Terra Cotta Candy Machines (Craft Camp Day 3)

Wednesday was another fun day at camp.  I was feeling pretty good at this point too–things had been going smoothly, the girls were all getting along fine (as I expected) and all the time was being filled up (one of my biggest worries)

Day 3:
Paint pot pieces
Snack (granola bar)
Make cards

Day 3 Details
First up was painting their pieces to make little gumball machines (we just made ours be jelly bean holders, in case any parents would be less excited about actual gum coming home with their kids)  Anyway, each girl got a 3/4 inch wood bead (I filled in one end with wood putty so there wouldn’t be a hole on top) and a small terra cotta pot and base.

I collected a bunch of plastic lids (like from sour cream, etc) from my house, and from a couple of friends and they worked great for holding puddles of paint while the girls worked.

This part took nearly an hour, which surprised me, but they were all having fun!  We left everything outside to dry, had a snack, and then came in to make cards.

Out on the table I had 2 blank cards and envelopes for each girl and several different papers that my girls had picked out, along with scissors and glue sticks.  I told them to just decorate them however they wanted and use them whenever.  Some of them wrote notes to each other, a couple of them gave cards to me.  As we were about to wind down I pulled out a couple of packages of sticky sparklies 🙂  This way girls could add them as final touches and I could distribute them mostly evenly so no one hogged them.  A few girls got so involved with theirs that they stayed another 15 minutes after camp was done to keep finishing them up.

After the paint was all dry outside I used E6000 to glue the wood bead to the lid, and then the glass bowl to the upside down base to let them dry overnight.  

(there are several more versions of these guys if you want to see some different styles/proportions here, here and here)

Be sure to visit Day 1 and Day 2 if you haven’t seen them yet.

Finally, huge congrats to Randi (Sowdering About) who won the Sit Safe.  If you didn’t win but still want this sanity saver, email Lisa at wisewhimsies at juno dot com and she’ll hook you up 🙂