Yesterday Dustyfeet was playing with M, the 5-year-old Egyptian girl who lives next door to us. M is very into arts and crafts (my kind of girl) and she decided that colouring was getting boring and wanted to do something new. The project that I came up with was very much a spur-of-the-moment job, but both girls loved it, it pretty much filled an afternoon, and we had some impressive works to show for it at the end.
We started with hands and feet. Dustyfeet loves having her hands drawn around. Instead of just tracing them with crayon and leaving her to colour them in (or, as M would put it, “just scribble scribble”), I traced both their hands and feet onto the back of some sticky shiny paper I found in our local supermarket. I cut out the shapes and gave the girls the stickers to stick onto their sheets of paper. Here is Dustyfeet’s effort. I think I might keep it as a souvenir, seeing as I never could persuade her to let me make a print of her feet when she was tiny.
You’ll notice one of the hands isn’t sticky paper but is cut from a glossy advertising leaflet. That was an earlier attempt, but on that occasion M wasn’t there and Dustyfeet wasn’t as interested in having her hands traced, so she would only let me do one. I might save up some of the leaflets that pile through our door and do this again one day. With lots of hands and feet and a big sheet of paper to paste them on, we could make a collage. I’m thinking lots of footprints would make a nice treetrunk, and the hands could become leaves. Now where can I get some green and brown sugar paper?
Having done our hands and feet, M was starting to think big, and announced that she wanted to do her head. The sticky paper sheets weren’t big enough for a head (especially not M’s head – she has a huge mop of black curls) so we moved on to newspapers, and we didn’t stop at heads, either.
The girls thought these were great fun – Dustyfeet would have lain on the floor and let me draw around her again and again. I drew the shapes first, then cut them out, and I taped the sheets of newspaper together with masking tape after that (it seemed easier to do it that way around). Dustyfeet has been very interested in colouring the pictures in now that they’re on the wall (this involves a certain amount of wall-colouring as well – must get some wallpaper liner so that she can scribble scribble on that instead!). I feel there is more mileage in this project – we might cut out some sticky paper for eyes and mouth, make or draw some paper clothes, or do the whole thing again on plain paper so they can paint it.
Sandytoes and Dustyfeet 