A Celebration of Artful Memories!
Thank you to everyone who entered The Artful Parent book giveaway! Congratulation to Kristal, our giveaway winner!
When I asked you to leave a comment sharing your favourite childhood artful moment I didn’t realize what a great collection of inspiring stories I would hear. I loved reading each and every one of your artful experiences! I felt as though I was able to get a glimpse into your childhood memories; moments that I could tell you hold dear to you.
Many of your memories included engaging with nature and exploring. Several recounted stories of mothers and fathers leading by example with their own creative endeavours and creating opportunities for art making. So many great ideas came out of this that I want to highlight them here.
Favourite Artful Memories:
- Decorating cookies with mom in the kitchen!
- Treasure hunt through the trails collecting treasures and natural materials to including making a home-made books with stories about the walk.
- Stamping using potatoes.
- Making cards using pressed flowers.
- Designing wrapping paper by painting or stamping brown parchment paper.
- Sewing costumes using mom’s extra fabric and setting up a backyard circus to perform in!
- Body tracing on giant sheets of paper and making paper clothes to dress the life sized you!
- Making God’s Eyes using sticks from the insides of cactus trees and yarn.. going back to the 70’s!
- Weaving a mat from newspapers inspired by an ‘Encycolpedia of Crafts’ book.
What has really come through is that all of these artful experiences were born out of the following…
- Allowing children the freedom to decide what they want to do and give them the space and tools to do it. Example: Jake’s daughter creating a book from scratch called “My Book of School”. He shares Mia’s story here.
- Providing children with not only a space to create but one that suits their needs. Megan’s bright red family art table with legs cut down to ‘kids size’ is the perfect example of that!
- Inviting children to engage in a creative project like making the centrepiece for the living room table for a special occasion.
- Prompting children with an idea (like taking found materials) and providing the freedom to explore and express themselves.
- Modelling creativity such as seeing a parent sew, knit/crochet, dance, build etc.
- Encouraging creativity.
- Celebrating creativity. Two great examples were shared: 1) celebrating and encouraging a children’s work by covering a wall with her creations and 2) honouring a child’s home-made tree ornament by bringing it out and hanging it on the Christmas tree every year!
- Spending time with mom and dad whether it be in the kitchen, at the craft table or in nature. This came through as the warmest and dearest family creative memories!
A wonderful artist friend of mine coincidentally posted this beautiful photograph of her artist mother making art with her in her studio today. With her permission I’m sharing it here because apart from the fact that everything in this photo is beautiful, including the colouring and composition, I was struck by what a fantastic example this is of sharing creativity! Most definitely an artful memory captured perfectly!
Thank you for sharing your stories! It was so much fun to welcome new visitors here and I especially LOVED hearing about all of your artful moments from your childhoods and artful moments in the present with your own children!
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