jellyfish | Today We Did

Our pile of glitter and metallic glues.

We have a tub of glitter glue and metallic glue tubes that the kids use on all sorts of projects. I like using glitter glue over glitter as it is generally less messy (unless A leans in it and then spreads it all over the place…or dangles her hair in it), and it’s easier to place exactly where we want it. The downside is that the kids (especially A) put it on so thick it takes ages to dry, and we often need to leave our projects at least overnight to dry.

Drawing on her waves.

Today A used the glitter and metallic glues to draw a jellyfish picture. She started out painting fish, but they morphed into jellyfish. She also wanted to add an eel, but it grew tentacles and became a jellyfish too. She drew waves with some blue metallic glue, and sand with yellow glitter glue. There’s also some seaweed done in green metallic glue.

I like how glittery this picture is.

Drawing sand at the bottom of her picture.

Making a jellyfish.

These wonderful jelly-fish were made using a paper bowl and scraps of various yarns, cotton, and ribbons. The ribbons were all collected from gifts we had been given for birthdays last year and were just sitting in the craft box awaiting their final purpose. It’s great when we can re-use something like that in our craft pursuits.

Painting the top of the jelly-fish.

We ended up making three jelly-fish. First we painted the bowls, L picked orange, A picked blue and purple. I ended up finishing off the purple one though, as A got a bit tired of using the tiny detail brush she’d decided to paint with. She chose a much thicker brush for the blue paint, which allowed her to paint the bowl more quickly and easily.

While the bowls dried we sorted out our tentacles. I thought the jelly-fish would look better with tentacles of varying lengths, so I wasn’t very particular about the length of the pieces as I cut them up. I placed the tentacles into two piles, one for each child, so that they each had a range of different tentacles to choose from. I ended up needing to cut more yarn up as we ran out before we had finished. Some of the yarn was feathers, and some was a powderpuff yarn that was fluffy. I thought these yarns looked really good on the jelly-fish, and it gave them a bit more variety and texture, than if we’d just used plain yarns.

Taping on tentacles.

Attaching tentacles.

To stick the tentacles onto the bowl, we used sticky tape. The kids made bundles of several tentacle pieces together in some sticky tape, and then they taped that to the inside edge of the bowl. I found that it was easiest to use a longer length of tape, stick the tops of the tentacles along it, and then fold it over to form a rectangle of tape housing a number of tentacles, and then tape that section into the bowl. We continued doing this all the way around the edge of the bowl to give the jelly-fish a good coverage of tentacles.