Shortcake, recipe found online.



 
And since they were supposed to be in charge of dinner and they all made dessert, I threw together a chicken and spinach ring with the leftover dough.

Piggy Banks
Seth had 6 large empty plastic peanut jars left after he made trail mix for The Boundary Waters trip. I decided to use them. It took days to get the label and glue off so A+ for whoever is in charge of adhering those labels. I tried soap and water, goo gone, WD40, vinegar, and do you know what worked? Peanut Butter! I smeared the glue with PB and let it sit for an hour and it wiped right off. We used 3 of the jars to make piggy banks and the other 3 were supposed to be turned in to baskets but right now they are still just empty peanut jars.



Melted Crayon Art
If you have ever been online then I am guessing you have seen this project. Glue crayons to canvas and blow dry them until they melt. Since I had seen it so many times I didn't think I needed to read instructions so I set the kids to work gluing crayons. Once everything was glued down I decided to look for some tips for blow drying and only then did I notice that people glued all the reds together, blues together, etc because apparently the blow dryer does not blow straight lines so the colors blend and you will end up with a big brown mess if you are not careful about which colors are next to each other. Hmm! What to do? Well Seth and the kids thought I had lost my mind but I felt pretty brilliant when I started putting 16x20 crayon covered pieces of canvas in my oven. And guess who was right? Me, of course! I stood them up, propped against a large stock pot on the bottom of my oven, covered in tin foil, and set the temp at 250 and the crayons melted in straight pretty lines in about 5-7 minutes. After each one was done I turned off the oven, wiped out any melted crayon and cleaned the stock pot because it got pretty covered in wax each time. Well, when I got to the 4th one I decided that I could just throw it in without turning off the oven, cleaning the pot, etc and that was a bad idea! Our whole house was filled with smoke so if you do this project, do not be lazy. Stop and restart with each new piece.

Here are our finished projects.
 
My friend Cheryl did an art project where she melted the tip of a crayon in a candle and then made a picture with melted wax dots dripped off of the crayon. I thought we could just combine that project with this one so we put contact paper on our canvas to create blank space where we could do dot art. My crayons leaked under the contact paper so my logo is a bit messy but still pretty cool, I think. The problem was, that it took a long time to do the G and the kids decided they did not want to do the melted crayon drips so we did have to improvise on their pieces. 

 
Alex used a contact paper triangle on his and none of the crayon drip past it so he ended up with a huge blank space that looked like a house and he was super excited because he said he knew just what to do with it. He was right. It looks awesome!
 
When Alyssa saw that the contact paper was not working as we had hoped she decided that she just wanted melted crayons all the way down her canvas.
 
Chloe painted her name and some flowers in her open space.
 
Since they were sitting at an angle against the pot the tops melted and made the top of the canvas pretty too.
 

For our final project I offered to take the kids to paint pottery but they didn't feel like it on the day that I had designated so oh well, I saved the money and we do not have any additional pottery items cluttering up the place.

We had such a great time with each of our projects. I am sure it would have been fun to try to do this with a big group but it was much more laid back this way and I spent the time with my kids rather than worrying about whether or not everything was perfect. We had lots of other projects in mind and hoped to also have Chloe teach us ballet, Lyssa teach us skating and Alex teach us TKD but the summer ended up being super busy so those things will have to go on the list of things we still hope to do together.