Here's a super-dooper fun craft for you and your munchkin to try and a little history to go with it: Mosiac art has been around for a 4,000 years!!!! The Greeks were truly the people who improved the craft by using pebbles to create shapes, animals, and people from a variety of colors. The Romans used the art to decorate their floors. The Byzantines took Mosiac art to new places.... specifically the ceilings and walls of their rooms with figurative shapes. And, in the Islamic world they mainly produced Mosiacs that lingered around geometric and mathematical designs.
As for the Munchkin and I....we stuck to what we had around the house. We used seashells collected from a vacation we took earlier in the summer. There were plenty of extra plastic beads around. Some rainbow colored glitter came in good use and some plastic shapes from an old crafting kit were useful as well. Really....just grab whatever you want and toss it on there. The sticky base we made was actually a papier mache-type mixture. Here are the ingredients:
flour
water
glue
paint
(to tint)
~Mix until only slightly runny and easy to spread on a flat piece of wood.
~Place pieces onto the mixtures (once spread on it's surface) and wait for the fixture to dry completely.
The Munchkin had a *brilliant* idea to color the fixture mix with purple paint. This hadn't occured to me. I was going to be all boring and plain and just make it white....and I am so glad she was inspired. The purple background is one of my favorite parts about the mosiac.
Munchkin also had this great idea to pour a whole bunch of glitter in one spot and then blow really hard on top of it, spreading the glitter in a starburst kind of pattern. I love it.
Here are the blog parties I linked up to (check them out....you'll be inspired!!!!)
